All right. Our next speaker is up. We have a Mr. Chad Wankie. Will you also be speaking? No. So we have a Mr. Chad Wankie. He is the mayor of Placentia, California, which is a town, is it Orange County? Yeah. So I was lucky enough to get in contact with this guy. And he told me some very interesting stories about having been a young punk rocker being dragged out of a car by his mohawk and then being beaten up by the police. And one day he wanted to change the system and he figured he'd have a much better time doing that from the outside and being the guy who tells the police what to do. And that's a pretty punk rock attitude in my opinion. I don't care what you say. So I'm pretty excited to have him tell us how to deal with local government if you must as it pertains to your legal kind of business. Thanks Rex. Yeah, that was when I had hair. As you can see, I have a hard time growing a mohawk now. I tried to do it at the mohawk place and they laughed at me. My name is Chad Wankie. I'm the mayor of the city of Placentia and I'm a government affairs and land use specialist. What that means is that any business that needs a, what we would call an entitlement or a permit, could be a conditional use permit or a zone change or business license. I specialize in helping businesses kind of bridge the gap between bureaucracy and private sector. So my goal here today is to focus on cannabis and explain, kind of start high level and look at what levels of government, what the roles and responsibilities are of different levels of government. Explain how if you're going to open a marijuana business, a cannabis business. I'm going to say marijuana, cannabis, I'm talking about weed. So cannabis is nice, but you know, at the end of the day, marijuana is really what we're talking about. So if I switch back and forth, it's just because I keep trying to go and use the currently popular term cannabis, but in the back of my mind it's still pot. So my goal here is really to leave you with a better understanding of why local government, which would be city or county government, is really critical if you're going to enter into the cannabis space. Most people, when they think of government, they think of the feds. So the federal government has a particular role. State government's got a particular role, but at the end of the day, most businesses are going to deal with local police, code enforcement, fire departments and things like that. I also want to kind of outline the roles and responsibilities of the different people in the city. Some of the elected officials, appointed officials like commissioners, staff members and some different types of government. So if you decide you do want to get into this space, you have at least, you're kind of for armed on what you're dealing with. A lot of people talk to attorneys about opening cannabis businesses or consultants. Some of those people know what they're talking about. A lot of them don't. I've seen a lot of people who are cannabis specialists and they've never worked on a conditional use permit in their whole life. Don't understand the process or attorneys that were ambulance chasers four years ago and now they're marijuana specialists. So there are a lot of people out there that don't know what they're doing and this will kind of forearm you on what you should look for if you're going to hire a lobbyist or government affairs specialist and what to expect from them and also what not to expect from them. So the point, like I said, is really to help you understand the system so you can benefit. Don't waste time, time's money, especially if you're securing real estate in these projects. They take a long time from beginning to end. So you don't want to burn through all of your revenue for your project, just waiting for your permits to get approved or for your conditional use permit to get approved. Cities that are pro-marijuana like West Hollywood, for example, that city's got a population that's supportive of marijuana, a city council that's supportive of marijuana and they thought they were going to have everything up and running last year and they still don't. So even when you've got a supportive environment, most cities don't really know what they're doing. It's new and people are freaked out about weed. I mean, reefer madness is alive and well, believe it or not. People really believe that if, and I've had people say this to me, why do you want to ruin our city? What's going to happen to my two-year-old if there's a dispensary in the city? And what you hate, children and families, you want to bring drugs to our city? I'm kind of jaded. I thought people came up with ideas like this because they had some other motivation and it took me a while to realize that there are people out there who really believe that marijuana is going to destroy their property values, Western civilization, their families, their kids are going to be pimping themselves on the street corner because they can smoke reefer. It sounds crazy and you're laughing and I laughed until I realized that people are really scared of this. So you'll see cities, my experience is in California, but you'll see cities that are anti-weed, pro-weed, a variety here and there, but at the end of the day for most of the bureaucrats and the people that are approving these uses, which would be dispensaries, cultivation, extraction, testing, the cities haven't done this or they think they haven't done it and so bureaucrats don't, they're uncomfortable with it. And they're afraid of making mistakes. So you'll see really long time frames for people. So I want to help you kind of cut your time frames down by doing things right in the very beginning. This is why it's important to understand local government. This is a raid that took place in Santa Ana. It's not a