My name is Jason Moore, and it's my honor to introduce Esther Gocale. Esther is author of Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back and Founder of the Gocale Method, and I'm proud to say that every time I drive my car, I sit on a, with my back propped up on a cushion that was designed by the Gocale Institute. Gocle, I apologize. See, I read it always on text, but many apologies, but without further ado, everybody, please a round of applause. This is a video that is only showing us still. It was taken in a Druze village in Israel, and the woman does hospitality. She serves apples and tea and a 20-course meal on the floor, and she puts everything there, and she lifts everything back, and she does all of it with her back in this shape. I call it hip-hinging. Her back is characteristically flat. From doing this all her life, she doesn't have to bend her knees very much anymore. Her hamstrings are really well stretched out. This is in the OR, Stanford Medical Center, and this is an anesthesiologist who has a very serious back problem and remarked to me that she looks forward to when she retires and won't have to bend anymore, which she's a young woman. It's a very low bar, and it's a very sad statement, not only of what we suffer in modern times, but also of our expectations to suffer and our sort of helplessness and hopelessness around this. So as some of you know, I spend a lot of time traveling and observing people in different cultures, bending. This is a Filipino man in San Francisco Airport, and he moves luggage, 17 years, no back problem, Africa, and what you notice that in a lot of places that are non-industrial, that have strong kinesthetic traditions that have been handed down from grandparents to parents and kids, that you see this hip-hinging, and this is India, again, on a boat in India, and this is in Italy, and I also look back in time to see, to look for different ways of bending, and this is a way that carries ancient wisdom in it, you could say, but along the way you also see different variants of this bending, and it all isn't always with a flat spine, and so this is, you can see in her low back, that there is some rounding, and on an anecdotal basis, I have found this to correlate with back pain, like this woman, complaints of back pain, and sometimes, so this is a variant, you see in Africa, a lot more among men, where there is a rather straight lumbar area, and then somewhere in the mid-back there might be a little bit of distortion, it seems to work without pathology, it doesn't seem to accompany, you know, it isn't accompanied by back pain. This is something I observed a lot in Brazil, so this is part of the African diaspora, and what I notice is like, there's a degradation of this old form of hip-hinging, you can see here that he is rounding his back, and he does it this way when he's doing light work, but when he's doing something heavier with cement here, you see that he returns to having a more proper hip-hinging form, and so it's really interesting to make these observations, and when you've taught movement as long as I have, you realize that it is a lot like a language, it's the language, it's like teaching other languages, in that you want to zoom in and zoom out, sometimes you focus on a point of grammar or a convention and spelling, and sometimes you zoom out and you memorize a poem, and you don't know what half the words mean, and you're learning a very different thing, and that's the way I have learned to teach effectively, efficiently, it's very similar in principles to language, and another similarity with language that I find very interesting is how degradation happens across time and across geographies. So for example, this bending form, this hip-hinging form seems to be a very fragile part of human movement, a little bit like the R sound, and I'm not an expert in this field, but you know how the R sound, when you move to different cultures, changes quite rapidly, you know, immigrants change their R side, R sound, and also in languages, so fried rice becomes fried lice, which actually on this, these kind of circles is maybe a good thing, right? And bending is like fragile in that form, in that sense, it changes, and there are consequences. This is very modern, this is a kid, a teenage kid, second generation, Mexican family, my gardener brought him along, you know, he wanted to earn some money, and he appeared and was helping with weeding, and here hip-hinging form has really fallen apart all over the place, as you can see. I tried to give them him lessons on how he might change, but this is not an easy thing to learn on the fly, it's something, you know, in the courses that we teach, we do in lesson four, we still first build a lot of components, a longer back, reshaped, a remodeled back, and then, and a strengthened back, and then you learn to maintain all of that length and shape and strength as you bend, as you hip hinge. So not a good first lesson, but a badly needed lesson, because this is where more problems happen than with anything else, and it turns out, in perusing the medical literature, that there is a web of connections between bending in the lumbar area and back pain and tight hamstrings, which is interesting and makes a lot of sense. If you look at someone who is round, round back bending, you can imagine, and you know, the causality isn't proven here by any means, but you can imagine that tight hamstrings prevent the pelvis from moving through its entire range of motion. It's impeded, it's held back, and therefore, the bending tends to happen higher up in the spine, and you can visualize almost the discs and the nerve roots and so on that are challenged in this kind of situation. Whereas, in this more traditional hip-hinging form, you can imagine that the discs and the nerve roots are as fine as if they were, you know, the architectures preserved, and therefore, if the original stack or form was good, it continues to be good through the hip hinge. So, my usual preoccupation is with teaching people how to improve themselves and how to do it quickly, and how to get out of pain, and how to live their full lives. But there are academic considerations which are interesting too. For example, now, why is this hip-hinging such a fragile thing? Because people do learn from each other, we are natural mimics, monkey see, monkey do is how we go about things, and so, yeah, once it has changed and people are rounding, then we copy each other, and so on, as is happening in today's society, in modern society, but it doesn't explain the trigger, like what would start people round-back bending. And the answer that I am playing with that I think makes sense is that it's a change in sitting form that is triggering the change in bending form, because sitting form is much more subject to fashion, it needs an implement of some sort, and so you are much more easily molded, you are much more vulnerable to what the norms of the day are and the thoughts, you know, the thinking of the day is. And so, to the extent that you are held in certain ways and given certain kinds of chairs to sit in, you are being informed, and not always wisely, to modify your sitting style, your ancestral sitting ways, and then my hunch is that that's the trigger. Once you modify your sitting posture, then you are set up for having modified bending posture. So here is what I would consider a more ancestral sitting way, this is in India, and this is another one, and there are numerous, there isn't a sitting way, a correct sitting way, the ancestral way, there are many many. This is how people sit in Village Africa. They have this L-shape, they cross their ankles, and they have the hamstring flexibility, and they're also cultivating, it goes both ways, to do this many hours a day. But people also sit on implements, tree stumps or rocks, or when, you know, for a job like this, you want to be elevated, and that would be a very routine thing to do as well. And this is, oh, I don't know what that was about. If someone can help me, rescue me from this color problem, that would be much appreciated. So, almost. Where was I? Here. And so what I'm showing, so while we are waiting for that to come, oh good. So this is, okay, stay in the light, and don't touch the black. South America, backstrap loom weaving, and you can see that it, she's sitting, I consider this also an ancestral style of sitting, and a healthy one, and it is in a chair, and she has, the characteristic is that her pelvis is antiverted. And one of the things that allows, if you can imagine, the hamstring muscle, it retains its normal length in this, as opposed to when the pelvis is tucked, where it loses its length. And this is on a bicycle, which certainly isn't an ancestral vehicle. You could, but the body is well adapted to sit on, in all sorts of things. So this too, with the pelvis antiverted, imagine the tail, an imaginary tail out behind is an easy way to think about this, and you can see that this, and this is even more modern on a little scooter. And again, this is, this includes an architecture that is healthy, and sustains good hamstring flexibility, and in my experience, that then preserves healthy bending form. So this is in Portugal, and we're talking people of all sizes, both genders, all ages. This is, it's very democratic, good posture, and bad posture. You find it in all kinds of sections of society. But if you have sat like this, then, in my experience, you are much more likely to bend well. Because you haven't let your hamstrings adapt to a short resting length. This guy is 82. He is a Portuguese. He runs a mill. He's a mill worker, and you see him sitting. To those of you who have trained eyes, you can see that his pelvis is out behind him as well, and he's repairing his own millstones, and here you see him bending, and you can see that same hip-hingeing form, and there is a correlation between that kind of healthy sitting and healthy hip-hingeing. This is Fausia from the first slide, the Druze woman, who unfortunately you can't see the movie version of this, but she's crossed, she sits cross-legged on the floor. This is what she's done her whole life, and she can do that in a healthy way. I don't recommend this to people who have gotten away from that for years, decades. You don't get that back easily, and in some cases not at all.  But she, this is the way she sits. It's cross-legged on the floor with no help, and she does it perfectly. Her back is perfectly straight, and her bending is straight. And I want a word about sitting, because sitting has been much maligned in recent times, and I think overly so. I don't think it's sitting per se that is the new smoking, as you sometimes hear, and evil, and should be rooted out at all costs. I think it's the way people sit. Now, without a doubt, sitting eight hours at a stretch and, you know, is unhealthy, and one needs to get up and move and do various things, but people have been sitting for, from time immemorial, you know, cooking and tanning, and sitting is part of our heritage. I mean, need I say more? This is a scribe from ancient Egypt, and these people all sat, and in our more recent history, too, there are many, many examples of long hours of sitting. That didn't seem to result in musculoskeletal problems or other types of problems, and so I maintain, I'm convinced that it's not so much that people sit, but rather how they sit, that is the problem, but without a doubt, get up and move around and punctuate your sitting with movement. So this is a clerk who works from sun up to sun down six days a week, and it's not only in modern times that people work hard, but if what you're doing is tucking your pelvis, as you see me here on doing with my baby number one before I knew better, you know, and I'm kind of educating her pelvis in a poor fashion to tuck, you know, I'm not, I'm not, and if we continue to use this kind of baby furniture, then of course sitting is killing you. I mean, this is, this is doing all kinds of mischief with the organs and your physiological processes and your musculoskeletal system, and then after that, you know, if we put these kids who have been trained by our really poor baby furniture to be this way, and now we put them for hours and hours in school sitting and at digital devices, and this is what they're doing. It's really incredibly sad, and then of course that is the pattern that they learn, and now we continue to give them poor