 My name is David, and I'm one of the co-curators here. My other co-curator is Chris, down over here by the technical side of everything. And we are a student-run organization through UC Davis, and this is one of our salons. It is a smaller event that we would like to have more frequently. So if you do enjoy this, we are having another one in January. As part of the TED organization, we are here for the perpetuation of great ideas. Now, I would like to go ahead and introduce our emcee for this morning, Tanya, and she will be going and introducing all of our rest of our speakers and providing an explanation for our theme, words of inspiration. You all look so lovely today. Thank you all for coming out. How are you all doing today? Oh my goodness! Can we get a nice round of applause for Chris and David and all the wonderful volunteers at TEDxCC Davis? They have been putting in so much work. Oh my goodness! This is the best audience that I have encountered this entire week. Thank you all so much. So today, as you can see on our program, our theme for this TEDxCC Davis Salon is Roots of Inspiration. So what I encourage you to think about is what differs pure inspiration from a root of inspiration. And the way that I see it is a root of inspiration is that small idea. Inspiration is really big, and you see it everywhere. A root is a little bit smaller, and it's young, and you have to take care of it, and you have to make sure that it grows, and you really have to spend a lot of time with it. So I encourage you to think about not only what directly inspires you, but some things that you might have to work a little bit harder on to become inspiration. And as you listen to our speakers and our performers, I'd like you to also see what inspires them and how it might connect to what also inspires you. I think we have a lot more in common with our inspirations than we may realize. So our first speaker that we have for tonight is Professor Steven Wheeler, who is deeply involved with many departments at UC Davis and other universities as well, which you can see from his bio. And one thing that he asked me to mention, which I'm also very interested in, is there is a brand new major at UC Davis, which is the Sustainable Environmental Design major, and he happens to be the faculty advisor for it. So you can always speak to him if you're interested, but for now instead of speaking to Professor Wheeler, we are going to listen to him speak. So please join me in welcoming Professor Wheeler up to the stage. Okay, thank you all very much. I am a faculty member in the Department of Human Ecology at UC Davis, and I have the honor to be the kickoff speaker today. I'm going to do a fairly big picture talk, but it is going to lead into the many other talks and performances, which have more detailed examples of roots, of sustainable, of inspiration. And I see I already moved on to the next slide. I am going to talk about Sustainable Cities, which is a theme I have worked with for about 20 years. Now, I will be the first to admit that our current cities, towns, suburbs, and exerbs are far from sustainable. We have a lot of problems out there. We have a lot of traffic congestion. We have pollution. We have lack of affordability. We have inequity. We have lots of places that are just plain boring, where there's no life going on, where we don't feel inspired, right? Some of you grow up in those places. Some of you maybe live in those places. But where there is crisis, there is opportunity. We have opportunities everywhere, and I'm going to mainly focus on those today. And there is lots of inspiring work out there. There are lots of roots shooting up, doors shooting down, and sprouts shooting up. Let's try that metaphor. How's that? Okay, people always ask me when I hope this clicker works. Okay, technical support, please help. Okay, which way do I click? Okay, which one was that? Okay, I hope I remember. Okay, people always ask me what is sustainability? Isn't that a very vague term? Does it really mean anything? And my response is it does mean some things that are fairly different from the ways that the world worked in the 20th century and the ways that we developed our cities and towns. It means three things mainly, taking a long-term approach. That seems common sense, right? But let's face it, we have many incentives for short-term thinking in our society. If we're a politician, we think about the next election. If we're a corporation, we think about the next quarterly report. And many of us are simply trying to survive day-to-day, week, quarter-to-quarter. So, practicing long-term or seventh-generation thinking, if you prefer, is one aspect of sustainability work. Another is thinking holistically or ecologically. This has many different pieces to it, but they're all similar. One is thinking across different goals. Thinking about environmental protection or restoration at the same time as economic prosperity and social justice or equity, the three E's. Another is thinking across scales of work, thinking in terms of what we can do at a household level, at the individual level, at the neighborhood level, at the city level, at the regional level, or at the watershed level, at the state level, the national level, and the global level. That's a lot of levels, isn't it? We had a bumper sticker in the 70s. Think globally, act locally. Very good, okay? But that was the beginning, one of the beginnings of this type of thinking. But really, there are more scales. We need to think at many different scales and see how they interrelate. And we need to act at whatever scales we can. We need to also work across professions, across disciplines, and across communities. And lastly, we need to be actively involved. We need to be creative and proactive and inspirational. In the 20th century, again, we had an ideal of the professional as an objective expert who stands apart from problems and delivers data to decision-makers. Well, nobody really stands apart. We are all in it together, and all of us can be proactive in framing alternatives. Okay, let's talk about a few specific challenges we have with our cities and towns, just to provide a little more background. This is the environment a lot of people experience every day. Very dominated by a particular technology, the motor vehicle, and it's not just the roads that have changed, but the entire landscape around the roads has been designed to accommodate this technology at the expense of many other human needs. This is the case not just in North America, but increasingly the rest of the world as well. Latin America, for example. And even the developing world, like China, which is in the middle of the most rapid transition to motorization that the world has ever seen. It is also in the middle of some of the worst air pollution the world has ever seen. And there's a relation between the two. So this is one set of problems, and traditionally we tried to address this problem through technology, right? Technology is going to solve our problems. Well, it doesn't. We can't just widen roads forever because we simply get more cars and more driving. So this is one set of problems. We also, with our cities and towns, have particular patterns of land use that are not particularly productive. We have what is known as suburban sprawl. And we have to be precise about these things. Suburban sprawl is often low density, but not always. It is disconnected. The road systems do not connect. You cannot get from here to there without a car. It is single use. You have all the houses over here, all the jobs over there, all the shopping over there, schools over here, and you have to drive. And it often leapfrogs across the countryside in a disconnected fashion as we see here. This is not just... There are many forms of this around the world. This is Southern California. This is higher density, but it still has those same characteristics. Single use neighborhoods, non-connected pods of development, and motor vehicle dependency. And then we have countries like China that are developing high rise forms of sprawl. It is not current, but still some of the same characteristics. Single use, poor connections, and increasingly dependent on motor vehicles. So this is one of our current patterns we need to think about. We also have very big houses and very big cars. We have lots of consumption. Whole sets of problems there. We have use of particular water, particular resources such as water. Very important in the West, in this state. And this is Las Vegas, pumping water left in the ground from the last glacier that is disappearing fast. Also pumping water out of the Colorado River, which is disappearing fast. We have particular patterns of relation to the natural environment. We have bulldozed large pieces of land. We have put the waterways into pipes or culverts. We have removed habitat. We have patterns of economic development that are very big scale and global. Now, yes, we all like to get cheap stuff sometimes. And we all like to drive and things like that. But there's a limit and the balance is a bit out of line. And there are many costs, Walmart may have cheap stuff, but it also pays cheap wages that people cannot live on. And it drives the traditional businesses out of downtowns. And it results in a placelessness. A geography of nowhere, as one person has called it. Every place looks the same. We lose culture, tradition, connection to the places we live. We also become unhealthy often. This is spreading worldwide as well. We eat foods that do not work for us. And we live in places that are inequitable. This is a map of the tax base of different jurisdictions in the Chicago area. Some of them have way more money than others for local schools, services, roads, other types of things. Okay. And the ultimate sustainability problem, climate change. I'm not going to go into this, but we need to deal with it. And cities and towns are one of the places that we can do that. Okay. This is kind of tough stuff, right? Not terribly inspirational. But along with this, we have a lot of