joke when you see the outfits. You'll think that he and I actually made this at home. That really is a guy with his, you know, traffic helmet on. In this case, the police raided what I would call an illegal dispensary. It was non-permitted. They knocked down the door. They kicked everybody out and then they ripped down the security system, but there were two security systems. So once the first set, the overt cameras were all ripped down. There was still audio and video and in the video and the audio, you can see what appears to be police officers eating edibles and talking about punching crippled people in their stubs and things like that. So pretty disgusting things. It's not the norm, but just to give you an idea of when you don't do things right, this is what can happen. So the problem is really that when it comes to government, like I said, people think about the federal government and they have really no clue what cities do. I happen to know a guy who has a pizzeria in a coastal city in Southern California and he got cited for having too many chairs in his pizzeria. Literally, he's got a permit. The permit says you can have X number of chairs. His staff pulled out more chairs. He got written up. They kept doing it. He now has a misdemeanor conviction for having too many chairs in his pizzeria. He's a criminal. So it's not just marijuana, but paying attention to conditions of your permit, paying attention to what the guys with the guns tell you to do, paying attention to what code enforcement tells you to do is really, really critical. You can see the cities can make or break you.   They can put your, if you're found to be a public nuisance, your property can go into receivership. So the best thing to do is to create relationships, build bridges with the local government and basically be friends with the people who have control over your assets, your business, and, you know, your freedom.  You probably shouldn't have one if you're running a cannabis business in your business. So just something to think of. Quick primer here. The federal government clearly handles national policy, aside from what you've heard earlier and the DEA and the federal classifications for drugs on a day-to-day basis, at least in California, the DEA is not rating cannabis dispensaries anymore. And the reason there were a lot of raids in the past was because cities didn't have the manpower or the revenue, the dollars, to go after all the dispensaries. So what they do is they call the local DEA office and the DEA would come in, they'd deputize local officers, and it would be a DEA raid. Part of that was for asset forfeiture, but a lot of it was just funding. That's not really happening anymore. You've got the state level, and that's where you're typically going to have your licensing. So most states will require a state-level license for a cannabis operation. And there are a variety of different flavors of those types of licenses in different states. In California, you can get cultivation licenses, outdoor, indoor, mixed-light licenses. You can get extraction licenses, which are volatile or non-volatile extraction. You can get retail licenses, delivery licenses. Those are at the state level. You still have to get a local permit in order to operate, and there's still a lot of confusion for people. I talk to people all the time who say, oh, I've got 40 acres of weed growing, and it's in this city, and I say, well, that city doesn't allow cannabis cultivation. They go, oh, no, no, we got this thing, and, you know, it's under this, and somebody's given them the idea that it's okay to do it even without a city license. And it is explicitly not acceptable. The only time you wouldn't need a city license is if you're an unincorporated county property, in which case, there is no city. It's the county. So in that case, the county operates like the city. You still need a county that's approved it. So when you're going into a city, it's important to understand that there's really two forms in the United States of city government. There's what's called the strong mayor, which is where the mayor's elected, but the mayor's also the CEO. So they have a lot of power, and this is typically in larger cities. So it's a full-time job. The mayor's the CEO. He's also chairman of the board of directors, but the city council is the legislative body and the board of directors. So what you've got is a politician running the city. The mayor can hire or fire staff members independent of council, and the city charter or the state will dictate which powers the city council retains compared to the mayor. So it's different in different cities. There are what's called general law cities in California and charter cities. Charter cities have their own constitution basically. But at the end of the day, what's important to know is that the mayor is not only the mayor, not only an elected official, but also running day-to-day operations. The more common form of government is called the council manager form of government. And this, to compare it to a corporation, the city council would be the board of directors, the mayor would be the chairman of the board, but the CEO would be a city manager that would be hired specifically for that job. So you've got a non-elected official or non-politician running the day-to-day operations. The city manager is typically hired by the city council as a whole. So I'm a mayor, I still get one vote. People think it's cool, my friends get to say, you know, go back to work and go, what did you do this weekend? Oh, I hung out with the mayor and everyone's like, oh, that's bitchin'. I still have five times as much work and I still get one vote. So day-to-day operations are run by the city manager.  