furniture. This was, I just, two weeks ago, I was in Portugal, and they have just changed all their furniture in the subways and so on to be conforming with our ideas. It's all this lumbar spine stuff, and I'll refer those of you who don't know my work about J-spine versus S-spine to look at my website, and I have other talks on YouTube where you can orient yourself in what I think the contour of a chair should be, but it isn't this, and if, you know, if that's the way you've been trained, and this is my husband before he knew, before he knew better, you're sitting on your tail, your imaginary tail, then, you know, then you are going to bend poorly, your hamstrings will be tight, your brain has learned a pattern of being round-backed, and that is what you are going to do, and then there are consequences. You are going to be bent out of shape. If, however, you have some knowledge of how the body works, so this is baby number two, and baby number two wasn't even supposed to be born because I was in such trouble with my back-off to baby number one, but that's another story, and I'll refer you to other sources for that, but baby number two, we knew how to position him to sit well, and here he is, you know, away from all the rather poor contours in the back of the thing, here he is showing his posture edge in the finals of a wrestling match that he won in the South Bay, and and he has continued to keep this form. In fact, this morning I have the great pleasure of watching the finals, Worlds, Ultimate Frisbee Championship played in Italy, and there was my boy in the winning team, the world champion. It was very thrilling, and then I was in Italy last week to watch my youngest daughter, who you see here, win for the US, the World Championship in the juniors, girls division, so they both have, I mean, I think they have an edge because I just don't think it's the genetics somehow. I don't think I've provided that, but they have, they move well, and they were carried well. By this time, we knew what we were doing, and so this is a prescription, you know, if you have young people in your life, influence them. It's simple things, the way they are carried, the way you handle them, the way you teach them the language of movement, you know, what is, what are the components of movement? You don't want to teach them this, and you don't want to teach them this. You know, this is not part of the normal vocabulary of movement, and you can guide that. You are training their brains, setting their neural pathways. By the time we had baby number three, I knew even more, you know, each baby learned something, and this sitting pan that you see, this is an African technique that's awesome. This is when they're beginning to sit, and you sit them in this bowl, and then you stuff them with all kinds of stuff around. So it becomes like a mold, and it's an age where they're usually frustrated, and they're, you know, on their back flailing around, and wanting to be part of normal society, but physically unable to, and you provide them this mold, and they're happy as can be, and they are getting their backs all sorted out, you know, they're learning what it means to have good structure, and they're strengthening their legs against the side of the wash tubs, so they're getting stronger, so they don't fall as much when they start walking, and they're externally rotating their legs, which is another ingredient that you want to teach them, not just having their behind out behind them, and maintaining flexible hamstrings, a lot of ingredients to having normal human structure, and this to me is a really wise way that is very ubiquitous in Africa, and I recommend if you have little ones, you know, in the four, five month range, wanting to begin to sit, look this up, it's great. Another technique that I learned from my baby number two and three was carrying on the back, which to me was one of the best baby things I learned. It's the African style, simple piece of cloth, again, I'll refer you to YouTube and my website and other places where I teach this more formally, but I recommend learning a few ingredients to keep it safe for yourself and for your baby, you know, so start with stuffed animals, and learn to hip hinge, learn to lengthen, reshape, strengthen, it does all go together, but I'm working in my garden here, and she is getting her hips opened up, very, very important, you want the legs externally rotated, that is sets the possible, the stage for the torso being able to nest between the legs, otherwise it gets stuck, and there comes a point where you are then forced to round back bend, and this is baby number, her older sister carrying her, and that's all part of what you want to happen, you want, it's good for all parties, you know, she is preparing to, for when she has her own baby, she'll be a, you know, little expert, and young, and it establishes a really good bond between them, actually they both were on Stanford women's frisbee team, they're like this together, all my kids went into frisbee, now I'm thinking I need to learn, so all kinds of good things happening physically, emotionally, you know, very, and safe, so I was talking about how you want your legs externally rotated, so there's room for your belly, in the case of a baby, or a pregnant woman, or someone who has a little extra weight, but also your bones, your entire torso needs passage, if your legs are turned in there isn't the same passage to really allow the pelvis to nest, and so that is one of the ingredients that you want, so that your back can retain its original shape, so other prescriptive things are to encourage your kids, and the kids in your life, and yourself, to do activities that encourage good posture, if you go back a hundred years, any dance form, or exercise form would have this kind of wisdom, packaged into it, you know, so football for example, if you think about the power position, it's a hip hinge, and that's because football was invented more than a hundred years ago, where people still knew how to bend, and so within the realm of that sport, this healthy form has gotten codified, and passed down, and it's stable, and so you can avail yourself of that benefit, you can kind of revisit old times if you will, by learning these old sports, or sports that were established a while ago, or old dance forms, or any old fashioned kind of activity, another thing that I think is very important to do is provide yourself and your children healthy furniture, like why, if we are going to sit and we are, no matter what we think about it, travel, involve sitting, and rest, you can't go to the restaurant and bring your treadmill desk, and whatever else you have in mind, so it's going to be in your life, and then you need to have furniture that's conducive, and that includes, this is chair, this is a mini version of the chair that we've designed, that I actually, I pride myself in having only two products, I guess there are three now, there's a head cushion too, but a chair, and a cushion, if you don't want to get a chair, then transform whatever chair you have into a decent chair by adding the right kind of traction, possibilities, and there's plenty on YouTube about that, so you can, and on my website, you can look that up, but you want to predispose the pelvis, to tip forward, and you want to do it in a healthy fashion, and you want to provide an option for how much, because it really depends on where you are right now, so the way I designed the chair was it's flat, it's flat, and then it has curvature, different curvature, different points in the front half of it, so depending on how far out you sit, you are getting more anti-version in your pelvis, and you find the place that feels right for you, and the rest of you stacks well, so this is important as well, and then actively like pay attention to your own bending, I do a lot of bending because I teach people things on the ground, that's me helping someone with stretch lying on the side, which is a really good way to learn to get your behind out behind you, and come out of any kind of fetal shape that you might have gotten accustomed to lying in, this is our teacher Joanna, and you're just seeing a freeze frame of a video, sorry, but she pinches very nicely, she's in Portland, and that brings me to another piece of this, which is do yourself a huge favor and actually do some training, because though none of this is rocket science, it isn't trivial either, it is nuanced, and you can learn a lot from a book, our book, my book has over 1100 images, step by step, and you can learn very valuable things from there, but there is a limit, and most people are visual, so we have a DVD as well, and that helps you learn more, but ultimately if you are learning a kinesthetic thing, like if you want to learn how to play tennis, or how to learn golf, you wouldn't dream of learning it all from a book, and there is value in having a coach and a teacher give you feedback, give you hands on guidance, give you a more nuanced understanding of what you need to do, and also take you places which just feel strange, because you haven't been there in a few decades, so even if it is natural, it feels so weird, we have a lot of people who say, oh my goodness, I remember your quote Sarah, do you remember, do you mind saying? That's what you said, I remember, and a lot of people say that, it's like, okay, are my knuckles touching the floor already? You feel odd, because even though it is an odd, and then it takes a mirror to see yourself and realize, wait a minute, this looks totally different than it feels, and to go through that passage, it's very helpful to have guidance, so that's my invitation to all of you, is to do yourself a favor, we do a lot of stuff free online, every month we have free online classes, we have numerous of them, and we do stuff, we have stuff on YouTube, we are here, our mission is to really change the world, to change everyone around you, so they are reflecting to you what you need to do, because that's the way it's happening in village Africa, people are copying each other and they have really good models to copy, so I need to give each of you good models, so you are all influencing each other positively, so we have to get to that threshold amount of good posture around you, so that it starts spiraling in a good direction, it takes a lot of work to get to that threshold level, so we actually have, if we should circulate, we have like a newsletter, if someone can create a page and circulate that, then you can keep in touch, and we can inform you of our stuff, and let me end with a little lesson, and I'm going to invite you to scooch to the front of your chair, if you have a back problem, if you have a disc problem, so I recommend you don't follow along, you can touch base with me after and I'll give you more individualized attention, okay, but otherwise you can come scooch so that you're almost tipping over the front edge, you're kind of like, your sit-spons are hooked onto the edge of the chair, your knees are maybe a little low and open, it does help to have your knees facing out, there's a little technique we call kidney bean shaping the foot, it's not that you want your foot to be facing way out or really wide, although until you learn this kidney bean shaping maneuver, it might be helpful to widen your legs and have your feet face out a little bit, and now for safety, make yourself a little extra tall, you won't have to do this once you have good length and good shape in your back, but for now, create length and a little better shape by just engaging whatever muscles you can recruit to make yourself a little taller, a little stronger, a little flatter through your spine, and now you are going to try to hinge just a teeny bit in one piece, so the only place that's going to be moving is your hip joint, so it's going to look like this, and you want to determine that it really isn't round back bending that you're doing, and the best way to determine that is to use your fingertips on your spine, so you can go side to side, you can go up and down, ideally you would find a shallow groove, if not a very deep groove, and neither bones sticking out, but do the best you can with what you've got, make yourself super tall, and now you are going to very slowly bend forward, staying super tall, and the moment you feel your groove is changing on you back up, okay, you don't want it to disappear, and you don't want it to