opportunities. And I'm going to spend the rest of my time on these. And we have a lot of great stuff going on locally. At the national level, at big scales, currently, it's grim. We don't have a very functional politics. Increasingly, we cannot even get to the point where we can't plan for sustainability. But locally, many cities and towns, many individual people are pioneering different ways of living and building towns. This used to be a double-decker freeway in San Francisco, the central artery, or the central freeway. It was damaged in the Loma Prieta Quake. People saw an opportunity. Do we need this huge gray piece of concrete in the middle of our neighborhood? Oh, and behold, they took it down and designed surface-level parks, playgrounds, a boulevard that helped knit the neighborhood together. My friends Elizabeth and Jake there at the center had the pleasure of actually designing it. This was another double-decker freeway in the middle of Seoul, South Korea. A pioneering mayor had the vision of taking that down, restoring the waterway that used to be underneath, and creating a central green corridor through the city. So, greening cities in these ways, restoring previously damaged urban places is one of our great opportunities. We have a lot of what are known as brownfield sites. These are, I think I stepped on the cord. Okay, let's try this. These are contaminated pieces of land where there was industry or railroads or other types of big infrastructure. This mic is not working very well. Okay, does it work? Let's try this mic. Is this better? Okay, I have moved on. Let's see, let's go back to, this was a shipyard, a huge ship basin in Vancouver, British Columbia. We developed into an entire string of neighborhoods, paths, bikeways, parks, all around. Beautiful amenity, this is known as False Creek. We have lots of parking. Whenever I lead a walking tour of a city, when we see a parking lot or a parking garage, we think opportunity. And the city of Portland, Oregon, took this three-story parking garage down, created a plaza, which is essentially the city's living room. People come here 24-7. There are events all the time. People hang out. It is the place to be. So adding civic space back in is one inspiring local type of action. Okay, all those creeks, all those waterways that are in culverts or in pipes, we can dig them out. This was a creek underground in Berkeley that I actually was involved in about 20 years ago. We got the landowner to dig it out of the pipe it was in with the assistance of a state grant, and these volunteers are reconstructing a natural stream channel along the route, and it is now a park. Replanting native vegetation, we have ecologies around us that have been colonized by non-native plants, by invasive species, digging them out, putting the native habitat back in. A good part of restoring the function, the ecological function of our landscapes. Lots of water systems can be rethought. Gray water within buildings, runoff from roofs, from parking lots. We can do creative things with those, or as in this case, even sewage. We don't like to think about sewage, do we? But the city of Arcata had a choice. Does it spend $27 million on a mechanical sewage treatment plant, or does it construct a wetland to handle it? It took the latter approach in the way back in the 1980s, and this marsh is now a wildlife refuge. It's a popular park. People are building housing around it because it's so beautiful. It is a huge amenity for that city. Even with a simple parking lot, we can put a green swale in the middle, take the water into the ground, infiltrated on site, and add beauty. Bigger scales of action through urban planning. We can put a line around sprawl. The dark line that you see here is an urban growth boundary around the Portland metropolitan area. And all the little circles are visions of transit-oriented development, and we can preserve communities that have a center and have a place, and also have public transportation. We can preserve farmland next to cities, as much of Europe has done, and rebuild the linkages between that farmland and local people. Farm to Fork is one of the mantras these days in Sacramento as well as many other places. And Davis, we are pretty familiar with this kind of thing, but there are many forms of urban agriculture also that are being added to make this connection. We can reverse the traditional priority hierarchy of transportation. Instead of high-tech transportation, we can start with our feet and bikes and public transportation and work up from there. There's a global movement of traffic calming. City of Davis here has many traffic calming features, and this is reclaiming our main form of public space for multiple uses. Also, new types of public transit. This is a light rail train, but there's a lot of creativity in this area. There's bus-rabbit transit. There are metro systems. There's all sorts of interesting paratransit vehicles, pedicabs, you name it, that people are experimenting with locally. Zero-net energy neighborhoods. We have here in Davis the world's first zero-net energy neighborhood. But eventually, every house, all of the structures that we live and work in can produce more energy than they consume, and this is one of the main ways we will address climate change. Information. We can use information to change our behavior in terms of energy, in terms of lots of other dimensions. We can think about the whole metabolism of products and materials that flows through our lives at a local level, not just recycling, but reducing our use. We're using things. We have new institutions like FreeCycle locally, where people can go online and just share stuff they don't need anymore. Lots of creativity here. We have equity initiatives, even in this last election in which, let's face it, the red states, the red cities, predominated in a lot of these places, minimum wage ordinances passed, raising the minimum wage in some cases from around $7 an hour to $15 an hour. That's a pretty big leap. And also, we have lots of nonprofit organizations building affordable housing in different places. Many of them founded and run by people like UC Davis students, just a few years out of school, who are doing something good for their own community. Last but not least, we have creative, many, many creative roots of change with the arts, with music. We will see some of those today later. But all sorts of things, neighborhoods, cities, households can do to make our world interesting, to be in fun and sustainable. They go together involving people in their own future. Also, through various exercises, types of public participation, maybe even including the TEDx series, is another part of this. So all of these elements can go together to try to make the places we live work better, work better for the future, for the long-term future, and for ourselves. And hopefully, if we are creative and strategic, we can find jobs for ourselves doing this kind of thing. We can find businesses, as I think we'll hear in a little while. We can involve the arts, and we can build community. So, lots of opportunities. The big-scale picture is pretty difficult, but the local picture has lots of roots and shoots. And let's see what we can do to make those grow. Thank you. One thing that I'd like to draw attention to is how he closed by saying, you know, it can be really overwhelming looking at the big-scale, but start small, start local, and combine that with the idea that he brought up of the things that we don't need. Do I really need to rebuild the freeway? Do we really need all these extra things that we have? And maybe the next time something that you have breaks, instead of going out to buy it and completely replacing it, think about what you can do with it or how you can do without it instead. So that's definitely something inspiring for me. Thank you. And so our next speaker that we have, Joe Guy, if you've gotten the chance to check out his bio, you can see he has a lot of involvement with business and leadership, but these are really, you know, high-stress environments, and what's really inspiring to me is how balanced he seemed to be able to take that and the rest of his life. And I got the chance to chat with him a little bit beforehand, because as you can see, he says that he likes to balance it with his passions for music and martial arts, and he is a saxophonist in a rock band and has been practicing multiple different types of martial arts, while still managing to be a very accomplished member of the business and leadership world. So I would like you all to join me in welcoming Joe Guy to the stage. I think that's part of the first slide, right? About five years ago, on the corner of the 3rd and Seastree right here in Davis, a man named David Brode began standing at this corner day after day with a notebook in his hand and asking people what their concept of compassion was and would they write that down, would they write that down in the notebook? And as he was standing at this corner, he speaks of his own inspiration to do something significant, to spend a significant amount of his time and his energy and his resources in selflessness. And I don't know if any of you have met David or wrote in his book, have seen the result of his work there, but something like 10,000 entries were put in this book about 3,000 or so were published, were put in his notebook and about 3,000 of them were published in this book. It's called Compassion, Davis, California. And I began thinking about why that was significant to me and why that was inspirational to me. David also talks about who inspired him and how he had seen a TED talk by Karen Anderson and she had in 2008 received one of the TED prizes, $100,000 prize to fulfill one of her inspired visions to establish a charter for compassion that a number of other inspirational thinkers were a part of crafting. So we have this inspirational root on 3rd and C Street grabbing my heart more recently here and reminding me that about the same time this was happening in about 5,000, 5,000, 6,000 miles