What will happen is the city council, when they hire the city manager, the city manager would essentially be the policy advisor and that's the person that the city would go to to understand what you can and can't do. The city council staff, city attorney, city manager, those would be specialists in their field and they're the people that would provide advice to the city council and that's really important to understand because frequently I hear people say, hey, I want to go open up a dispensary in this city and I say, well, it's not legal in that city. They say, oh, well, we know the mayor and I think, well, that's great, you got one vote out of five, it gets you zero. But they have this idea that the mayor can just go, hey, hook my buddy up and give this guy a license. And knowing the mayor is great, it's nice, it could be bad because if the mayor, if the other four council members all hate the mayor you're not going to get anything. It's probably going to be worse for you. But the day-to-day decisions that are made by department heads like city attorneys, development directors, public works directors, because those are the experts in the field they're going to give advice to the city council and when they make a recommendation on a project, for example, if you wanted to put a church in an industrial area, most cities require a conditional use permit. That permit, staff will typically make a recommendation which is either approve or deny. If the staff says, we think that you guys hired us to tell you what we think is the right thing to do and we think this is not a good idea, a city council really has to stick their neck out to overrule that and they have to have really good reasons why and it does occasionally happen but it's important for you to understand that the staff members have a lot of influence and it's nothing nefarious, it's not anything shady, it's just because they are specialists and they are called upon by the city council and the planning commission to give their opinion and advice. If you're going to open up a cannabis business some of the problems you might run into would be when it comes to the who in the city you obviously want to look at a city that either allows cannabis uses or is going to allow cannabis uses and that typically means there are at least three of five council members there's a majority of the council members that are supporting this. If you've got a seven member council or greater they typically need a majority for this. If there's a city manager who doesn't like it they can really gum up the works by the way they write staff reports the police chief can say hey we think this is a really bad idea and if you're in a public meeting as a council member gets up and says god I think this is a terrible idea it's really hard to go well jeez chief I really don't agree with you I'm going to vote on it anyways and not have somebody come back and call you out and say your own police chief said this was a bad idea but you guys are going to do it anyways that's not responsible so it's a big political risk for elected officials. So to successfully operate you really need to know who develops, implements and enforces the law so the development typically would come from staff. You'll have city attorneys and a team of people coming up with legislation or processes to approve cannabis uses they're going to then bring that to the city council with the recommendations to approve that once it's approved implementing the law goes back to the staff level and enforcement would be code enforcement and the police so you really need to make sure that you're dealing with these people in a polite, nice way people if you ever want to just get a good laugh stand by a planning counter at a city and watch a guy come in with a bunch of plans and then be a total jerk and wonder why his plans all of a sudden go to the bottom of the pile it happens all the time bureaucrats they don't get treated particularly well their jobs can be kind of boring and it's a difficult job when you have elected officials who can kind of so the bureaucrats are faced with kind of some interesting situations they can have people come in and treat them like garbage and then can't really do a whole lot about it so be nice you don't have to kiss people's butts but be nice be appreciative ask questions but the end of the day be polite this is important because you can see here civil asset forfeitures criminal penalties for code violations like the chairs I mentioned earlier and force receiverships that happen in Alabama the police, city governments and the DA and the sheriff seized over 2 million in 15 these are a little bit old but the numbers don't come out every single year so what you want to do is just make sure that you are really paying attention and on your team, if you're going to get into this you need a solid team, you need somebody that understands land use, you need an attorney you need people that understand operations make sure that you understand that specific city's requirements in the city and Southern California in their huge licensing packet you would submit a package to them they would go through all of their requirements and check off the boxes and score whether or not you meet all the requirements one of the requirements on page 20 that didn't have anything to do with all the other signs said you must have a sign in Korean, Spanish Vietnamese, Khmer and English that says nobody under 21 on the premises that wasn't under the signs section it wasn't under any of the other sections it was like a spoiler thrown in there and if you missed that then you lost a bunch of points so when they're scoring applications it's important to make sure that if you don't know how to do this yourself you've got somebody that does understand how to do it because cities want to make sure that they are dealing with people