get kind of angry deep, so you are hinging at the hip and nothing changes in your back, and then you come back up, so you've got your legs open, if you know kidney bean shaping of the feet too, open up your legs, that's great, and now you are just hinging your entire torso a little bit, and get feedback from your fingertips on how you're doing, and then when you get very good at this and you're very comfortable with this, you can refer to the book and learn how to implement more, and maybe understanding, although I recommend that you proceed all of that by really lengthening and shaping your spine. If anybody would like to have me check their form or touch base with me about what's going on with your body, I'm going to be around and I'll be very glad to assist people, but let me take some questions, please. Microphone. I think to be said about I was trained to sit with my feet flat on the floor, not to have crossed the legs that my posture would be improved if that's how I was training myself to sit, true or false? Really short answer, false. But a little expanded, we have human beings have a taste for symmetry, and where did all these rules come about that this should be 90 degrees and the feet should be this way and they should face straight ahead, and I don't know the basis. You see my collection of images and I have tens of thousands of them, and I have yet to find one population of the type I'm describing that has their feet straight out ahead, certainly never in, and that says that your feet, no, they do all kinds of things with their legs. This is perfectly good posture as far as I'm concerned. As long as your pelvis and your spine remain well stacked, that's where it's at. Your legs and arms are made to do anything you like. Esther, I'm wondering when you're sitting that way, what do you do to counteract the tightness in the muscles here in the back? So if it's habitual tightness, you may not have everything you need to just instantly make that go away, but you want to make sure that you are not trying to sit up straight and stand up straight in the most common ways, that being like chest out, chin up, chest out, the kind of old fashioned approach that A doesn't work because you have to remember it to do that all the time, and B, I don't think it's so healthy because it compresses.  So first of all, you have to get rid of this idea that you have to sit up straight and make a huge effort ongoing to have this so-called good posture. But then it also helps to settle your pelvis well. That gives the possibility to have a well stacked spine without a lot of muscle tension.  So there are a lot of ingredients. But start with the idea like, okay, every bone in my body has a best place to be somewhere in the field of gravity. I was not born with the user's manual, but I can intuit this somewhere deep in me as knowledge about how I'm supposed to be put together. And there are populations, fewer and further between, that can guide me in this. And even teachers, who know the lay of the land a little bit, so can guide me. And pictures, so start to figure it out because it is unnatural to just have your muscles all tense. It's solvable. Thank you. We don't have any more time for questions. Everybody, please round of applause for Esther.


What happened between you and Harvard? Well, I don't think they were quite happy with me when I was outspoken against the lockdowns and school closures and instead favoring focused protection, doing better protection of older people who are at the high risk. And when I had COVID, I was hospitalized for it and I have an autoimmune disease. So there was no need for me to get the vaccine, nor would I protect others by taking the vaccine. So they didn't like that either. So they said goodbye. So you mentioned you had an autoimmune disease. Was that part of your reason for not wanting to follow up with a vaccine after your infection? It's not an autoimmune disease. It's an immune deficiency. So it's called autoimmune deficiency, which makes me sensitive to infections. It's a generic thing. So. Okay. I reached out to, so I was trying to understand the dynamics of Harvard and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were working at Mass Brigham Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard.  And I emailed them to ask, first of all, to confirm like, were you all the ones that fired Martin Koldorf? And if so, would you hire him back now that COVID is, people have had access to the vaccine for years now. And yes, they confirmed that your employment at Mass General Brigham was terminated and that faculty positions at the medical school are contingent upon employment at Harvard Affiliated, at a Harvard Affiliated Academic Medical Center. And then that there's a continuing primary series requirement, which affects new hires. It amounts to receiving the latest COVID vaccine if the new hire has not received a COVID vaccine in the past. So I guess the bottom line here is that if you're an undergraduate or a faculty member at Harvard, you don't have to get the vaccine, but there's a kind of special situation here for people affiliated with the medical programs. Is there anything else you can add to that understanding? Yeah, so that was partly news to me, but that they still have that requirement. But it's very unscientific because having recovered from COVID, I have better immunity against COVID than people who just had the vaccine. Right, well, go ahead. Why would it still be in place in April, 2024? It's not clear to me what the point is given that we're at a point where pretty much everybody has had COVID. I agree with that question and I don't have an answer to it because I don't think there's a good answer to it. But I mean, in your scientific and medical understanding, is there any steelman case for why they're requiring this or is it just entirely because they always have and so they're digging their heels in and continuing to force people to get this vaccine when in reality there's not much utility? Yeah, so there's no scientific reason for it or public health reasons or patient safety reasons to have this mandate in place. So it's probably inertia or unwillingness to admit that the vaccine mandates were both unscientific and unethical to begin with. And I say they are unscientific because we've known since born in the 30 BC during the Athenian plague two and a half thousand years ago that if you have recovered from an infectious disease, you have immunity. Sometimes it's permanent immunity for lifetime like measles and sometimes it just protects you from severity of disease the next time you get infected which is the case for coronaviruses including the four previous ones. So there's no, and we know, we knew very early on in 2020 that if you had COVID you had immunity that protected you from later. You can still get it again as with other coronaviruses but you're still protected. So it's unscientific for that reasons but it's also very unethical because less for the sake of argument the student that this is the best vaccine ever. 100% efficacy, it doesn't have that but let's just assume it and no side effects. There are side effects but let's assume this is just the perfect thing. Then with COVID there's more than a thousand for a difference in mortality among the old and the young. So to force people that are young or to force people who have already had COVID who have immunity to get the vaccine when there are a lot of people including my 87 year old neighbor who hadn't gotten the vaccine that's very unethical because you're deprived this was a shortage of vaccines you're depriving the vaccine from people who need it and who benefit from it by forcing mandate aid to people who don't need it. So it's very unethical and very bad public health policy to have these mandates on people that don't need a vaccine when there are people out there that haven't gotten it but who do need it because they're at very high risk. So I think that what Harvard's National Brigham and Harvard University by these mandates was highly unethical and very bad for public health. A great example of that is the vaccination of children. I'm still struck by how to this day as a New York City parent when I take my toddler to the pediatrician there's frequently the suggestion that he gets a COVID vaccine and the implication that this is very, very important. And I wonder for parents who were receiving this pressure from the city of New York during peak pandemic when the vaccine was beginning to be rolled out it doesn't really make sense to be vaccinating a one and a half year old boy compared to my elderly in-laws. That was always a component to this that's sort of bizarre when we know in fact that thankfully this is not particularly dangerous to children or rather the virus itself is not particularly dangerous to children. The vaccine certainly carries some risks for boys of a certain age. You're 100% right. So when you look at any vaccine or any drive for that matter you have to look at the benefits and the potential risks. So for older people who have a high risk of dying from COVID back in 2021, if they hadn't had COVID already they maybe had a 1% risk of dying. And then even if there's a small risk from the vaccine it's still worth taking it because the benefits outweigh the risks. But for children or young adults we know that the risk of dying from COVID is minuscule. So, and it's less than the average influenza year during the last two decades. We're usually about 200, 2000 kids every year die from influenza depending on the severity. So COVID has less risk than the typical historical influenza season.  So you know the benefit is very, very small at best. But you don't know what the risks are. Now we know it because we know that the risk of for example myocarditis which is inflammation of the heart especially among teenage boys and young men. So we know there are some risks. So I don't think children should get this vaccine. And I think also basically forcing this vaccine or trying to force it on people just make parents skeptical about the other vaccines like measles which is actually a very important vaccine. I wanna back up for a second and then I wanna return to what we know and don't know about vaccines at this point. But I wanna, you know, now there's a little bit there feels like a little more breathing room to talk about these issues. People aren't quite as heated as they were maybe two or three years ago. First of all, when did your relationship with Harvard? When was that severed? What's the timeline here? So Harvard's master and Brigham fired me a little bit two years ago. Okay. And then Harvard Medical School put me on leave for two years. Wow. And then they ended that leave at the end of last year. So we're talking about 2022. What was it like, you know, people have a certain perception of Harvard and what the culture of Harvard is like.  Like what was that experience like in 2022? So among my colleagues that I worked with like on a regular basis doing research with I had no problems. I would say the majority of them were in favor of focus protection. I was skeptical school closures and stuff like that. So I had absolutely no problems with any of the people I worked with on a regular basis. The leaderships of Harvard's master and Brigham did not like for example, when I did interviews with about the Great Bank's regulations. So they were not so happy and there were others who were also unhappy. When two of my colleagues tried to arrange, this was in late 2020, they tried to arrange like a debate between me and some of my colleagues who were in favor of school closures and lockdowns. So two of them tried to arrange a debate but there was no takers on the other side. So I said yes, of course. There were no takers on the other side? No, they didn't want to debate me. But they were making that law land. I don't understand how you could possibly, you know, force a policy into place and then not feel comfortable defending it in a public forum. Yeah, to me that's kind of shocking. And when people wonder who they should trust when it comes to public health, I think one criteria is if there's a scientist who's not willing to debate other scientists about it, then you shouldn't trust them. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here and please subscribe to Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed for notifications when we post new episodes every Thursday.