away, here's this bench, first of all, that's been built on this corner just this last spring by a number of you here. I think about 500 people were involved in putting this together, the City of Davis, the City Art Council and others. Just as a show of hands, how many of you were involved in putting this bench together? Raise your hand. All right, how many people were one of the 10,000 people that signed this notebook? Raise your hands, keep your hands up. How many people have been to this corner on 3rd and C Street? Saw David's Danny there. Okay, there you go and have seen this bench. All right, that's the significant number of people here. We are talking about a root of inspiration that's deep, that's growing, that's expanding, that's flowing, connecting with you, with us, together, right here. And so, with all this, I'm remembering that, here we are in Davis, and at the same time this was happening five years ago, I'm having my own journey begin, my own roots of inspiration, about 6,000 miles away on the other side of the equator in the City of Santiago, Chile. I was asked to go down and teach a class for a week, advanced project management, something really glamorous like that. And so I show up and I was just out of my element, out of my comfort zone, and I thought it might have been, everything was different, you know, the people, the place, I didn't know where I was, the currency, and so I sort of had to figure how to get this all together, and then I thought, oh well, it's because there's some really important people here in this room, the heads of the largest copper producing company in the world, right here. And they were in this classroom, along with personal friends and family members of the head of the firm that had brought me down to Santiago to talk. So I don't know if I was nervous, or what was going on, regardless, somewhere in there, I had to set that all aside, and just do what I was there to do, and somehow bring out of me whatever it was that I brought. So I'm teaching this class, and as the week is progressing, I realize something very, very, very different is happening. I mean, it's never happened to me before. And, you know, the people in the class were asking questions. I mean, I've had tough questions before, but these were intense, serious, pointed questions about problems they'd been experiencing with projects. Just, you know, projects, you know, start to finish, there's a budget, and so forth. And yet, as they were asking these questions, and I was having to come up with answers, I became aware of my own mantra that it's printed in my instructor bio that says, fail over projects, hurt people. And I kept hearing this and feeling this, and what I began to experience was something just incredibly visceral. The pain that was coming out of these people as they were asking their questions, pain associated with issues and concerns they had over projects that have been in the past, projects they were in the middle of, projects that they were facing, and, again, realized that what I was talking about, maybe it wasn't so unglamorous after all, it was not about the mechanics of project management any longer. It really began to be this pounding, heart-to-heart connection that was happening as we were talking about what the issues were and where they were going with all this. So, in short, what happened was I had a life-changing experience doing something in a completely different way than I've ever done before. And I had to ask myself, what happened and why, probably more importantly, why? And as I began being really introspective, and that's not something that I do very well. Honestly, I would really rather hang out with you guys than hang out with myself. That's kind of the way I'm wired, right? So I'm spending a lot of time. Actually, it was a seven-year period. I'd already started this for two years before going down to Santiago. And I'm really just checking in with what's going on and why was this so different. And what I discovered that was that it was compassion. It was compassion. It was compassion that was motivating me and moving me to do something in a much, much different way than I've ever done. It was compassion that was creating this fresh perspective instead of actions that I'd never experienced. Not that way. And then I really had to go, okay, now I'm wanting to do things for people. I'm just like when I hug people and all these kinds of things. And sometimes that's kind of awkward. Especially in class. This is a UC Davis class. We're all going to be serious here. But I really want to hug. And it's not just the hugs. It was this intense awareness that what was happening was you and us. And whatever it was we were talking about and what were questions you have and how do we get to the answers of those questions. I was having this inspirational moment that says compassion is really what's driving everything. And I didn't need to figure out what to do with this. And what it led to was finding out what my purpose in life was. Why I was even here. And that started to get kind of huge. I don't know if you want to think about that sometimes. Some of you probably already know what your purpose in life was. I know people that are, I shouldn't say twice their age. But closer to my age that don't know why they're here. Are you asking why are you here? What is your purpose? They're still trying to figure that out. There's a gentleman in this room today who is a friend and a mentor of mine who challenged me a year ago to state why I'm here. What is the purpose of my life? In 10 words or less. And write it down. Let's see if I can do this. Help people see how to fulfill their purpose here. Yeah, I got it. 10 words or less. And I'm going that's your epiphany. That's what you're about. That's why you're here. I mean that's pretty broad. But everything that I was doing, every time I was in front of a group of students, every time I was in a room answering questions, it was really about, wow, what is their purpose? How can I help them get there? And what do I do with this? And I realized that I needed to put together some tools that would help me be able to help people in any circumstance, wherever they were at, with questions they had, whether I knew anything about the topic or not. And it was longer about project management. It was about, you know, relationships. You kind of messy, right? It was about work. It was about school. It was about life. It was about problems. It was about things that were happening that were hurting people, not just projects that were failing. So I realized that out of the inspiration that it was compassion that was really driving me and finding out what my purpose for existence is and needing to put together a set of tools that I can just have right there to be able to be helpful to people on the spot, that the tools started coming from all over the place, all kinds of tools. And I'd like to focus on just one today. Inspiration, compassion, purpose, practice. And the tool I want to tell you about is a story to illustrate this. So it's about four in the morning. How do I know that? I get a phone call on my cell phone. I'm looking over. I can see green, yellow lights of the old-fashioned clock alarm, clock radio. Anybody might still have one of those. Somewhere, that tells me where my phone is. You get the phone and I hear a voice and she's crying. And I'm trying to figure out what's going on. And it turns out that a mom is driving around Davis looking for her teenage daughter who went out the night before. You know, the mom is working on her master's degree and doing homework and just kind of thinking, yeah, sure, go ahead, not doing her usual. Yeah, half the parents call me and say, you know, the kind of thing that we've learned to do, that's the usual thing for some good reasons. None of that happens. She doesn't know where her child is. She's trying to remember who doesn't have a phone number, doesn't have a address, and gives me a call. I'm in Sacramento. I'm not the subject matter expert here. I do not have any names, phone numbers, no knowledge. And I'm hearing this panic happen and just this breakdown into, you know, sobs that now we're just wailing. I'm going to help this person with their purpose in life. Really? And I'm just kind of waking up. I'm looking outside. The wind's blowing, and then I hear her saying, she's in her car, it's cold, it's dark, and I'm waking up now realizing I need to do, what do I do? What do I do? And the first thing I say, this is what comes out. The first thing I said was, so what are you thankful for? Really? Yeah. Yeah, really, what are you thankful for? Really, that I could call you in the morning and you'll answer the phone. Good. Who's watching your little one? Oh, yeah, my friend Hope. I'm thankful for, now all of a sudden I'm hearing, I'm thankful for my friend Hope. Well, what else are you thankful for? And then after the third I'm thankful for, there was a shift that happened. When people can be grateful for at least three things, studies all over the place have shown this, there's a shift that occurs and all of a sudden now, this person is in a different state and is trying to figure out what to do. And here's what happens. Here's this place where we're okay and kind of below that, see the negative numbers, they're there for a reason, you know, it doesn't mean you blew your exam, you've got negative numbers happening in life too. There's sadness a little bit lower than that, there's anger, there's fear, this person was in panic. And, you know, these are good emotions, they're valuable emotions, but, you know, a nice place to be, right here, above the line. And what happens is as soon as we move above this emotional line, clarity comes. We're in this pressure, the pressure is just causing us not to be able to know what to do. We move up this emotional line, one of the best ways of doing it is gratitude. Now all of a sudden this person is going, I need to just go home and get some rest. Guess what's the next one above gratitude? All right, and then above that, you