[S2E7] If Only You Knew
The outcome of a trial can often hinge on who's sitting on the jury. In Curtis Flowers' six trials, a simple pattern has emerged. When the jury was all white, or nearly all white, Flowers was convicted. In the two trials that had more than one African-American juror, the result was a hung jury. His fourth and most recent conviction, in 2010, was handed down by 11 white jurors and only 1 black juror.
[S2E7] If Only You Knew
The Batson v. Kentucky decision not only banned the use of race to exclude people from juries but also created a process through which lawyers can contest a strike made by opposing counsel. First, the objecting lawyers must tell the judge that they believe the other side struck a juror because of race. Either the prosecution or the defense can file a Batson challenge, but it's commonly a defense tactic.
It is not unconstitutional to strike a black juror or even all the black jurors. It's only unconstitutional if the prosecution strikes them because of race. The Supreme Court also has ruled that it's unconstitutional to remove jurors because of gender. Otherwise prosecutors can cite any reason for rejecting a juror. If the reason seems unrelated to race or gender, it is allowed.
Speaking of boyfriends, Liam is really screwed up right now. He's got so much to work through, which wasn't really a surprise. We knew he was having some PTSD issues and that he wasn't dealing so well with what happened to Mal.
The story I told you about the blanket is true. I just wasn't the on having the contractions. Please sit, and let me explain. Before I came to Toronto, I was living in Cambridge in a boarded up rooming house, addicted to oxy, sharing a dirty mattress with a woman named Holly and her newborn son, Robbie. One morning, Holly wouldn't wake up. I didn't know what to do. I tried to revive her, but she was already cold. I looked at that beautiful little baby boy lying next to her, and I knew that I had to turn my life around for him.
Sean Chapman: Yeah, so I grew up in central Florida, a small town north of Tampa. It's called Spring Hill. And as you said earlier, first-generation. So both my parents immigrated to the US, my mother was from Scotland, dad from the Dominican Republic, and they met up in California and for whatever reason they decided California wasn't for them, but they preferred Florida. So I ended up there and I studied at Tufts University, graduated 2017, and I was studying engineering physics because at the time I really didn't know exactly what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to work with renewable energy, but I mean, it's a pretty broad field. So I thought kind of going from first principles would have been the best way to go about it.
Sean Chapman: So at least culturally, I was not ready for the culture shock. I mean, it was a very arrogant of me to assume that, oh yeah, you know, it's a European country. Everyone's going to speak English, it'll be fine. You know, I'll just do Duolingo for one month and I'll have enough vocabulary to get by. I was very wrong. So thankfully, I mean, the people at the company I work for, I mean, it's an international company, so they speak English. So at least in terms of my work bubble, that was okay, but I kind of just needed my hand to be held the whole time I was going through the bureaucratic processes. So I was lucky enough where since my mother was Scottish, I was able to get my UK passport and I got my foot in the door before Brexit. So I was still able to like live there as a European, but you still have to do all the Italian paperwork. But yeah, in terms of the life lessons and things that I learned. Yeah, I mean, it's sometimes you can't plan or expect for things. I mean, life just kind of happens as it happens and you kind of just have to take it one day at a time. Very much be mindful and live in the present. And thankfully, I mean, I had say in that in that sense, a safety net through my company of people that were helping me actually get through all the processes and kind of find a house, get settled, start my networks from scratch. And then in terms of my work, at this point, I have many jobs. So whenever I started I was just doing electrochemical engineering modeling. So I was working with a commercial software, COMSOL it's called, and it's a very good for multi-physics simulations. And I was modelling, modelling essentially a single cell of their electrolyzer. So the company and after they make these AEM electrolysers where the idea is they take the benefits of, say, conventional alkaline electrolysis, which is how industry has done it for over 100 years now with, say, new solid-state systems, which are called PEM Electrolyzers, which have way higher power densities. They're a lot more compact, but they have issues because they use a lot of, say, rare metals. They're very expensive and very commodity intensive with what we do is essentially it's the membranes that we actually use like they behave is a high so you can use a lot cheaper elements but also they have this added benefit being solid state you can pressurize the hydrogen before it leaves and such and and the membranes themselves they haven't really even existed for more than 15, 20 years. So like a lot of stuff is still kind of being defined. And whenever I joined, I think we were, we were pretty much world leading and we still are. But people have caught up in the last few years, you know, friendly competition. But yeah, like whenever I was modeling that, it was kind of from first principles. So lots of, You know, electrodynamics, fluid flow or multiphase transport. But realizing that I didn't have enough say experimental data for some of the things that I well is essentially it was lacking in academic literature, some of these numbers. So then I ended up going to do more experimental work. And yeah, and after a while, I was the only one coming up with patent ideas. So then, then they kind of had me on the intellectual property side of things. And right before I went back to school, I was working with the engineers because they didn't really understand the chemistry and the electric chemists didn't really talk with the engineers too much. So I was the liaison between the two. So I've worn many hats, but it's hard to answer the question of like, Oh, what do I do whenever people ask? Because I actually have to sit down and think about it, what the short answer is. But I like it. I mean, it's it's interesting and it's almost like I every month I have a different job, so it's, it's easy to not get bored.