that can't, that will operate a business in accordance with the law that aren't going to embarrass them and in many cases they're going to make money and a lot of cities do this because they want the revenue it's amazing to see the people that will come to city council meetings when the city's talking about marijuana and approving marijuana and get up on the podium get up at the podium in public on TV and talk about all their illegal activity I literally saw a guy get up and talk about how he's been extracting and making edibles for 10 years and giving him to his grandma and his mom's been selling him and all these things and it's, that's illegal the guy just admitted to illegal activity the bad part for me is he went and sat down right next to me so the next day the city manager goes why did you bring that idiot I don't know the guy, he just happened to sit next to me and I'm a friendly guy so I was talking to him but you'll get people that look like extras from Scarface that'll come to your city and get up and talk and you look, nobody wants the guys from Scarface running a marijuana dispenser or anything else having to do with marijuana in their city so to go back to the roles of the elected officials it's kind of quick here we've already talked about them but the elected officials are city council members specifically city council members and mayors when I talk about appointed officials those would be people that are appointed by the city council typically commissioner or committee members some cities will have a cannabis commission and that's a commission that's specifically put together to look at the cannabis issue but planning commission on the third line is extremely important all of these commissions are advisory bodies to the city council so they will have an area that like a traffic safety commission or parks and rec just like the show you can have a cultural arts commission you can have airport land use commission harbor commission it's different in different cities but these are all appointed officials they're not elected they're appointed by the city council but they can still have a large amount of power and a huge impact on your project the planning commission will hold hearings on rezoning special use permits land use ordinance, conditional use permits so if a city's got an ordinance often times it will go to the planning commission first and then it will go to the city council so if you've got an application for cannabis you've got really kind of two hurdles to overcome one is the planning commission you want them to approve it and then you've still got the city council that works so you can't just count on a relationship with one council member the staff members are all of the bureaucrats all the people that are employed by the city so it'll be planners that you'll be dealing with it will be code enforcement officers and when you submit an application for cannabis depending on the type of use I think the most intensive use would be a volatile extractive process that's where you're using butane or something to extract cannaboids from the actual cannaboids you're going to get into fire police code enforcement you're going to get into department of toxic substances control because you're dealing with flammables you've got a whole host of people that you'll need to be dealing with and those are all staff members one interesting experience I had was in the city of I'm not going to say what city it is but I was in there with a client who was going to build an extraction facility and a cultivation facility and we're sitting there and we're looking at plans and I'm asking them questions about why they want certain things and I've dealt with these staff members before and at one point they looked at me and they said hey Chad we have no idea what we're doing and we kind of want to just work through this with you and we can change things as we need to go but we really don't know what we're doing and I was kind of flattered because they were like hey we want you to kind of help us out unfortunately my client was really freaked out and said I don't want to put my money into this you know I was really worried about it but this is a city, it's a big city they've had dispensaries for years they should really know what they're doing but to these staff members who are the front line people they're the first people who are actually looking at plans for this project they were looking at it and just going I don't know, I don't know what to do let's figure it out together it's kind of scary so understand too that the bureaucrats they're not they're likely not going to say that in a meeting but this is new for most of them and there may be mistakes made not because they're trying to screw up your project but just because it's new or they're not experienced in it they haven't approved indoor cultivation, you think about it the only thing people really grow indoors is weed maybe there's people growing mushrooms that's illegal anyways but they're really you're not growing lavender or I don't know margarine, anything else you're not growing any other herbs indoors so most cities have not had to deal with real indoor cultivation where you've got mold issues on top of the security issues but you've got mold, you've got all the other mitigation issues and so it's just new for a city you need to have patience with the bureaucrats government relations and lobbying are kind of intermixable terms lobbyists are typically going to be looking at policy a government affairs or government relations specialists like me would typically be working on the nuts and bolts of your approvals so different cities will call the process that they use to approve your project different names, it could be a conditional use permit, it could be a regulatory