All right, we're ready. Two minutes, Michelle. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the library's Zoom room. We'll get started in just a minute. We're going to let everybody get into the room. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Thank you for being here on a Tuesday night after the holiday. The best holiday, Labor Day. And another minute for people who are just joining us right now. Almost there. Welcome, welcome, everybody. We're going to get started in just a second. Welcome to San Francisco Public Library in the virtual space. I hope you're having an amazing Tuesday, everybody. Okay, we're going to start it right now. First, we, again, welcome to San Francisco Public Library. We always start with a land acknowledgement. So let me take care of that. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Romitushalones people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as we are uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as First Peoples, and we wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Romitush community. As we noted in the chat, if you'd like to place what land you're joining us on Zoom from, we'd really appreciate that. You're here tonight for Grotto Nights with Roberto Lovato and Beth Weingarner. But before we do that, we're going to talk about a few upcoming events at the library. Our on-the-same page book club for September and October is Solito by Javier Samora. If you haven't read it, I encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or buy it from an independent bookstore. We'll have a book club on October 24th in the virtual space and then Javier will be joining us also virtually for a talk with one of our library fellows, Hernan Acevedo, on Thursday, October 26th. Should be a really wonderful conversation. So I hope you join us for that. We are also kicking off Viva Month. Viva is the library's Latinx heritage month from September through October. We'll kick it off with some poetry on the Fulton Street steps of the main library that's coming right up next week on September 13th, a noon time visit of poetry and the farmer's market will be out there too. So you can take advantage of both. All right, and now on to tonight's event. Again, this is Grotto Nights at the Library for everyone who's joined us. Our theme is Giving Voice to the Dead, and it will be a conversation with writers Roberto Lovato and Beth Weingartner. Let me give you a little bit of background on both of them before we get started. Assistant Professor Lovato is the award-winning author of Unforgetting, which was called a Groundbreaking Memoir by the New York Times and picked as an editor's choice. As the founder and lead strategist of Dignidad Literaria, Lovato joined authors Miriam Gerba and David Bowles in the historic campaign that led to concrete commitments to Latinx writers in the U.S. from McMillan and other major U.S. publishers. He is also the recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center. And as a journalist, Lovato has reported on numerous issues, racism, criminal justice, psychedelics and health, violence, terrorism, the drug war and the immigration and refugee crisis. He has worked from across the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti and France. His essays have been appeared around the world. Some notable publications include the New York Times, Boyernacog, The Believer, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, and other national and international publications. And let me tell you a little bit more about Beth. She's a journalist, author, essayist and culture critic who's contributed also to the New York Times along with The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Wired, Mother Jones and many others. She's one of my favorites, a former daily news reporter for the examiner and a former contributor to The Chronicle. She's the author of several books including Sacred Sonoma, Beloved, The Columbine Effect, how five teen pastimes got caught in the crossfire and why teens are taking them back. And Tenacity, Heavy Metal in the Middle East in Africa. Her newest book, which she'll talk about tonight is San Francisco's Forgotten Cemetery, A Buried History. So please join me, everyone out there in Zoomland in welcoming both Beth and Roberto to our virtual stage. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am gonna get started by reading a bit from the chapter on Yerba Buena Cemetery in my book. And because this is a live event, you guys will figure out why and if in it's. James Scholl, California Strait Fair on traces of old at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, 130 miles east of San Francisco. The discovery brought floods of people to California and its city by the Bay. In 1846, when San Francisco became a United States territory, about 200 people lived in this small town. In 1849, San Francisco's population hovered around 1,000. But by 1852, its population had exploded to 36,000. This rapid growth led many people to live in cramped, unsanitary conditions, whether intense or other dwellings. And San Francisco didn't have any real hospitals or a formalized system of healthcare. Several deadly diseases, including cholera, malaria, yellow fever, typhoid, smallpox and scurvy, rampaged through the city's population. One doctor estimated that between 1851 and 1853, 20% of the people who came to California seeking gold died within six months of their arrival. In 1850 alone, more than 1,000 people died in San Francisco, including nearly 100 aboard ships arriving in the city. Some 250 to 300 died in a cholera epidemic in the final months of 1850. And another 30 died in late October, when the Sagamores were excluded shortly after departing from the city's central wharf. San Francisco's early settlements along the bay also burned down six separate times between December 1849 and June 1851, killing somewhere between 301,000 residents. City officials quickly realized that they needed somewhere, somewhere larger than the city's existing graveyards to bury the dead. In March 1850, William Eddy, the city's surveyor, staked out a 15-acre property on the edge of the city and claimed it was the perfect spot for an official cemetery. Perhaps naively, Eddy told the Daily Hospital of California that there is, quote, enough town property in that locality to make a cemetery sufficient to accommodate the dead of the city for the next half century. Within eight years, Yerba Buena Cemetery was full. Estimates on how many people were buried at Yerba Buena very widely. In 1866, the Daily Alta California estimated that the site took in 7,000 to 9,000 dead. A burial register compiled by the daughters of the American Revolution in the 1930s enumerates about 4,800, but that does not include 800 moved from the North Beach Cemetery. Significantly, it also excludes the hundreds or thousands of Chinese dead that were buried there. The cemetery housed a potter's field for indigent dead, as well as Protestants, immigrants, and bodies supposedly relocated from Russian Hill Cemetery and the sailor's burying ground. Despite William Eddy's assurances and for a variety of reasons, the land near Market and Larkin Streets turned out to be a terrible location for a cemetery. The ground was composed of mostly sand and the high winds in that part of the city often blew the sandy topsoil away, exposing coffins and human remains. At the same time, San Francisco continued to expand and the land that was once so far away from settled areas was now surrounded by housing and commerce. In December, 1853, less than four years after Eddy had staked out the boundaries of Yoruba Buena Cemetery, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was already looking for a new place to establish a municipal burial ground. So after the cemetery closed, there was some effort to relocate the graves and we'll get into that. Some of the dead went to cemeteries on Lone Mountain while a few hundred were reinterred in city cemetery, which opened for burials in 1870, near land's end. But it's anyone's guess how many remained at the heart of the city as Yoruba Buena Cemetery was built over. As road and construction projects changed the shape of the civic center area after 1870, workers found human remains again and again. In 1889, a crew breaking ground for a new city hall at Larkin and McAllister streets found at least 70 graves, including those of many Chinese immigrants. But then the new city hall at Larkin and McAllister was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake. In April, 1908, workmen who were building the city's main library on the same site found 25 more graves. They stored the remains in a box to be picked up by the coroner's office, but someone stole the skulls before the coroner could fetch them. Quote, it is presumed that they were taken by medical students or ghouls, the chronicle reported. The spectacle of digging up remains to make room for the main library drew people from all over the city who wanted a glimpse of what lies beyond the grave. Quote, when it became known that the workmen were excavating on the site of the famous Yoruba Buena Cemetery, a great crowd collected to watch the uncovering of the graves. Many rotted coffins were discovered, but in every case, the bodies had completely decomposed owing to the damp and sandy nature of the soil. And only a pile of bones remained to tell that a human being had once been entered there, the chronicle reported. Decades later, the graves of 97 early San Franciscans were discovered in the late 1990s as the city built a new main library at Larkin Grove Streets and transformed the former library building at Larkin and McAllister to the Asian Art Museum. This time, workers were careful to box up their remains and send them to the city morgue where they were studied, though their identities could not be determined. Ultimately, they were reinterred in the Pioneer Garden at Cyprus Law and Cemetery in Colma where many other early San Franciscans were ultimately moved. Rose Pack, a consultant with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce at the time, urged the museum to hold a prayer ceremony to show respect for the dead and to assuage any concerns among Taoists or Buddhists who might otherwise avoid visiting the museum once it opened. Quote, basically you venerate your ancestors, she said. You wouldn't be trampling all over them unless they were interred properly with the right offerings. It's good to appease the spirits of the dead and protect everyone who goes inside the Asian Art Museum. Museum leaders invited a Tibetan llama to perform a ceremony designed to protect the site from, quote, misfortune and promote positive healing energies in October, 2021, sorry, October, 2001. Another multi-faith ceremony took place in March, 2003, before the museum opened to the public. That's the end of my reading. Roberta, do you want to go? Oh, sure. Before anything, thank you to Beth for inviting me and thanks to our friends at SFPL as always for just doing the right literary thing with we poor writers here in San Francisco. And I just need to state out for, and I'm really here to celebrate Beth's book launch, which is just coming out of Beth, my former roommate here at the San Francisco Writers Grotto located on Mission Street in San Francisco. And so, yeah, thank you. I am going to read something from my book, Unforgetting, which is right there, hold on, right there. And just to set a context, it's my books about my search to understand why my parents' Homeland of El Salvador became the most, quote, unquote, violent country on earth, which is a relative term, but it was used by my peers in the media to describe it because it had the highest homicide rate per capita in the world, except for wartime Syria at the time in 2015. And so I was trying to understand beyond the superficialities of regular discourse about El Salvador and about homicide, about crime and about any number of issues in our time that are spoken of mostly in superficial terms. I thought I would go a little deeper. So I took this journey into multiple underworlds that include, say, gang underworlds, that includes guerrilla underworlds, that includes the underworld of my family history, my dad's secrets that I reveal over time and others. And one of them is the underworld of the mass graves and the underworld that is the Institute of Medicinal Legal, the Institute for Medical Anthropology, kind of the forensics lab of El Salvador, which was arguably one of the busiest in the country since it had, in the world, since it had such a busy