Aidan Martinez: Yeah. And I mean, what's just excellent about your job is the applied nature of what you've learned so far and how you get to use it on a day to day basis. And just to make sure that we got the audience up to speed. What you were talking about before is covering not only the science of energy storage and batteries, but the science of electric conduction and getting more efficient energies and energy production specifically out of hydrogen, right?
Sean Chapman: Yeah. I mean, well, none of it was planned. Like, even when I was in Florida, I didn't think I was going to get into Questbridge. I did not think I was going to get chosen by by a school. And I'm glad that I was able to spend my years at Tufts. But even whenever I was there, I ran into one of my professors, Iryna Zenyuk, one of the smartest women that I know, and a role model and the hero. And I think she's at UC Irvine now. And she was the one that kind of introduced me to hydrogen and basically sold me on the hydrogen economy. And that was just a happenstance kind of meeting. And, you know, and through meeting her, she kind of helped me or told me to do the SULI program, you know, and then I ended up in California. And so it was all kind of just me being open to like, Well, why not? What's the worst that can happen? Like, if I really if I really fail and I can't get myself back up, like, like you said, you know, there's always the option of going back home. But for me, I knew that there wasn't much opportunity in Florida, at least in my life, where I'm from. And with respect to the first-generation aspect, I mean, my parents, you know, they also you know, they emigrated, they left their families, they took a risk. I think it's just that openness to kind of take risks and risk taking and looking back like like if I went back ten years and I talked to my old self and I told him, like all the things that you would eventually do, you know, I would have scoffed and I would have laughed it like like no way. Like, yeah, none of that makes sense.
Aidan Martinez: You know, I love that. It would all boils down to is you had, if you will, you had the right hot word or like hot phrase setup. And once you heard. Anything related to energy production, you would just light up. And in the case of this professor, you know, there's probably no way in heck that you knew that she was, you know, probably on her first couple of years just getting started with her career. And yet there was this this intersection that happened at this point in time. And it's all because you decided to go afterwards. And I think, you know, tactically for someone else that might be like going to office hours, that might just be straight up emailing the professor. But, you know, some of the best mentorship relationships that I have myself are with professors. There's so much here that we could continue to talk about. But I mean, you know, I want to pick your brain on one last thing before we part ways with this interview is how do you see hydrogen fitting into the broader climate change ecosystem? You know, sell people on why hydrogen is the energy of the future here.
Sean Chapman: Oh, man. Yeah. I mean, I'm a I'm clearly biased. I'm a bit of a hydrogen maximalist. So there's a short term and a futurist answer. So short term is. You can't electrify everything. We don't have enough lithium. Yes, you could use, say, other electrochemical systems. So there's other chemistries you can use. There's even a company in Boston Form Energy. They basically are just using iron rust pellets. So it's extremely easy, cheap. And so like for that, for a grid scale storage, it makes sense. But there are just some applications where you will always need a fuel. And the only fuels that I know of that are carbon neutral are derived from hydrogen. So even if it wasn't hydrogen, some people talk about ammonia, some people talk about liquid organic hydrogen carriers, and they're all either hydrogen derived or just hydrogen. And even if you look at the direction that we've been going with fuels over the last hundreds, even thousands of years, you know, we started with what, burning wood and dung and then. 041b061a72