safety permit it could be just a cannabis permit but at the end of the day you're applying for a discretionary approval which means the city is not legally obligated to approve your project they can decide to approve it or decide not to approve it but there are going to be conditions on it so you don't want to get caught up in different words on what your permit is at the end of the day what you want is whatever the city says you have to get that's what you want, if they call it a permit anything else, that's what you want so what you really are looking for though is a specialist that understands the processes most of these processes are the same regardless of whether you're opening a 7-Eleven or a church at the end of the day the conditional use permit application is essentially the same you need plans that are a certain size, you need parking studies and traffic studies these processes are the experience that you're looking for you want somebody that knows how to package a discretionary permit how to submit it and how to get it approved one of the things that bureaucrats and staff members hate is when somebody tries to do it themselves and they don't know what they're doing imagine you're sitting at work you've got a whole pile of work to do and somebody comes in and they want you to teach them how to do your job so you've got a degree, maybe a master's degree, you've been doing it for a long time and they have no idea what they're doing if you've got a lot of work and a lot of cities are kind of understaffed most cities are pretty strapped on the budget so they don't have planners just sitting around twiddling their thumbs doing nothing despite what a lot of people think about bureaucrats they're actually working hard they don't have time to teach you what a conditional use permit is what a zone change is what a specific plan is and so if you don't know what you're doing they're going to put it aside their work product and their performance is judged on how many of these things they get approved and they're going to be dealing with a lot of other projects than yours so if they can get these four projects done in the same amount of time it takes for them to teach you how to process yours they're not going to waste the time on it so you want somebody that understands that so you want professional architects you want professional planners you want attorneys that understand the city's ordinances so that's your process so I'm going to move on to the police I kind of thought of this as how not to get your butt kicked by the police if you've ever seen that video it's one of my favorites on YouTube the way you interact with the police today can impact the way you're treated by them forever and what I mean by that is the guy with too many chairs who now has a criminal record and didn't have one before every time he gets pulled over or interacts with law enforcement or a city they're going to look at him differently if he applies if he ever applies to be on a planning commission or he wants to get a CCW or anything else he has to disclose that so you want to make sure that you do everything in accordance with the law we call that compliance in our industry you're compliant with all of the guidelines and if for some reason you have a problem if you get open, you're up and running and the police show up at your door and they want to inspect your facilities to make sure that you're still operating in compliance just be cool to them if you say they can't come in they're going to go get a warrant they're going to knock your door down they're going to come in anyways so it's a lot better to be polite pleasant and collaborative you can be adversarial and cuss them out and be a jerk and you may get your ass kicked and you may get your property destroyed when they knock the door off the hinges you saw in the video parts of the door go flying stuff like that's not fun to deal with even businesses that aren't cannabis related have situations where people don't want to follow the law they don't want to listen and they're just going to flip the bird to the city the city is not just going to go oh jeez this guy doesn't want to deal with us and go away they're going to just keep ratcheting up and keep turning up the heat until it eventually gets to a criminal matter so I know of a man in a city right now who is facing criminal charges because he has piles of sand that are too high on his property no joke he's not allowed to store have material like that stored outside and he's not allowed to have it these huge mountains of it and he just thought that particular city would go away and leave him alone he wouldn't listen, they talked to him okay we're going to file criminal charges and then all of a sudden oh wait a minute I'll take all that sand off my property so you want to make sure that you play nice because whether regardless of your business and whether you think you're in compliance or not you want to make sure that the city agrees and understands that you're in compliance there's no upside at all to trying to be the rebel and fight the system at the end of the day they have the legal ability to just shut you down in the city of Anaheim Anaheim operates the power system it's great, I have a building in Anaheim I run one of my businesses out of it's not cannabis but the power is really cheap because it's Anaheim public utilities instead of Southern California Edison that's great until you want to open an illegal dispensary and they shut your power off and then so you put a generator outside and they come and they take your generator you can keep trying all these different workarounds but at the end of the day you're going to shut down and you have to be compliant and work collaboratively with the city one of the things to go back on we're talking