Profs and Pints San Francisco Bay Area

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “How Money Shapes Minds,” a research-based examination of how money alters our thought processes and behavior, with Daniel E. Martin, associate professor of management at CSU East Bay and director of Corporate Compassion Education at Stanford University’s Center for Compassion, Altruism Research and Education.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-money-minds .]

Acquiring more money doesn’t just change what we can buy. It quietly changes how we think, how we relate to others, and how we relate to and use power. Psychology, epidemiology, history, and ancient wisdom all converge on this conclusion: the more power and money we have, the less compassion we feel for others—unless, that is, such compassion is intentionally cultivated.

Gain insights into how money influences our behavior—and how we can keep growing wealth from shrinking our heart—with Daniel Martin, who directs Corporate Compassion Education at a Stanford University center focused on understanding the neural, mental, and social bases of compassion and altruism.

He’ll discuss why wealth so often reduces compassion rather than increasing it, and how the use of power changes as wealth grows. We’ll look at how inequality changes moral judgment and political tolerance for suffering, and whether compassion can be trained in leaders and institutions in ways that measurably change behavior.

Drawing from experimental research in social psychology and other fields, we’ll explore how merely thinking about money increases self-focus, reduces helping, and weakens empathy—effects that don’t stop at individuals but scale up into teams, organizations, and entire societies.

We’ll look at evidence showing that higher social class predicts lower empathic accuracy, greater entitlement, and more tolerance for unethical behavior, while inequality itself erodes trust, generosity, and concern for suffering at all levels. These patterns help explain why large systems so often become indifferent to harm, even when the people being hurt by them believe they are acting rationally or fairly.

We’ll look at what great thinkers such as Plato, Rumi, Aristotle, the Buddha, the Vedas, Zoroaster, and Lao Tzu have to say on the matter. You’ll emerge with a better understanding of how money affects your behavior and the behavior of those around you. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A limousine parked by a homeless person in San Francisco’s Mission District. (Photo by Shani Heckman / Wikimedia Common.)

Profs and Pints Napa presents: “Frankenstein, Knowledge, and Forgiveness,” on the deeper meaning of Mary Shelley’s widely retold tale, with Kim Hester Williams, professor of literature at Sonoma State University and scholar of the American Gothic and Horror in literature and film.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/napa-frankenstein .]

Mary Shelley's classic novel, Frankenstein, ranks as one of the most famous Gothic and Horror novels of all time, and now is experiencing a resurgence of interest as a result of famed director Guillermo del Toro's film adaptation of it.

Since its publication in 1818, debate has swirled around the question of what exactly Frankenstein represented to its author. Was it Shelley’s response to the works of her famous husband, Percy Shelley? A public conversation between her and her also-famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft? An argument with John Milton's crucial text, Paradise Lost?

Hear such questions tackled, and gain a much richer appreciation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale and subsequent retellings, with Kim Hester Williams, who teaches the novel to college students and in October gave an outstanding Profs and Pints talk on Horror as a genre.

She’ll discuss how the new Frankenstein film fits in with Mary Shelley’s various ruminations on love, loss, and knowledge—gone awry. We’ll look at what the author had to say about the human frailties that hold us back from forming deeper relations with one another and living according to our higher virtues.

We’ll examine how Shelley, and Guillermo del Toro in her footsteps, press audiences on these simple questions: When will humans ever learn to love and to forgive? Or to forgive and then to truly love? (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30.)

Image: A publicity still from the 1931 film version of Frankenstein (Wikimedia Commons).

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “A Global History of Psychedelics,” with J. Christian Greer, lecturer in Stanford Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, historian of psychedelic cultures, and creator of the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-psychedelics .]

Across time and space, human communities have used mind-altering drugs to explore deeper levels of consciousness, access visionary states of awareness, and heal disease.

Learn about the global history of psychedelics with J. Christian Greer, who teaches a course on the subject as a scholar of religious studies with a special focus on psychedelic culture.

In a talk that blends history, anthropology, religious studies, and archeology, he’ll trace psychedelics’ journey from ancient ceremonial use to part of modern science and culture.

He’ll explore how substances such as peyote, ayahuasca, and “magic mushrooms” have been embedded in spiritual and healing traditions, rites of passage, sorcery, religious rituals, and divination. He’ll also discuss their more recent application in psychiatry, new religious movements, and technological innovations.

He’ll especially focus on the ways in which scholars have long misinterpreted the evidence for humanity's ancient love affair with powerful psychoactive substances, as well as how a new generation of researchers has unearthed evidence that overturns everything that we thought we knew about humanity's irrepressible appetite for consciousness alteration.

It’s a lecture that invites audiences to see psychedelics not as fringe curiosities but as enduring companions in humanity’s long search for insight, connection, and wonder. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)

Image: Stone statues from 1000 BC to 500 AD depicting creatures with mushroom caps on their heads (National Institute on Drug Abuse / Wikimedia Commons).