know, passion, that's a okay word. Some people put joy, like, and I don't mean just like, oh, that's pretty happy, I mean like overjoy, joy and speakable, full of glory, that kind of joy. And some people call this top area love, and I've heard people say that, you know, there's two possible reactions to things that can happen to us in life when situations arise. We'll either react in fear or we'll react in love. So what was happening here was we're moving a person above this emotional line, and I'm thinking about this definition of gratitude that I just heard the other day, the other day. It turns chaos into order and confusion to clarity, an author by the name of Melody Beatty. I was at a, like a healing circle by one of the local persons here who was hosting this, and they were talking about gratitude of all things a few days before, I'm gonna talk about it. So I kind of picked up on this quote, this is exactly what was happening. But really what was going on was this person is in an anxious state, moves through gratitude to get to that answer. So gratitude is one of these tools now in my toolbox and my set of practices and I'm thinking how does this relate to Ted X, UC Davis, when we have a bunch of students who have a lot of questions in life that you need answers to, like. Anybody relate to any of these? Okay, when you have questions and you're in an emotional state where you're not necessarily above the line and there are pressures going on, we need to do something to get resilient because resilience is how we deal with pressure and stress. Gratitude is one way that gets us there. So here you have gratitude, getting you to resilience so that you can get your answer and all this came about because there was an insightful moment because of a root of inspiration that says compassion can drive things and get you to have tools and right after you get your answer you realize that this is all, this is what my life is. The inspiration, it gets insight, compassion is driving, gratitude is just one tool. We start to get this sense of resilience to the pressures and we know what to do next. We can get the answer to life's question. Now it might not be what your purpose of life is that it helped you get to, maybe I just helped you get to the next step of what the right thing is to do. You can take inspiration, you can get your own practices and be resilient and get the answers to your own questions and inspire yourself or someone else whether you have a question or whether it's someone else. So some of the other practices that happen to come along are resident breathing. There's a certain way you can breathe, where your heart and your brain get connected together and you're fine. There's anybody here via values and action character strengths and you can use those. These are some of my toolkit, systems thinking, Peter Sange, the fifth discipline, muscle testing if you've never heard of it. You're in for a surprise. Moving meditation is what I call martial arts. Sometimes I just want the music really, really, really loud. Just go for it and now I'm ready for my Boston next day. I have that real resilience that I need. And then it reminds me once again of this author who says, gratitude is, what does it do? It turns what we have into enough and then more. And what I realize is, as we come back and we look at this bench, compassion is listening. All the things that I experience, the roots of inspiration brings me right back to imagine, empathy. This is what happens to me in Santiago five years ago. Imagine understanding. And as I come walking around the bench, down at the little corner, the smallest art piece of this bench that the community has put together says it all. Thank you. Thank you for being here. I'm grateful for your presence. I'm grateful for those who listened with your heart. I am grateful for your attitude, practice, and your resilience. And then I'd like to leave you with one question. What do you have that's already inside you? And how are you going to be inspired to do something about it? Thank you, Joe. I would like to say if you've never actually been there before that this bench is a very humbling place to be. You can honestly sit down here, especially right before a farmer's market. Watch all of Davis move right in front of you. And the second thing I wanted to say is as awkward it is to try and hug the person next to you. It is a very heartwarming feeling. Now, I would like to move on and say that we had the ability to add a third performer to our ensemble today. I would like to introduce Tanya, my secondary emcee. She is the president of the Davis six-bit spoken word collective. And she is going to grace us with her own improv. Please help me welcome Tanya to the stage. So, as a brief introduction to my piece just so you can vaguely understand why it inspires me. When I was 16, I had the opportunity to go on a month-long backpacking trip through my school. And I was terrified. You know, I'd been a swimmer my whole life. I was not prepared at all for the level of rigorous physical activity in this backpacking trip. But I went on it and it was like the most fun I've ever had in my life. And so for months and years afterwards, I thought, you know, I figured out what I want to do with my life. Like, I want to be a wilderness god. I want to take people out on these trips. And so the piece that I'm going to perform, I wrote when I was in that stage and I was like, this is what I want to do. I figured it out. And then around when I was 18, I started getting sick. Not like really, really, really sick, but sick in the way that it affected what I did and how I moved and how I interacted with people. And there was a certain point where I sort of had to realize, at least where I am right now, that's not a possibility for me. I can't be a wilderness guide. I can't take on that responsibility of taking care of other people when I need to take care of myself. And that was a really hard thing to accept. But I'm not at the point where I'm willing to completely push it off the table because I believe that if I keep working hard and if I keep trying, I can get better enough where I can get back to this place. And the way that I keep that thought in my mind is sometimes I'll run through this poem in my head and I'll think, you know, I've been there once before and I believe that I can get there again. And so this poem is very simply titled Outside. I have established my place in the world, says the tree to the passing bird. He's hoping his words will be heard as an affirmation. Here I stand, here I be. This is what home means to me. But it's neither bird nor tree. Bit by bit I'm gaining clarity that my old concept of reality is contraception for being free. See, I could have easily slipped semi-queasily into a quiet life squeezing me with a surprising lack of seasoning. Standard practice is convening into conventionality. Paladly passing the days as if awake in utero. I'm not moving, no. I'm squeezed in on all sides, suffocated by the sense of being inside. I spy six planes in a set of stairs slowly sinking in my chair, watching bugs bumping against the ceiling, peeling off pieces their antenna and attempt to circumvent the stents of this here heart home. Like how my rhymes try to escape this poem. Because home is where the heart is, my blood mind dry outside, sides aching, back breaking beneath the 60 pound pack cracking new grooves into the snow beneath my boots. This is truth. As tangible and real as your first loose tooth and this is the way I want to spend my youth. Loose, limbed and fast-paced craving arid, barren landscapes, new mind states indeed, a sort of geographical greed because I need desert streamin' past the windows like the wind flows through my fingers yet it lingers like dead beast singers stuck under my skin, pinpointing like stars, leaving the most beautiful scars carved into me like stone. So I carry these memories wherever I roam. Like how there's tomes told in the cracked soles of my feet reminding me to keep certain realities out of my periphery and preferably more perpendicular to me. That's why when I bike I spread my arms like I'm flying legs pumping like pistons this one to drive by thigh five I'm high knees beating my bones but slow going on a mountain bike might crash and fall cause I can't ride my bike with no handlebars and I can't handle bars can't craft a linear rhyme because my lines defy structure flustered by edifices keeping me in I want to spin buildings out of spider webs stick my legs to stringy threads and let them go and move on to a new home because the moon is what this part is and I've said mine under the sky amidst howls to the moon and melodies at noon and prayers to be primal to the day that I die. Thank you. Thank you Tanya. I would try that myself but I'll spare you all the pain of me trying to do that up on stage right now. Now before we go to intermission I'd like to make a few announcements. Raise your hand real quick Now what we're going to do for our interactive activity is you're going to take that sticky note and write something that inspires you friend, family member idea that you've heard today just anything because in our lobby we're going to make our own tree of inspiration and we want all of you to help contribute so you're going to take whatever inspires you in person, anything, an idea and you're going to write it down and add it to that tree Now the thing we want you to do with that though is after you write your idea we want you to talk to other members in the audience preferably people you didn't come with we want you to talk to all the creative, artistic and intellectual individuals in this audience right now and we also encourage you to talk to the speakers we encourage you to come up to them and talk to them about their ideas and what you felt about their ideas what you thought, what inspired you about those ideas Now we will also have complimentary refreshments and everything else in the lobby and so we have roughly about 15 minutes for our intermission and we will give you about a 5 