about law enforcement is when you're dealing with any sort of consultant whether it's an attorney a lobbyist a land use consultant we're not magic workers we can't just wave a magic wand and get you a permit lobbyists believe it or not are not walking around with a bunch of hookers and briefcases full of cash at least not to me but that's not the way it really works and I have had a lot of people over the years say to me can you guarantee that we'll get a license and I always tell them I can't guarantee you anything we will process your application and I'll do my best to make sure that everything's done properly but I can't guarantee that this government body is going to approve your project so if somebody does I call these promises of success they're either lying and just going to take your money or they're bribing somebody which is a federal corruption charge that you're now a party to neither one of those are good and if for some reason you get a license in a way like that there are a couple of elected officials in the city called Atalanto who just got busted by the FBI those permits that you got are now suspect and likely just to be pulled anyways so there's no upside to your business and spending your money on a foundation that's not solid it's just not worth it when one of the best times I ever had a guy ask me if I could basically guarantee a license I started asking him about criminal record they're going to want to see your criminal record a live scan for pretty much the managers the owners and the shareholders of your corporation so I asked this guy do you have a clean record he's like well not really and it just happened to be that he was from a Caribbean island and I started talking to him and he said well I have a cocaine trafficking charge and I shot a policeman with a machine gun and I said look I'm not trying to be a jerk but you're Scarface nobody wants Scarface in their city you can't traffic cocaine shoot people with machine guns and then roll into California cool we're going to give this guy a license we also one of the other things that a government affair specialist or a lobbyist or attorney can't do is we can't fix critical deficiencies in your team or your application or your location if you have a location that doesn't meet the guidelines for the city the city is not going to approve it if you have a person with a criminal record on your team or as an ownership in your corporation you're probably not going to get a license if your application doesn't meet all the requirements for the city you're probably not going to get your license so those are critical deficiencies that your attorney and your other specialists your government affair specialist cannot cure on their own so those are the people you want to ask what do we need they should give you a checklist and you make sure that your team that you can control meets the requirements and is legit but it is either impossible or illegal for someone to get over a hurdle like that and if they do if they say they will you probably don't want to deal with that person how are we doing on time okay I've got ten more minutes so that's my presentation I appreciate you all being here thank you for listening I'm available I'm available for questions now I can take questions from the audience and I'm also available afterwards sir I heard in City Hall next to the marriage certificate the death certificate you get my card I heard in January they're going to change the law regarding your recommendations and so forth I just heard word of mouth are you aware of it you mean your medical rec that they handle that even though it's quite open recreational in California you know the law in California at the state level has been changing over and over and over and this kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about the government not always knowing what it's doing I mean California's really essentially been legal since 96 I mean medical marijuana and we still don't have our act together yeah so I couldn't say exactly how San Francisco is going to handle that it's likely that the reality is in the business that if people can buy it without a rec they're not going to go through the hassle of going and getting a card if they can just go and buy it recreationally so some cities are still struggling because they've allowed medical cannabis dispensaries and things like that but they haven't allowed recreational so it's hard for them to get people that are actually going to come in and put money into a business kind of a long-winded answer to I don't know does that question over here are there any like the kind of give like a general guideline to like what do you do on a general basis if somebody wants to like go into business is there like a Wikipedia of sorts to kind of break down the different steps to open up the business not really I mean there are overall general guidelines but the steps are pretty much different in each city the processes can be different normal and some of the other organizations will have guidelines general guidelines to follow kind of like what I've spoken about today but not city I don't know of any place that you can put in a specific city and find out how do I get my license in this city you end up having to actually go and read through the ordinance yourself in each city or hire somebody that knows it already in a place like California to try and open one of the biggest mistakes is cities will typically have radius maps where they won't allow dispensaries or marijuana uses within a certain 500 foot radius say of schools, daycare centers things like that and people will basically tie up a site that's too close to a daycare center one of the problems with daycare centers is they don't have license daycare centers so it's kind of hard the cities