homicide rate. So they're visiting the medical anthropology tape you know, the medical anthropology tape in the lab and you know, here you go. The IML medical anthropology lab looks nothing like the glossy colorful high-tech labs of bones or CSI. The drab white walls are covered with drawings of technical specifications of skeletons. Hanging beside them are three frame professional drawings in colored pencil, featuring muscular, scantily clad superheroes, all three standing or lying next to a large mounds of skulls. A gift from a grateful comic book artist. The unagile Saul Quijada swishes the towelette he brought out of the bathroom into garbage. You've been like he's Steph Curry, the superstar of my hometown basketball team, the Golden State Warriors. Quijada extends his freshly washed hand. Quijada is both a member of the forensic anthropology team and an auxiliary trainer for the renowned Argentine forensic anthropology team, which did pioneering work uncovering mass graves from that country's dirty war. Dressed in a blue polo shirt, the stocky mustachioed Quijada looks more like a handsome wrestler than a scientist who's licensed in traumatology, the science of injuries and what causes them. The skill of the anthropology lab lies in what forensic scientists call making the bones speak. Men like Quijada have this unique ability to quickly recognize the source of damage to tissue, skin, and bones from various weapons, knives, machetes, explosives, shrapnel, high caliber weapons, mortars, mines, and more. Quijada and his medical anthropology team work with the Argentine forensic team to identify the remains of migrants who died during their Northwood Odyssey to the United States. What killings do you focus on, I ask? We see the whole process from the urban and rural areas where the killings in El Salvador forced migration to the deaths that take place during the migration through Mexico to the United States. Quijada and other forensics at the IML study, study the bones and crime scenes of the gang and other killings in El Salvador, which have left thousands of dead and forced thousands more to migrate. Going back as far as the unresolved mass murders during the war in the 80s, they've created a team in the federal district of Mexico City to use DNA from the remains of migrants to identify them. The IML works with forensic specialists in Arizona, Texas, and other locations on the migrant trail to investigate the horrific desert dehydration deaths and the drownings of migrants in the Rio Grande and other rivers crossing the migration journey. People pushed to their deaths by Barack Obama. There's an increasing number of bodies and parents and small children being found on the US trail. Together with their peers in Mexico and the US, Quijada and the IML are reconstructing epic migration stories that they can be told to the larger world. Throughout the 2,500 miles of migrant trail, Quijada says, there are traces of people in armaments. Many of these armaments are still circulating and so are most of the killers.  We walk over to the tables which bears the nearly complete skeleton of number 195, an 18-year-old male killed in San Salvador last July. Other skeletons in the room date back much further to still unresolved mass murders and crimes of war in the 1980s. The head of 1975 appears to have been severed from his shoulders. You can see here, Quijada says, pointing at the vertebrae where the man was hit with a machete. Quijada's talk of making the bones speak echoes surrounding the birth of forensics in China, which I encountered while researching the history of forensics in preparation for my trip. In 1247, Sung Si, a lawyer charged by the rulers of the Southern Sung dynasty with investigating murders in the kingdom, produced the first book on forensic science with a magnificent title, The Washing Away of Bronze. The title reminded me of the Greek concept I learned and loved in church and at Berkeley, Alephia. In granting amnesty to its war criminals, El Salvador has sanctioned the forgetting of the atrocities committed against its people by its own government. Quijada's reconstruction of memory from these bones is one of the great forensics correctives to this forgetting of wrongs. I'll stop there. Making the bones speak. I mean, they'll speak for themselves, I think, in society because of all the discourse around them, but when they're forgotten and marginalized, like so many of you killed by the US-backed government over 80,000 people, mostly, you know, vast majority killed by their own government, 85%. So when you have that, it's like, you need forensics to help tell the story of what happened to close the chapter, one chapter of the life of the person, to then literally give the bones to the family so that those families can then have some closure about this most titanic of sorrows that they bear in the loss of their children, their parent, their wife, husband, elderly grandparents. I mean, the US trained militaries in El Salvador spared no one in their slaughter. For sure. So, you know, let me ask you, but this is really, you know, I wanna get into your book. Well, what does your book say about the city of San Francisco? You know, I didn't anticipate the writing a book about the cemeteries would become a history of San Francisco as a whole, but the two go so closely together in the sense that San Francisco as a settler city was founded because largely because of the gold rush, a little before that because of Spanish missionaries and military activity here. And nobody really anticipated how fast it was gonna grow. They were looking out across sand dunes and swamps and realizing it would take two to three hours just to walk or take a horse across the city. So they kept putting cemeteries in places that they thought nobody would ever wanna live in. And then the city kept encroaching and encroaching and encroaching and they kept having to move places for the dead further and further out. And in the course of that, it seems like a lot of institutional memory was lost or just records were never kept. And certainly records were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fires, but, you know, like I read in the chapter, workers were digging up bodies 30 years after the cemetery closed. And in many cases, it had been forgotten that there were the dead were still there. There were other situations where people were digging sewers in this area of civic center and appalled to discover bodies and refusing to work until the coroner could come take care of it. So is it poor planning? Is it poor foresight? I don't know, but we seem to be making similar mistakes over and over again as a city. Yeah, I really see, I was reading when I was rereading your book and I really see in all the forgotten dead, like very, I think critical cultural, psychic spiritual problem that society faces right now, which is, you know, the idea of, oh, that's about the dead but that's too heavy and we want to keep things light because we live in the electronic age that depends on light to communicate and to run society and is all up in the clouds. So, you know, I grew up in San Francisco and grew up in a city that had no cemeteries, that had no acknowledgement of its dead, instead it outsourced the burial and the process of caring for the dead to coma and daily city and those places. And I just think it's an apt, not metaphor, but it's a true fact that shows that San Frans, you know, the kind of fascistic ruthlessness of Silicon Valley, you know, not just Elon Musk or Larry Ellison and, you know, some of their, you know, other non-white peers who have no sense of history, no memory of the dead, but also just like everyday people just don't want to deal with death in San Francisco. And as a result, you have this very dangerous culture that is centered in Silicon Valley and it's beautifully written about in my friend Malcolm, got his last name to escape me right now. Malcolm, his book Palo Alto, you see the kind of like eugenic psychology and culture that goes with hand in hand with the technology and the evolution of the economy and the culture of Silicon Valley. It's now taken hold in the world. So technology, lack of acknowledgement of death, Donald Trump, fascism, all these things are connected culturally, I think. And so your book really gets at that, at that part for me, that's how I read it. Well, one of the things that comes up in the book, you know, the dominant culture of San Francisco of the United States of Western Europe is one that has not had ancestral traditions for a very long time. And so we don't have these praxis of taking to the dead, whether it be going to the cemetery and sweeping the graves and leaving food or even communing with the dead in a more abstract way, like feeling like your mom is in the kitchen with you while you're cooking. So that is one element of, I think, why it became so easy to disregard the dead in San Francisco. But another piece of it is definitely along class and racial lines. When it came time to move all the cemeteries to coma, quote unquote, and move the dead to coma, the people were asked to move their own loved ones on their own dime. The city paid for a little bit of it, but for the most part, cemeteries asked the living relatives to move their dead. And so what happened was anybody who didn't have local living relatives didn't get moved in a lot of cases. And that was mostly the poor people who had been buried at the city's expense in the first place and immigrants from other parts of the world who did not have local family. And so what you wound up with was, we have nice cemeteries in coma, full of the people who had the money to move. And we have a lot of dead in San Francisco still who are immigrants and the poor. Let me ask you a question. One of the central pieces in your book are these mass graves of people throughout El Salvador. Can you talk a little bit more about who's in those graves and particularly your visit to, I think one or more of them and how you felt being in the place where these people had been buried? Hmm. Let me just press a pause button before I break down because I've been to a lot of mass graves over the course of several years over 2,500 miles from El Salvador to Guatemala, to Mexico, to border towns like Brooks County where you had a mass grave of children and mothers pushed to their deaths by Obama in that era. It's not limited to Obama, he just started it. Then Trump made it official and made it popular and Obama did it more silently and more liberal like Biden's doing now. And Trump just made it more. So having gone to all these places and look at the way that the powerful forget because of who benefits, for example, from the forgetting of our dead, well, the people that killed them for one. And so that's why I embarked on this epic underworld journey that even I was going on when I started the book until somebody told me, hey, that's pretty epic what you're doing. It's like, all right, well. So, you know, El Salvador has been one of the most consistently violent places on earth. And so I knew from my own experience here with police in San Francisco or in El Salvador with the military that I fought against. I know that like you don't get fascists without amnesia and philosopher Hannah Arendt makes this clear in different writings where she was talking about this concept of alathea, unforgetting, which was a Greek term back going back to the ancient Greeks that refer to the journey of the dead into the underworld before going to Hades or Elysium. So in order to get there, you had to cross, go into the underworld and cross the river Leithy, the river of forgetting. And so the dead had to forget who they were in life to go beyond life to the afterlife. So, you know, the Greeks, well, you know, some Greeks that we need to forget, we need to remember who we were in life.  