minute warning to get back to your seats Thank you Alright Welcome back everybody Did everyone have a good intermission? Did everyone have a good intermission? Oh my gosh you guys are so great Alright so raise your hands How many of you met someone new out in the lobby today? Look at that You see how many hands there are? We are achieving our goal and how many of you learned something new about someone's inspiration today or took a look at the roots? Excellent I love the way that it looks out there My favorite sticky note that I saw on the Trier Roots of Inspiration it just said, wow women on bikes I was like that speaks to me Was that yours? That's great I like that one It inspires me too And so remember though that this doesn't stop with the sticky notes on the tree or the intermission or whatever you can continue all these dialogues outside of the salon in the lobby or in the rest of the world so we highly encourage you to keep talking to others and to yourselves about what inspires you but for now what we have coming up is our next speaker Pam Morone or Dr. Pam Morone and so as you can see she has a very impressive biography on our flyer but one thing that isn't put on there which is a little fun in fact I found out about her is she is an entomologist and for those of you who don't know what an entomologist is it's pretty much somebody that studies bugs and thinks bugs are cool yes people do think bugs are cool so I always ask people when I find out if they do entomology if they also practice entophagy which is the practice of eating bugs and she automatically says yes it's a great source of protein she says you can tell everyone that I have a copy of the book Eating Insects on my bookshelf back home but thankfully she takes pity on her friends and family and she doesn't make them participate as well in the practice so I would like you all to help me in welcoming Dr. Pam Morone up to the stage there's a conversation going on actually it's more of a debate with the world population going from 7 billion to 9 billion by 2050 how are we going to feed all these people many will say we still have to have chemical pesticides others will say we have to have genetically modified crops well we all can agree that we have to feed the world more sustainably and do it more sustainably than we have in the past what I'm here to say is that there's an alternate technology biological crop protection or natural products that can help solve all of these problems and do it more sustainably and that's what I'm here to tell you about today I grew up in a little town in Killingworth Connecticut on 30 something acres I spent my childhood with a kitchen strainer at the pond identifying the dragonfly nymphs and other insects that lived there and I helped my parents with their very large half acre garden and their vegetable garden and their raspberries and their blueberries and their Christmas tree plantation but the most important watershed event was when the gypsy moths invaded the town and most of Connecticut and stripped the trees bare and they did this about every five to seven years and so I was standing out in the woods and the droppings from the caterpillars were coming down like rain if you're an entomologist you know the droppings are called frass so that frass would come down in my head and I'd look around and I'd see it's like the middle of winter in summer because these caterpillars had denuded the forest well there was a dogwood tree right outside the kitchen window and this is a shot I took just a little while ago it's gotten a lot bigger still outside the kitchen window and my dad was worried that this beautiful tree was going to get harmed and denuded by the caterpillars so he trots off to the store and the hardware store and he brings back a product to kill the pest, to kill the caterpillars so he sprays it on the tree all the caterpillars drop to the ground and my mother comes out and she's freaking out and she says, panel up, come look, come look and she looks down the ground and she makes me look and the lady beetles, the honeybees the lacewings, the beneficial insects were all dead along with the caterpillars and what we found out was actually that product that he used was quite toxic to all of those organisms but also to himself so my mother wagged her finger at him and said, you will not use that again and he, like most husbands do dutifully obey their wives and went back to the store and said, what have you got that's safer believe it or not, there was a product and this is gosh 50 years ago was bacillus thuringiensis a common soil bacterium still in use today the first ever biological product for pest control that kills caterpillars and he sprayed it instead of the chemical so I went out there and they said dad, what do you think? and he goes, I don't know if it worked but it's safer in the environment the story of my career developing products that are safer but people don't necessarily think they work but the products that we're developing today in the labs here in Davis they sure do work and they are environmentally responsible so how do you do this? well, I'll tell you the process for how we get from discovery to a product but first I want to define what they actually are so what we're talking about are naturally occurring bacteria fungi, molds and insect specific viruses and also natural substances like extracts of plants that have nontoxic modes of action fatty acids and other things like that and they're regulated by the environmental protection agency there's been a 65 year history of use and there's never been an environmental or safety incident with these types of products so we have a long history and they're well regulated so what are these? well I could give you a little baggie and send you out on an expedition and you could bring back some soil or some compost or things and there might be something in here that could be turned into a product but as my husband knows I'm an expert at this having groups in my career screening testing over 100,000 microorganisms so when I'm on vacation with my dear husband who's here of 36 and a half years and our dogs and I'll be walking and I'll go oh my god I've got it and I'll have my baggies always in my pocket and I'll collect a sample and yeah we know entomologists are weird you know that and I'll collect a sample and I'll bring the sample back to the laboratory and there's some of the places that you can look just like most of your human drugs more than 50% have been found from natural sources your antibiotics, penicillin comes from a mold the same thing we can look to nature we're looking for leaves and flowers and composts and soils and find the microorganisms that lives there and turn them into products so the next step in the process is actually isolating them onto petri plates so we have some amazing types of bacteria that can be found in nature all different colors and types but our microbiologists will bring these samples back to the laboratory and then they will isolate them on the petri plates and individually pick out the colonies they think are interesting now over time it might be a more random process in the beginning but over time they become expert pickers and they can pick off the ones that they think are quite interesting and they haven't seen before might be just not any ordinary thing and then they individually put them on the plates and then we grow them in liquid and little test tubes in liquid fermentation and then we test them we then test them against a whole range of pests and weeds in the laboratory to see if any of these microbes and their extracts from the microbes will kill and become a natural pest control so we test a wide range of insects nematodes which are round rooms that feed on the plants weeds algae and so forth now this is heavy chemistry for some of you I'm sure just like I said remember penicillin comes from a mold same thing here is that the compounds, the chemistry produced by these naturally occurring bacteria and molds these can be pesticidal and here are some of the structures that we found in our lab that have pesticidal activity so that microbe that we find from that soil sample produces these compounds as it's growing and in fermentation when we grow it and this is what's causing us to die so then you have to turn it into a product okay so what's the next step well you have to formulate it in a way that a farmer can use so it has to be able to not wash off instantly when it rains it can't clog nozzles it has to spray nicely and stick to the crop so that's called formulation so the formulation chemists which we have will find ways and preservatives in our case where the chemical products are organically listed so they would only have certainly organically allowed preservatives in there to be able to have the product being able to be moved around put in the warehouse and withstand all the rigors like chemical pesticides so that's what formulation chemistry does and then you have the chemical engineers and the microbiologists who have to grow the microbe in fermentation just like you're making wine and beer but a much faster process because these microbes can grow and keep growth in 36, 48, 72 hours so you put them in a fermenter there's a picture of a fermenter in our lab here and they multiply themselves and in their growth they're producing these pesticide compounds and the chemical engineers and microbiologists will find the recipe just like you're cooking and actually some of the best scientists are really good cooks of these microbes they have a flair for it just like some of you can cook and others can't and they will find the right food for the microbe oxygen the right temperature so that it can maximize their growth in the fermentation tank then we have to get some and put it out in the field in real world situations not just the lab and spray it out on the crops and find out how it kills and what kind of pests and the spectrum of pests it's killing and then we have to make sure that it's safe just because it's natural doesn't mean that it's