aren't always clear on that and it's very difficult to find out home daycare centers because they're not licensed in any one specific area so it's very difficult to map those out that's a really common mistake another common mistake is not background checking everybody I mean guys will get far down the line and then they're like wait a minute we didn't know that you just got a DUI that opened up and be honest about it so making sure that you do your due diligence up front that you've got appropriate financing the other thing is people use all their money up front to secure the property and they don't have any money for the applications, the architects all the other things tenant improvements cities want to see some cities have required that you prove that you've got $400,000 in one case liquid so that they know that you've got at least got enough money that you can put in the building, put in the security apparatus that they require which we're going to talk about on the next panel and actually get up and running so making sure that you've got the financing doing your due diligence on your own team and picking a good site those are probably the three biggest sir? nothing, doesn't impact you no, you can grow six plants some cities allow old outdoor some cities don't, some cities require permits for that most of them don't you can grow six for personal use no sir? also related to the radius thing say you have, that's been properly licensed we would call that a grandfather situation where you'd be grandfathered in so you just want to make sure if that does happen you want to make sure that you maintain documentation of that because at some point that day care may come back and say to the city hey, this dispensary is here and we don't like it and it may come up you want to make sure that you can prove everything was done properly don't count on other people to maintain the records just because you were approved doesn't mean that same board is there doesn't mean that same staff is there that's why the government affairs relationship maintaining it is essential cities do change staff a lot especially in smaller cities people will have a tendency to want to go to a larger city and make more money so it's not uncommon to have staff members moving a lot that may have approved your project planning commissioners change elected officials get termed out or don't get re-elected so if a year later you could have a big difference on the people there so always want to make sure that you're covering yourself paying attention to what's going on and that you maintain good records of your initial application package and any mapping that you've done did I see another hand anywhere else sir some cities that you would say they're easier than others I know you mentioned West Hollywood they still have it together West Hollywood is a city where you've got a supportive population and a supportive staff and a supportive group of elected officials the problem is it's West Hollywood it's super expensive and it's very restrictive they've got a criteria that they're going to score on and they want world class facilities so as far as the overall sentiment towards cannabis it's an easy city a city like Long Beach or Oakland they're easy but it also depends most cities will have a lot more restrictions on dispensaries so you'll have cities that may have restrictions on the number of dispensaries but they won't have a restriction on the number of extraction or cultivation facilities so those are kind of left to you know how much real estate isn't buffered out by daycare centers and things like that there are a lot of cities there's a city in Orange County that recently allowed distribution which sounded great they were going to give four distribution licenses they only got two applications there just wasn't enough property you couldn't find land in that city it was small and with all the buffer zones they wanted a specific zoning which was industrial nobody could find property so they thought they were going to make a lot of money on these four distribution facilities and they ended up with two applications that didn't go through I would say that maybe a little less than 50% of applications don't end up getting approved or if they do get approved they don't even open up so I mean it is a it's a grind you know it's a long these are long term projects and they take a lot of money and they take a lot of time sir in the back the real estate thing is one of the most critical issues in the industry because it's expensive sometimes there might be a bunch of sites but as soon as cities start approving cannabis use property owners have unrealistic expectations of what their property values actually are there are operators in the industry that will literally go out and secure a property and then write ridiculous offers on all the other properties so that anybody else that wants to get into the industry and compete with them has to compete with these ridiculous offers so imagine your property owner and some guy offers you four million dollars for property that's worth one and a half million the next person comes in and offers you 1.7 which is a great deal for a one and a half million dollar property but in your mind you're going well I have this other offer so there are a lot of different games that impact the real estate but market conditions of expensive property limited property the zoning is a big one you're typically going to have zoning problems where the city will say that to have a manufacturing or cultivation facility you typically have to be an industrial or manufacturing zone so there may not be that many people that want to sell their property in those zones Long Beach had an interesting situation where they had decided that medians were parks and so if you can't