You don't get fascist militaries supported by the United States without forgetting, without, you know, and so you need alathea, you need to unforget, which is a term that the Greeks also equated with truth. And as did the Christians who followed them in cutting and pasting Greek philosophy into the Bible and all that. So, you know, I really think that, you know following the others who've talked away, I think the way that a society treats its dead says a lot about that society. And so how do you think continuing on my last question, how do you think the treatment of the dead affects the living in San Francisco? I think it's some ways it's probably subtle because so many people don't know that the dead are still here. I recently went to the Legion of Honor, which is surrounded by thousands and thousands of graves that were in what was called city cemetery. And I knew after the renovations in the 90s that they'd had a display of items that they'd found in coffins. And I asked one of the docents, do you know if that display is still here? And she was like, what are you talking about cemetery? What are you talking about? I was like, yeah, this whole place is a cemetery. And she was like, I don't know anything about that. So on the one hand, I don't know how deeply it's affecting people because most people don't know, but I also think, you know, what you were talking about, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable if they do know that where they're standing is a graveyard.  But if you don't know you're in one and somebody tells you suddenly, that can be really unsettling, I think. But one of the things that I hope to do, in fact, the main thing I have to do with my book is to to help people know like the places in the city where the dead might still be, and hopefully to urge more signage or reminders in public spaces where the dead still exist. So that, you know, if you're walking through the farmer's market at UN Plaza, you might see some things saying there are hundreds, maybe thousands of graves still here. You know, I think knowing that and seeing it regularly could lead people to feel a little bit more comfortable with this weird coexistence that we have in San Francisco where there are a lot of graves still in the ground, but they're not recognized in any way. Mm-hmm, yeah, that's great. I think you're also gonna, I would hope your book also stirs conversation about what lies beneath the silicone surface of San Francisco. And I really appreciate your book that way. Oh, no, go ahead. So for you, what was the most important part of trying to give a voice to some of the people in these mass graves that you explored in the forensic lab that you visited and described in your reading? How did you approach the process of trying to speak for them or speak of them in a way that would help them be remembered? Muy cuidadosamente, very carefully, because, you know, the living are in union with the dead and telling the story of the dead. It's a story that largely takes place among the living. So, and in the past that still lives, like what philosophers like Walter Benjamin will tell you. And so I was very careful. I didn't want to, you know, I don't really like this term trigger at this point in US history because it's been used so facetiously and ridiculously, quite frankly, in so many instances. Then the case of like the families of survivors of mass graves, you know, Salvador and along the migrant trail and Mexico and other places. I feel like I was careful before this trigger term got used to describe somebody having their head shaved or something. It was, you know, kind of like the term trauma, which has also lost a lot of its conceptual and powered as a concept. I would approach people very carefully and try to get them to speak. You find that people do want to speak about their loved ones. They do want to honor them in discourse and in practice. And so I would, you know, and I approached it with a kind of a missionary zeal. As you know, and people read my book, I was a, I'm a US born citizen that joined a guerrilla army in El Salvador. And we're very zealous about fighting the fascists responsible for 85% of all the mass murder in this tiny country, the size of Massachusetts. It's been the most consistently violent country on earth and coincidentally, the longest standing military dictatorship in the hemisphere. And so, and supported by the US Democrat and Republican throughout continues to do this through this day, you know, but undercover of policing and justice. So I think it would heal that I think you need to go and violate the norms, the cultural norms that tell us that death and dying and dead people are something awful, like this really ridiculous, like apocalyptic culture in movies or, you know, the ways that the dead are used that are used in the culture in very degenerate and like, I would say insulting ways. So I wanted to kind of like help show the poetry in like, for example, the forensic story that I read where there's a poetry in the way that these men and women go into the underworld, dig up these mass graves that are spread of bones of women and children elderly, like El Mosote were a town where 1,000 people were killed by the US back military under supervision of US troops. And we're just, they're spread in these giant holes in the ground. And the way that these scientists go in one by one could literally make the bones speak, putting them together and then delivering those bones to the families who are anxiously awaiting to know what happened to their loved ones. That was just beautifully crying. So I approached it with tears and an open heart and with whatever courage I could muster to go down there. So, you know, how did you approach this? You know, kind of easy to go in and looking at today, you know, it's not prepared in this culture to look at death. I found for me in particular throughout the book, I have the stories of people who were buried in a lot of the places that I write about. I tried as much as possible to get the first person buried there, but in most cases that wasn't possible. And then put that together from whatever newspaper records, there were genealogy records, census records, et cetera, to try to create a picture of this person's life. Where were they born? Why did they come to San Francisco? How did they die? Why did they die so young? But the irony is that most of the names that we have are people whose headstones were dug up in the process of rebuilding the city. So we actually have their identities and they were able to be moved. Whereas a lot of the people that remain in the ground, we have their names, but we might not be able to, if we found their remains, be able to put their remains to their name without a lot of extra work. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a ton of excitement in San Francisco, particularly in the medical examiner's office to identify the remains of dead who were found much later. I wrote a story about a skull that was found not in a cemetery site, but in somebody's backyard a few years ago. And the medical examiner's office came up with some basic information about race and ethnicity and whatever, but they didn't pursue it beyond that. They didn't try to identify through DNA or find living relatives or find the story of this person. I don't know. I'm driven to want to tell the story of every single person, which is not humanly possible. But anytime I get the name of somebody, then I start researching and I want to dig and I want to tell their story so that their life has some message for everybody else, particularly because most of the headstones are gone. So we can't just visit them and say, Thomas Wood, who was buried in city cemetery, lived from this age to this age. This is when he died. This is where he came from. If you go to Mission Dolores, you get to see that on at least some of the tombstones, but in San Francisco, again, most of them are gone. And I don't know. I'm sentimentally attached to all of the people whose names I have so that I can tell their history a little bit more. Let me ask you, follow up on that, Beth. Like I clearly locate my work in line of what's known in America, where Latinas has memoria histórica, historical memory, which is the deployment of memory in the service of justice, right? So, and I think those anthropologists, I talked to see it the same way because they're coming from Latin America, not the country that is trying to border themselves off from the memory of what they did in Latin America. And so I was wondering, do you see your work in the context of restorative justice or if not, how do you see your work on this? I didn't go into that with that intention, but I think it probably is because, as I said, my wish is that for more people who live here to be more aware of what's in the soil around them, to be more aware of the history of the city, to be more aware of what it took to get from the San Francisco of 1850 to the San Francisco of 2023. And I would like us to stop pretending that the graves are not still here.  And you probably knew Mission Dolores had a little one and you probably knew that- My parents got married there. Yeah, you probably knew that there's a military cemetery in the Presidio. So it's not none, but there were and still are so many more than we're aware of. And there was this whole race to develop and race to populate the city. One of the mayors famously said, respect for the dead is all well and good, but we owe more to the living of San Francisco than we do to the dead of San Francisco. And I'm not saying that we owe more to the dead than to the living, but we definitely owe plenty to the dead because they were the ones who worked and died here to make this place what it is now. And that's quite aside the whole under conversation about the indigenous people who were here first and who would still like their land back. I mean, that's also a very important conversation, but. Who benefits from the artificial separation of the living and the dead is the political question I ask. Who benefits from that, the powerful inevitably and those invested in a status quo system that has the means of production of death and life. Kind of like they're happy with it. I got my two kids, I got a car, got a house.  I want to continue making money so I can pay my mortgage and my Tesla. One of the things that kept happening is that people realized that the land in San Francisco was so much more valuable if it didn't have dead people in it. And so, you've got Lincoln Park which is a city run public golf course. It makes a little money, but imagine how much money you could make if you redeveloped that as luxury condominiums. Or, there was a small Greek and Russian cemetery as one of the ones that was around Lone Mountain. And they had a changeover between bishops and in that changeover period, they started selling off the land for their own burial ground to people who wanted to build houses on it. And the dead were still in the ground but the members of the church were selling off the cemetery to make money. Yeah, I mean, there's so much there in the dead like that we really need to come to groups. So, I mean, if you dig a hole deep enough in El Salvador, anywhere in the Americas or in the US for that matter, you're gonna reach a point where there's gonna be this spurt of justice that comes gushing out of the ground and the spurt that will then push the society to bring Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dwight Eisenhower to justice for crimes against humanity because of what they have overseen as far as mass murder that's been forgotten. And that's just on the political side then, you have property stuff that is implied if you really go back and you went bury and you tell the stories of why these people died and how they died, what happened after. And now it's like, the past lives, the past lives and that's why I love what we do in looking at the past.  And there, to be fair, generally today dealt with in a respectful way when they are found. But at the same time, how many people would buy houses if they knew that they were buying a piece of the cemetery? I don't know. So again, I wanted to return to this idea of the underworld. How did the mythology of the underworld help you write this book and perhaps cope a little bit with the process of writing the book? Well, I mean, I think about it like a quote from Nietzsche, for example, I can't quote it again. It basically has, be careful when you get the abyss because it's gonna look at you. So I anticipated that I was gonna be looking not in just one underworld, but into multiple underworlds and just my own life of like violence as a kid, violence as an adolescence, violence in war, violence gangs, you know, over decades that I've witnessed or been engaged participant to. And I was like, I better do something. I retained a therapist. And, you know, my therapist really is hardcore into Jung.  