safe you know that so we have to prove that it's safe so we have to do a number of tests and mice and birds and fish and lace wings and lady beetles and parasitic wasps and honeybees to prove that there are no toxic effects so these are well regulated and we prove that and then you submit the package to the Environmental Protection Agency and California Department of Pesticide Regulation and they'll approve it for sale but then you have to grow you know this is all nice well you know nice in the lab but you actually have to grow it in commercial production for large scale a 1 liter fermenter in the lab to 10 liters then to 100 liters then to 20,000 liters like we have in our factory in Bangor Michigan 20,000 liters being about 5,000 gallons about 2 to 3 stories high that's the size of fermenter that we need for commercial production and so we grow them in these big tanks and then you harvest them so again after 24, 48, 72 hours you harvest the microbe it multiplies itself so if the microbe is not stable in a liquid form and sometimes the compounds that they have are so biodegradable that they need to be dried and they're not stable in the liquid so you spray them like you're making powdered milk so in a big dryer and that would be what the end product looks like or if the compounds and the microbe is stable in liquid you can put them in a liquid form so they could be packaged for the farmer in a jug like this if it's the dry formulation to be packaged in a bag like this so that's the end of the process so let me give you some examples of some of these things so this is a product we commercialize called Randevo, it's a new species of bacterium new to nature first discovered by a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture from under a hemlock tree in Maryland and they named it chromobacterium subsugi meaning under hemlock and what this is a remarkable microorganism it produces purple pigments and some of these pigments and other compounds that we discovered is birth control for bugs the bugs stop reproducing it also makes them stop feeding in a few seconds and they throw up and die the picture of a leaf beetle actually leaking out of both ends pretty gross huh but you know I'm an entomologist I get into this stuff and so it also repels the insects from the leaves this is a new mode of action so it doesn't work like chemical pesticides chemical pesticides typically the farmers will spray it and they'll see the bugs drop off in 24 hours well this is because it has this unusual mode of action of this repellency and this reproductive effects and the anti-feeding it requires some education for the farmers to use it but once it's integrated into a program it's a great tool we've discovered in our lab from a garden soil a bacterium that is actually a weed killer and it kills pigweeds like in this picture you can put one drop of the bacteria onto a leaf and it will completely stunt the plant compared to the untreated on the right so it's got a remarkable ability to produce some compounds that move in the weed up in it's called systemic activity to kill the weed and we're developing this now here's an example of some bacteria that don't actually kill anything but actually enhance the crop and so we found two different bacteria and one of them actually helps this plant live in soils that are very salty so when there's lots of fertilizer used in agriculture the soil becomes very salty lots of salt and the plants can't grow very well and they become really wheat so you have some examples where we could put the bacteria in the soil and the plants will grow remarkably and be green and healthy but without the bacteria they look pretty wimpy then we have another bacteria we discovered where you can stop watering and in times of drought the plant will live, and this is a picture from our laboratory where very little water was given to the tomatoes for six weeks on the left is what happens to the drought-stricken plants and on the right are the ones with the bacteria in the soil so these bacteria are remarkable in being able to enhance the growth of plants and sometimes they do this by living inside of the plant and on the top showing the fluorescent green that is a corn root and that shows that the bacteria have actually gone inside the root it's called an endophyte and by living inside the root whatever it's doing in there it's helping it overcome this drought and salt stress now the final example I'll give you is a bacteria that kills invasive zebra and quagga mussels these invasive mollusks mollusks came into the United States in ballast water many years ago in ships and then invaded the Great Lakes and are now spreading, well they've spread into Canada they're spreading across western Europe where they originally came from eastern Europe and they're spreading down they just found in Baja, Mexico and spreading west we have some various invasions out here in the west and if you're a boater or a fisherman you have to have your boat inspected for these mussels because we don't want them to spread because they cause major ecological disaster when they spread into freshwater ecosystems they can destroy native mussels they're even invading they're living on other organisms here and they grow so fast they destroy the lakes and also they clog up pipes so power plants industrial and power plants have to use very toxic compounds or ordinary ammonium compounds to get rid of these mussels and the plants so some years ago some scientists in a little lab in upstate New York of New York State Museum went looking for a solution to this mussel because the electric utilities in upstate New York were having problems with these mussels and their power plants so they got some water samples and some soil samples and by the mussel infested river and found screen tested several thousand bacteria and found one bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescence strain CL45A that when fed to the mussels kills these mussels and only kills these mussels a remarkable discovery because it doesn't kill anything else but these two species of mussels so we have commercialized this product into what's called Zequinox and we had approval to treat pipes and this year we got approval to actually treat lakes and have very successfully been able to reduce some of the populations around the edges of some lakes in Minnesota and that will be expanding that usage so those are some very remarkable examples of what naturally occurring microorganisms can do for pest management so here we are back to feeding the world again and my live stream has been to develop these discover these develop these and find ways to integrate these into crop production and pest management programs biologicals the bugs don't develop resistance very easily to them so you can use them and not have to worry that the bugs are going to become immune to them if you're a Napa Valley farm vineyard manager and you want to spray in the morning and get back in the field in the afternoon you can do that with these products because they have that level of safety if you're a consumer you can get about the chemical residues on your produce at time of harvest and the residues the amount of chemical is very highly regulated and a lot of consumers don't want the pesticides on their food at time when they eat it you can spray our products right up to harvest and doesn't leave any chemical residues so here are some of the advantages of why we're so bullish on these types of products so I've worked my entire career to try to transform agriculture in the current state where it's chemical intensive so farmers use primarily chemical pesticides and they dial in biologicals when they can't use chemicals or the chemicals have been restricted there's also a consumer demand for organic production which will continue to grow there's more organic demand than there is supply but the green is where we're really going to over the next 10 to 20 years is that my dream is that chemical have biologicals be the base of the program and you only dial in chemicals when needed so you all eat of course of course you have to eat food and health are inextricably linked together so all of you should care about where your food is coming from and how it is farmed so please join the conversation and the debate thank you I like that slide thank you so much for sharing all of that with us my favorite part about it is you know here in deos especially we're always hearing about big corporations and you know their killer pesticides and all the horrible products that are being put into our soil into our water and it's just so nice to hear that there's an alternative eco-friendly replacement for this balancing everything out and it's also super nice because now I know what to get my mom for Christmas so next up our next speaker that we have is going to be Kathy Speck and some of you might be familiar with the name not only because of the flyer but someone actually put Kathy down as one of their inspirations on a sticky note on the Tree of Inspiration and I'm vaguely familiar with the sound of Kathy because at the beginning of this event if any of you heard that little horn going off in the corner it was on her walker and if you get the chance to look it up close it is the best decorated walker that I have ever seen multiple noise makers and a significant amount of little plushy toy animals and I know that what she has to tell us today is even more beautiful and exciting than the way that she's decorated her walker so I would love if you would all help me in welcoming Kathy up to the stage oh and one other thing you can actually see it from here there's a My Little Pony hanging from the side and Kathy was telling me that she absolutely hates My Little Pony does not like My Little Pony at all so why is it on there and she gave me this great story her entire life turned upside down at one point and she just saw this My Little Pony toy and she said you know what I'm going to turn this thing on its head and she took something that she didn't like and grown from there can any of you shout out anything that you can identify in the walker from the audience are you wondering do I always I do except when I'm taking a shower I get rid of the cake cause it just makes you know watching my hair is so difficult so in fact I'll take this off so I don't fidget with it I fidget some of you heard the horn here it is awesome thank you Linda to be the most talented musician I've ever met thank you let's try that hey it's a beautiful day isn't it blue sky yeah so I was actually raised right here in Davis California I wasn't born here actually I was born in the theater my parents were here my mom said put away the popcorn my water broke I want to thank all of the people that helped make this happen I know it's a ton of work and thank all of you as well supporting something like this in our community and having you see Davis and the community of Davis come together to make something just like this but enough about you let's talk about me that's why you paid the big bucks right big bucks as some of you might know I have ALS amyotropic lateral sclerosis how many of you out there heard about the ice bucket challenge and ALS yes yes and I know that many of you did the ice bucket challenge and I was there with some of you and not only did you pour freezing cold water over your head but you also made generous donations thank you very much for that what is ALS well it's cruel it's devastating it's ugly and I don't mean that people are ugly I said this once people are ugly if they have ALS no the disease is ugly and cruel and devastating what it is basically is you have the motor neurons they're the ones that go to your voluntary muscles for some reason they don't know why but the motor neurons die before they get to the muscle and it's like I said all the voluntary muscles including your tongue some people with ALS they get it's called the bull bar region and it starts there their muscles with the tongue and swallowing and that sort of thing other people it starts with limb to get the feeling of what it would be like if you had ALS and you had the bull bar on that try not moving your tongue at all and say your name out loud go ahead try that don't move your tongue and that's what it's like and it's horrible for the person who's trying to communicate because you can look at the people they don't know what you're saying they don't know what you're thinking and then on the other side if you're the one who you don't understand you don't know what they need now sometimes you can use different devices like if you can still use your fingers you can type stuff and your voice or not your voice another person's voice you can have an American woman or a British woman an American man or a British man one of those and of course I was going to pick the British man um so it's uh neuro it's a fatal terminal neuro degenerative disease and if you go through the whole process like my mom did you end up in a situation that's called a glass coffin because you can't move anything you can hear and you can think that you have no way of reacting to anyone else they can't they don't even know you just are trapped in your own body now I mentioned my mom normally ALS is sporadic it can get anyone at any time anywhere and it used to be ALS affected people between the ages of 40 and 70 but as ALS is getting more known and there's more research and people are coming out of the closet that they have ALS because it's so ugly most people hide it they don't come out but what's happening now that more people are talking about it is we're finding out oh no it's happening to people who are 26 it's happening to people who are 80 and we got what they found in 1993 which is really the only one thing that's happened since the 1860s when it was discovered is they found a genetic mutation that leads to ALS but it's very very rare it happens to be in my family and our particular case has not been seen anywhere else and I just realized that I skipped one of the best parts of the slide show so we're gonna get a little bit silly here if you don't mind oh no thank you oh yeah there it is I was gonna say the first thing you need to know about me is that I'm hilarious I'm laughing at all the appropriate times so that's great that was long before ALS I just kind of liked getting down and dirty in cemeteries whenever we ran across one oh look there's a cemetery can we stop um yes oh that one okay so I was telling you that this very rare less than 2% of all ALS cases are genetic mutation like my families this is my brother Larry and his his hounds Chuck and Daisy and I'm over there in the corner Larry had been diagnosed with ALS on May 6th 2008 and he died June 11th 2008 2008 he had been misdiagnosed so many times and I had seen it in him before I could tell it was coming in this shot I was helping him go through papers the kind of stuff that you need to do when you know you're dying fairly soon and this picture was taken two weeks before he died my mom and my dad Thanksgiving I I look at those two and the turkey and they're so happy together and they're so proud and it's like they gave birth to this little baby turkey and it came out roasted perfectly my mom was my world I adored her I always wanted to be sitting next to her where our arms could touch I was a mama's girl she was diagnosed with ALS when I was 11 and nobody had heard of ALS back then Lou Gehrig's disease but that doesn't really mean anything to anybody first we just noticed some kind of weird twitches and I particularly noticed it because my arm was always trying to touch hers and I would look at these things happy in her skin I said mom what is that what's it doing well got worse and then her elbow wasn't working right and then her right thumb and her right shoulder and it got worse and worse and worse my parents had when they finally came up with the diagnosis which I wasn't going to believe because I knew my mom could out do anything she could do that there was nothing that was going to beat her but I am the second youngest of nine children when they made the diagnosis we were sitting at our very long table mom sitting here dad sitting there I'm sitting right next to mom and dad opened up this light blue little trifled pamphlet he said your mother has this disease and he continued to read it and read it and it's all about well most people die within two to five years there's no cure there's really we don't know the cause and da da da da da and I listened but not really tell the very end when I said ALS is not hereditary but it can run in families what does that mean you know what does that mean now we knew that her aunt had died of Lou Gehrig's disease back then we didn't know a whole lot about that a mom got sicker and sicker and I still did not believe that she was going to die I knew that she was going to pull through I had a deal with God about it well in 2000 1972 she had gotten worse and worse and we weren't able to take care of her at home anymore so she went into back then was the community hospital and she stayed there where they would keep her from choking from choking a death or aspirating it was just more than we could do at home anymore but she got to come home for special occasions and one of those occasions was Thanksgiving by then she couldn't use either of her arms she was able to speak and she was able to swallow and no problems no cognitive impairment or anything like that so and it also happened to be that my birthday is always right around Thanksgiving and so I felt extra special because she got to come home from the hospital to be there for my birthday as well so we took all the Thanksgiving fixings and put it in a blender and then she had her cut here and her straw and she sucked her Thanksgiving dinner to get this straw I still didn't believe she was going to die I didn't it was getting close to Christmas time we loved Christmas my mom loved Christmas and boy we looked like a Christmas store and it was really meaningful to me and so I had this deal with God that she was going to come home on Christmas Eve and in the morning she would be healed and there was a deal the deal that I was going to give to God I said you give me my mom I'll give you all my Christmas presents it makes sense to me well December 18th I was outside it was raining and I was outside playing basketball because that's what I did and my brother Jim opened the front door and said Kathy mom's in a coma and I said okay and I just kept shooting basketball because I knew I had this all figured out the coma wasn't really a coma she was saving energy so that when she came home she could be healed she was just saving energy December 19th phone rings my dad and mom's bedroom was right next to my bedroom and I hear dad talking to the hospital and I hear him say did she suffer and then he hung up and receded to call all the relatives and the good friends and I listened over and over and over again as he called people and then he came into my room and he sat on the edge of my bed and said mommy died I said I know and I cried myself to sleep the next morning I woke up and I could hear all these people were in the family room and you got to organize all this stuff for the funeral and the reception and I could hear it and I had been thinking maybe this was just a bad dream maybe I'm awake now and mom is still alive and I wanted to come from all the way all the way to the family room and I could hear what people were talking about it was oh she did die and I walked very slowly and I said what do I do now what do I do now I was empty I was hollow I just I had no idea what to do so my coping skills some of them were good some of them were not I I got way way way involved with sports or club activities I got straight A's because I had this vision of my mom sitting on a cloud watching me and I wanted her to be proud of me so I did great I did great and then I went away to college and I had to leave Davis to go to college because I had to come out I knew I was gay and this is in the late 70's and it wasn't cool to be gay like it is now I was way ahead of