We can talk about that in Q and A, but yeah, there's a whole fascist undercurrent to a new age. And so, you know, I read the poet, Santa Cruz poet, what's his name, Everton, I believe. I forget right now. I'm really tired of traveling. But he basically had a quote that, how can we even start to navigate the abyss without the mediating influence of mythology? And I was like, damn, he gets it because you can't look at the abyss directly. You need some force, some insight, for example, in this glorious essay by Ida Lo Calvino, a fellow war veteran who looked at the abyss himself. He's basically used the, you know, very misogynist, but still interesting like myth of Medusa and Perseus. The way Perseus couldn't look at Medusa, so he had to use the mirror to look at Medusa. So we need William Everson, thank you, whoever that was, Everson, the former priest at Santa Cruz. So you need something to mediate, to help you look at the abyss. So I use psychedelics, for example, you can see my stories on psychedelics that I've written, but I also use mythology.  And I feel like it served me, I went and I brought back the goods, which is unforgettable, which is a look, as deep a look into the abyss as I could make given my experience. And to show, you know, basically what the United States is, too many are Central American. I love that, I love that you, there are so many different underworld mythologies. I love that you use the Greek, because it's so universal these days, and it connects in with these ideas that you were talking about in memory and forgetting. One of the things that came up again and again as I was researching my book was I noticed that in places that used to be cemeteries in San Francisco, there would always be at least one or more cypress trees. We have a local type of cypress tree called Monterey Cypress or Coast Cypress. But back in Greek mythology, the cypress was a person who, a cypressess who killed his beloved stag and in his grief was transformed into a cypress tree. And so these are planted in places of death and grieving. And they often weren't there when the places in San Francisco were cemeteries, but have grown since then. And it kind of feels like a reminder, like a sign that like the dead are still here. And that felt, I don't know, a little bit sneaky from a land consciousness perspective. It's the land saying, don't forget about the dead who are still here. Absolutely. I spent the big part of the summer in a lot of different Indian reservations, talking with native folks. And I kind of really have like really questioning these land acknowledgements in a way because I was told to have a way. Yeah, you acknowledge it, but you still stole it. What's the point? Anyway, you think maybe we should go for Q and A. I found a quote by Everson, by the way, I'll put it in the chat. There it is. More than anything else, you must learn to penetrate through traumas, to utilize them as the shaping factor which makes you strong. This comes down to a problem of faith and its function on the meaning of the exigence of experience. You must have faith, faith in yourself and in your creative destiny in its myth-like dimension. I think there's a strong relation between any degree of faith and the awareness of the governance of the myth. To me, it seems almost unthinkable to try and meet the pains of life without the requisite myth to govern the encounter. That thing just made my head spin when I read it because I was like exactly what I was trying to figure out. I love that. I do agree that we should turn to Q and A in a moment. I do too. And every person in the audience... Is it me or is Roberto breaking in on me? Yeah, he is. You wanna take that question that's happening in the chat, Beth? Let me, here, I've got a couple of questions for you. We'll start with you, Beth, but actually both of you could really answer this. What story did you find most surprising that you uncovered or which story has stayed with you in the deepest way? Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, they all stay with me. And I think I talked about this in another similar question. There was a Magdalena Asylum in San Francisco located on the property that's now the General Hospital. And they had a small cemetery in the back that was mostly used for the nuns who worked there when they died would be buried there. But at least one of the... This is a place where girls were imprisoned mostly for things like being homeless or being uncontrollable at home. And there was a lony girl who was buried in that cemetery and she's not accounted for in disinterment records. And I often wonder what happened to her. But again, like San Francisco is filled with so many of those stories, it's hard to zero in on just one, but I think about her a lot. Haunting. Let's see if Roberto's got his audio working. I think maybe not, because I would ask him the same question. There were a lot of questions in the chat too, Beth, about your research behind the book and why this topic piqued your interest. Well, I came to this subject quite accidentally because as I said, there was this common theme, this common idea that San Francisco didn't have any cemeteries. And I started... Somebody turned me on to the California digital newspaper collection, which is a online digital archive of newspapers from the early part of California history. And just as I started to, because I was looking for information on something else, I started looking into what articles they had about the cemeteries. And I began to discover that again and again, people would create a cemetery and then they would need to move it and then they would forget about it and then they would dig it up again later and just that this happened over and over again throughout San Francisco. And people should know that all of these locations used to be burial grounds and some of them probably still are. But the newspapers were the major source of research and I also, as I mentioned, use a lot of genealogical research. A couple of other people on the web had created really fantastic resources with lists of local cemeteries. There are some other amazing local historians and archeologists here who are also doing a ton of work on this. So once I found the newspaper archives, then I started connecting with these other people and learning so much. Great. And the resources that you mentioned, you might be able to find those in, say, a library? No, it's again, it's a digital archive, so it's online. We do have some historic digital newspaper collections that Anissa's highlighting in the chat for everybody. Oh, thank you. And our wonderful history center, but. Let me ask you, I was thinking as you were talking about kind of a funny book that we had highlighted at the library a few years ago, which is Doug Doris Alive in Necropolis, which is kind of a humorous take about who's buried really in coma. But I thought perhaps you might have some books or other stories that have inspired you, inspired this work. Was there any other books that you would point to? I mean, there's a really great book that was written in I think 1995 by Michael Svanovic and Shirley Burgess. It's more the history of the cemeteries in coma, but it does cover the San Francisco terrain pretty well in the first couple of chapters. So that one's really useful. There's another, I don't remember if I'm still low, but there's another book out called silent cemeteries, a area that covers San Francisco, but also cemeteries around the Bay Area. So it's a good overview of some of the history. And one of the books that Roberto and I both love a lot, he recommended it to me when I started on this is the work of the dead by Thomas LaCourne, I think is how you say his name, you know, it's a massive book, but you can open to any page and get immediately very deep on exactly what, you know, what meaning the dead hold for the living and the stories that they tell just in the course of when they lived and died and why they died and where they are. Fascinating, we'll put that in the chat too because I bet you can check it out at the library. There it is. Roberto, we're talking about books that inspired your work if you wanted to highlight any works, but she already claimed work of the dead, so don't pick that one. Oh, you're on mute, Roberto, try again. I think a lot of myths about the underworld, whether it's the Egyptian tradition or the indigenous tradition, I was inspired by work, you know, those trying to recover the memory of what happened in Cambodia with Pol Pot and two million people killed. I'm inspired to do that book by, you know, the work of black scholars to look at, for example, the legacy of slavery and the United States Rural indigenous scholars. Those are a few, and Lacquer's book specifically was awesome. It is awesome, it's a great read. He writes beautifully, he's a historian. I know him, and he's a really smart guy and funny and thoughtful and, you know, a joy to read. Great, we'll have to check that out. Beth, another question for you, and I was gonna bring this up, so I'm glad somebody else did. Where are the headstones that are in Buena Vista Park that line the pathways there? Where are those from, or if you know? Yeah, those. So when the city went through the process of removing and relocating the cemeteries, almost all of the headstones were removed. Now, first of all, a lot of graves, like city cemetery did not have headstones for the most part. They had little painted crosses or little pieces of wood with names and usually just numbers on them. But for those headstones that were removed, in many cases, they were too heavy to take somewhere else. They were broken up and used in a variety of projects, breakwaters, various, you can't hardly go to the coast in San Francisco without seeing something that is made of what's called cemetery furniture. But yeah, those drainage areas in Buena Vista Park come from the headstones in Lone Mountain and it was a Works Progress Administration project. They put people to work building the park and building drainage for the park and they were told specifically put the headstones face down out of respect for the dead, which I think that ship had probably already sailed by that point, but in every case they did not. And in my book, I was able to trace the story of somebody whose headstone is face up and broken into pieces, but there's enough information there for me to find out who he was and where he came from. So yeah, the data are everywhere. They really are. I don't see any other questions, but I just let me do a call out too if anybody has more questions that they wanna ask. Anise has been really busy in front of her. I'll just remind folks that here's the link of the dock. You all have been very busy. So many resources added, so definitely check it out. We lost Roberto again as well. We did lose Roberto again. All right, well, oh, here he comes. I was gonna say, Beth, last words, last thoughts you wanna close with and then we'll let Roberto close with some last thoughts too. Well, I just wanna thank you guys for hosting us and thank everyone for coming and spending some time with us talking about this subject that can be a little bit tricky. A lot of people don't wanna think about the mortality or the dead who came before and I appreciate everyone's attention to it. Oh, Beth, one more question came into the chat right now about headstones for slaves. That is a great question. There were not chattel slaves of African-American descent in San Francisco. However, the Mission Dolores was built essentially with the slave labor of indigenous people who were brought in to build the missions, to be converted to Catholicism. They all got new names. About 5,500 to 5,700 are buried on the Mission Dolores property. As far as I know, none of them have headstones but there are some reminders there, signs and a few other things that let you know that they're there. That's about as close as we get in San Francisco but it is an important story. Sure is, thank you. All right, Roberto, if you wanna say, I made Beth do some closing words when we lost you there. If you wanna say some closing thoughts and then we'll close out this conversation, you're on mute. Thank you to SFPL and to Beth for your work and to those of who are brave enough to come in to the unknown waters of death and burial and to be an exercise and lead with your curiosity. Thank you because I think the dead are one of the ultimate ways to disorganize your senses from the true death of our living culture of zombieism and stuff. So I would just say really, you know, I think psychic cultural health comes with facing the undeniable unavoidable fact of death and our dead can teach us that I think. So creating them with respect, bearing them with dignity and raising them up in our memories, in our hearts and in our discussions elevates the quality of all of our lives. Thank you. Thank you. That's so beautiful. It really hits close to home for me.