the curve right yeah so I came out and had a lot of fun I was a basketball player and basketball I had been my saving grace and then my knees went and I couldn't play and then everything fell apart all the basketball all that kind of stuff that kept me going it wasn't there and I was starting to feel that emptiness again that devastation that point my coping skills went down the toilet literally I became an alcoholic bulimic anorexic I hurt myself I didn't do a lot of cutting I did like burns, bruises like getting bruises was really made me feel I know that some of you out there are cutters and I'm gonna say your name out loud right now and you can say I'm Kathy and I'm a cutter and I moved back to Davis because I knew I knew I had to come back to Davis to heal and I figured it that it would out it would take about a year the fast track one online no it wasn't online back then so yeah I needed a year to heal well no and I got lower and lower and lower until I was so ashamed and humiliated because people had expectations from Kathy Speck she was gonna go far and I ended up in college studying self destruction with a minor and suicidal thoughts only I flunked out of that so whatever I'm still alive darn it all well there's mom and dad mom and dad and the other pictures my mom was able to see her oldest daughter my sister Barb she got to see Barb get married and that was very important to her and I remember overhearing her talk to my dad because she couldn't use her right arm by then it just hung there and she didn't want people to feel uncomfortable you do the receiving line where you go up and you shake somebody's hand but she couldn't use her right arm and she was afraid if she leaned over with her left arm that that would make her uncomfortable so I had been listening to her and things that it was real now I've kind of gone all over and got back and forth just because silly now this is what I want this is the picture this is where it all comes together this is on our on the side yard I grew up on Oak Avenue 903 Oak Avenue it was a great place to live and I think on our block what we had 14 lesbians is that right it's not my fault well maybe a few so this is my family and my brother my brother Paul who's on the end and my brother Larry who's on the end both of them died of ALS Paul in 2011 Larry in 2008 and died in 1972 my sister Susan who's wearing a green sweatshirt she died on Valentine's Day 1997 and then grandma Mabel the only grandparent I ever knew died on the 4th of July 1974 and I guess the rest of us are still alive I'm doing great I I am I'm doing great with my ALS I really am and this community is a huge part of it absolutely I feel so supported and one of the things that's also keeping me alive longer is that I've chosen to use oxygen daily but also at night this thing is kind of like respiratory therapy and that has been proven to extend life possibly up to five years more so that has a lot to do with why I'm still alive and doing so well but other than that it is the community's support my friends who are here thank you I love you and the whole community how can I not how can I not be happy I know that sounds weird but I'm at the most peace and I got to go fast right, two yikes I have two minutes shoot, okay darn alright so this is what we could do I could sing a song I could show you a 40 second video of me skydiving and say a few more words song okay so what happened is this is a song that I wrote about 10 years after my mom died and I wrote the lyrics the music is from Paul Robbins and Linda DuVal the very very talented musician who was also my very kind and supportive caregiver I also wouldn't be doing so well if it were not for her helping me imagining if my mom could sit on the edge of my bed and tell me things were going to be alright that was my song for my mom comforting me and now this song is for you and after I die you can imagine me sitting on the side of your bed or you can kick me off on the floor and and sitting there and just telling you it's going to be okay now initially we were going to have me sing along to my CD that's the other thing I forgot to tell you because of ALS I can't sing anymore I was a singer performer all that kind of stuff but ALS has taken that from me however I am going to do this today is I'm going to sing with actually all I'm going to have is the sound from the laptop which is not at all loud so what you're going to hear is me trusting you because I'm going to sing and I have not done this it's called Sweet Beyond and what do I need to do here just so this is a healing song and I just talked so long that we missed oh jeez I like to do shows and I know these guys work so hard I know that all these guys work so hard doing all the technical stuff that I can't do and then I just turned out talking most of the time with Chatty Cathy I am okay so I'm trusting you I haven't done this and here we go Christmas in the sweet beyond thank you thank you very much thank you Cathy I got chills you are still a very beautiful singer thank you very much I really can't think of any better words to say for that other than inspiring so one more round of applause for Cathy please and so since we are running a little short on time I'm afraid I'm going to have to cut some speedy little introductions so for now if you would join me in welcoming our performer Ann Cap Cap to the stage that was beautiful wasn't that beautiful I don't know how I can top that but that was very inspiring very inspiring before I start my piece I just like to say hi my name is Ann Cap Cap our theme today is roots of inspiration and I think you guys really saw that with Miss Cathy Speck one of those roots of inspiration comes from self something that I learned from my travels from being a spoken word poet going all the way across the country all the way through California a lot of that inspiration comes from self from believing that you can so this piece comes from that part of me and after all the tears I hope you guys laugh a little with this so please enjoy you the cool kid right there you with the hype trend and the gelled hair the one who yolos who flirts as sweet as a ho ho who says school is a no go killing his mojo like a black belt in the dojo your elbows are up you're leaning like a cholo you the cool kid you see this poem is not for you this is an era where a new kind of beautiful is rising up like the depths of America this poem is for the losers the geeks on league of legend the people who find beauty in RPG the poetry writers the peace fighters the tacos who took too long to find their way back to reality because the world took up too much sanity the underdogs and the soon to be Steve Jobs of the 21st century this is for the acne attack boys who couldn't get the girl this is for the boys in the friend zone and the girls who can't afford a wink from the quarterbacks in the end zone this is for mama's boys misindependence maybe it's Maybelline commercial skip to watch the end credits of star wars the clone wars this is the new kind of sexy I would know I'm one of them y'all laugh but y'all can't handle my 5 foot 1 Filipino fantasy that's right y'all can't handle what's cooking up in my kitchen the kitchen's stirring up some sweet honor roll GPA y'all can't take in the curves of my perfectly coordinated honors pre-cow born parabola that's right y'all cannot take in the supremely sexy list of extracurricular activities including marching band theater assets broadcast journalism and did I mention speech and debate this incredibly attractive nerd from the 916 cluster her homies in the basement were having their fifth juice box they won't let them drink soda this band geek cluster her homie band geek to get turned on every time the tuba player plays in a perfect B flat pitch I'm talking to the crew who don't need no relationship as long as they got access to the internet I'm talking to you who have been dissed will be dissed or are being dissed for who you want to be despite the cool standards of human society if any of the spoken lies to you my sweet brothers and sisters of this underground society I'm asking you to rise up because the force is strong in you and that I come in peace and I hope y'all got the chance to check out her bio because she's in high school that is quite an accomplishment for a high school student so next up we have our final performers who as you can see are in the front right now setting up we have a little fun fact they make their own drums we are having Bakuhatsu taiko dance so please join me in welcoming them to the stage how many of you out there in the audience have ever heard taiko dan drumming before raise your hand make some noise nice keep them up keep them up how many of you have seen this group specifically perform before and nice we got some supporters they are a club at UC Davis that has been performing for a long time seeing them perform so I am excited who else out there is excited nice I hope y'all are ready they get loud thank you all so much that was incredible and that was a great end to an amazing event thank you all so much for coming a round of applause for yourselves and our speakers and all of our lovely student volunteers we couldn't have done this without all of you and if you were inspired or if you enjoyed anything that you've seen today stay update with TEDx UC Davis on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and you can get more information about our next salon that we are having in January for now we only have about 10 minutes left before we are getting kicked out of here so I encourage you I still encourage you all to talk to each other and take refreshments and mingle but if you could do so while picking up trash and making sure the area is clean and slowly moving your way towards the exits in the back we would highly appreciate it and if you have some pictures you can tweet or Instagram hashtag it hashtag TEDxUCDavis thank you so much to the Davis Downtown Business Association and all of our other sponsors and thank you all so much hopefully we will see you in January