Hi everyone, I'm making today's video about react global state management. So I've been a little annoyed recently at how much a boilerplate code it takes to just share a global state variable among different components in react. Sometimes I just, I don't ask for much. I don't need a bunch of complex functionality that Redux provides and I don't want to have to use reducers or react contacts. A new tool came under my radar in a very timely manner and I thought I'd make a video to share this with you guys and it's called Jotai. And Jotai is a really pleasant tool to work with when it comes to managing global state in your react because it introduces little to no boilerplate code and it's just such a pleasure to work with. If you have experience with Redux and you know, and you have experience with creating reducers and making context providers in react and doing prop drilling a couple of layers, nested layers, passing props to children of children of children in react you, you'll come to appreciate how simple Jotai is in terms of syntax. So here I have a very simple to-do list and I'm going to show you the code, right? So for the code I have app.js which is where everything happens. This is typically where you would have the state variable in the parent component and then you would pass the to-dos and set to-dos function to the children of this component. And then I have two children components. I have the list component which is basically just this list that you see here and then I have another component which is the text field component which is responsible for this top part here that has the input field and the add button. So let's see how we would use Jotai in this application in this scenario. I'm going to get rid of the state variables here because we don't need them anymore. Instead, I'm going to go to my source folder. I'm going to create a lib folder and have an adam.js file in it. It can be any name. The file can have any name. It doesn't even have to be in the lib folder but it's just the way I chose to structure my program. So in the adam.js file, I'm going to just import a function called adam from Jotai. And with this function, I can create a new adam variable. So I'm going to const, let's say to do adam equals to adam. So this is basically creating a new global variable. Adams in Jotai is equal to global variables in React. So I've just created a new global variable here and I initialize this variable with the value of an empty list. I'm also going to export this variable because I will be using this in other files and other components. And believe it or not, that's all that we had to do in this adam.js file. We can move on to the text field component now. So I'm just going to show you what the text field component looks like. It's this add button and the input field here. So basically what this code is doing right now is I have a button here that calls the handle add function when I click on it. And the handle add function does nothing but logs the current value from the input to the console. I'll show you an example. So I'll just say hello there. Let's click on add and you see that the console prints hello there. So that's working as expected. And this last line, the handle add function basically just clears out the value from the input from the input field. So it just empties the value after we're done with it. So it resets the input field. All right. So now let's try and implement our joe tie adam in this component. So the first thing we'll import is the use to, actually it's to do adam. Yeah. Let's import to do adam from the file that we've just created. So I'm importing this to do adam variable. And once I have that, I'm going to also import use adam from joe tie. So this use adam from joe tie, it's kind of like use date in react. And basically the way you use it is you come down here, you create to do, set to do equals to use adam and we pass in to do adam into the argument. So basically you can see how similar it is to the use date hook in react. It's pretty much the exact same thing. You have like the state variable and then you have the setter method and the setter function here. Can we all just take a moment and appreciate how clean this syntax looks compared to other solutions that we may have? So at this point, I'm pretty sure you're already familiar with how to use functions like these because it's just the same as use date. It's so intuitive. I can just do set to do's and I'll just get an old to do item, I'll use the spread operator here. Actually, it should be a list and let's use a spread operator and we'll spread out the old to do items and then you will add a new item to the list and we're getting the value from the input ref. And then once we're done with that, I'm just going to go out here and let's console log to do's for now so that we can see if it's working or not. Let's go back to app, refresh it, test one. You can see that it's printing array length of zero now. If I click on add, you see that array length of one and it says test one. Let's add another string, let's say test two and you see that test two is appended to the end of that array. So it's so simple. Now that that's done, I'm just going to take this line here, copy it. I'm going to go to my other component, which is the list component and literally paste it in here. I'll also just have to import use Adam again from Jotai. So I have the exact same code here and instead of just hard coding a single text element here, I'm just going to use to do's dot map and then map out for each to do item. Let's return a text element and because we're in react, we have to of course pass in the key. I'll just use math not random. This is not ideal. So just try not to use math at random for simplicity sake. I'm just going to just keep it at that. And then as a text, I'm going to do to do the to do itself. Yep. And see if it works. It's going to give me error to do Adam is not defined. Of course we have to import to do Adam as well. So that's the Adam that we're exporting from this file here. I'm going to go and copy the import statement. Put it in here as well and let's see. So it's empty for now. I can say watch. Let's do that and see that it's added. We can say do the dishes. It's going to add it to the bottom and it's working perfectly. Now before we call it a day, I'm just going to show you one additional utility and we can get off Jotai. So look what happens when I refresh the page. We lose all of our state. But what we can do is we can go to our Adam file here and instead of importing Adam from Jotai, we can import Adam with storage and we import Adam with storage from Jotai slash details. And then here instead of calling Adam, we call Adam with storage and then we pass in the initialization value and we also have to pass in a key, we can say to do or to do. It's basically just a string. It can be anything that you set it to be and then once we do this, let's go and try this out. I'm going to say this should persist and I'm going to do add. I'm going to go and close that page up and let's re-open the page and it does not work. So that was a mistake on my part because I completely forgot that I had this Firefox extension that clears out local storage and all of the cache when I create a new tab. It's called Firefox Containers and it's for privacy reasons. I have that extension up. So instead of doing that, I'll just open up a private Firefox window and I'll just go back to our app here. So we can just do test one, add test two, then we can open a new tab, we go to localhost 3000 again and we can clearly see that our state persists. So that's really neat, huh? Jotai can not only manage global state variables, you can also do local storage and it makes our lives that much easier. Now before you go, I'm going to show you one last thing you can do to optimize re-renders in Jotai. So in my text field code here, I have a console log statement here to indicate that the text field re-rendered every time this field component gets rendered. So here in my console, you can see that text field is rendered four times and when I say do the dish as the text field, I click on add, the text render statement is printed six times. So two additional re-renders from just this one action. But that's really inefficient because technically this add, this input field component shouldn't even have to re-render every time we add a new component. Only this bottom component, this display component should have to re-render and not the input component up here. So what we can do is instead of using use-adm, we'll use the use-set-adm function from Jotai instead and we'll replace the use-adm hook using use-set-adm instead. And you see that we don't even need to use the to-do state variable in this component. We're only writing to the global state, we're not reading from it. That's why we can completely just get rid of that and we can just do it this way using the use-set-adm function instead. So doing this, if I refresh the page, I can say test one. You see a text field re-rendered is only twice and I'll click on add, you see that the text field does not re-render at all, it remains that twice. Yeah, that's pretty much about everything that I want to share about Jotai. This was a pretty light video and yeah, I'm really sorry that it's been so long since I've posted anything. The truth is that I've been working on a really big project and I actually made a completely separate video for it and it's been taking up a lot of time but now I don't even know if I just want to post it because it's a really garbage trash video. So it's on my channel but it's a private video so I don't know what you guys think. Should I post it?