have a dispensary within 500 feet of a park and all your medians are parks well you have medians all over the roads everywhere that was a problem so again you have a city that's supportive of it you don't have people coming out with pitchforks saying we don't want weed in our city and it's a problem with the process Do you have any experience with projects trying to talk to local governments to change regulations and how possible it's very possible I have worked with multiple cities on kind of in the beginning crafting policies that work I've spoken at council of governments these are organizations of cities and staff members my message has been that all of these activities already exist you've already got retailing you have intoxicants you've got liquor stores you've got consumption lounges those are bars indoor cultivation not so much but a lot of cities in California do have greenhouses and cultivation even extraction which is kind of one of the most exotic things all of the essential oils lavender oil and all the other things those are all botanical extraction products so these aren't weed instead of alcohol so you can go and talk to cities and sometimes cities will not pay attention to how they're impacted by their buffer zones or their radiuses or they won't understand the practicalities of the industry I've seen it where cities have come up with ideas on how they want to do it and they've made it so onerous that leaders, people who understand real estate economics are not going to come into their city because it's not worth risking the money either it's too discretionary there's not enough surety that if you put together a good package it will get approved or there are too many unknowns you don't know what the taxes are going to be so you don't want to secure property and put a deposit on a property if the city is going to come in and say it's 20% tax it's just not economically viable and discuss what their policies are and what the impacts are but there are a lot of people in the industry who are always coming out elected officials and staff members and want to give their opinion a lot of those people are I was going to say idiots they're not credible and they don't come across credibly or they're basically trying to approve their specific project so they're trying to manipulate the elected so that their one project gets approved and nobody else's does so if you're going to try and influence local government you want to be even handed and fair you want to know what you're talking about you want to be credible in your personal demeanor how you talk how you come across if you stood up a city council meeting and talked about operating illegally for 10 years they're probably not going to want to hear what you have to say and also people do get kind of elected officials and they get bombarded by a lot of crusaders who are like this is the miracle plant it's going to save the world and you guys have to approve it because of this or that or that and really the cities are looking at a lot of times we need more revenue and we think this is going to save us so you want to make sure that you're thinking of it from their perspective and talking about things that are going to matter to them Rex can you want me to keep taking questions or okay sir like the reefer madness fear some people are just not going to it doesn't matter what you show them or how you talk to them they're just not going to get over it to them it's drugs to them marijuana and heroin and crack are all in the same category of change I think for elected officials if they can see or tour facilities dispensaries that are clean and well run and look good and people that look like a bunch of crack heads in there that makes a difference for them so setting up tours for elected officials and staff members which is pretty common to let them see what well run facilities look like but as far as just getting over the fear of marijuana being the devil weed that's a hard you know you're getting into the arguments that are really kind of philosophical in nature I mean it's almost a religious conversion for a lot of people and some it's common that people will make claims that are almost unbelievable that's where some of the crusaders come in I mean I had a guy come to me and say hey marijuana cures cancer and like so does that mean that everybody that smokes weed doesn't have cancer that would make sense to me obviously it's not true that's a very simplified conversation it's hard to do but I think if you can talk to people and get people in their community that they might know a lot of people have used marijuana medicinally I mean a lot of people just smoked weed to get high but a lot of people that are credible have used cannabis products now, medical and if you can get those people to talk to elected officials and staff members and other community members that's probably the most efficient and effective thing that you could do for somebody to actually stand up and say I use this and Dana Rohrbacher is a congressman from Orange County and I think he's the first federal elected official to have ever admitted to using a medical marijuana product that's a big deal anybody else? okay well thank you very much


Gweithio gweithio, everybody, and we're delighted to be able to present on our project proposal Aligning Teaching and Learning across the technological sector. This proposal has been submitted on behalf of the Learning Innovation Network and is supported by Thea, which is the Technological Higher Education Association, which has recently replaced the IOTI Institutes of Technology of Ireland group. My name is Nula Harding. I'm from the Ethlone Institute of Technology, and I'd like to invite my colleagues to introduce themselves. My name is Gina Nule, and I'm from the Institute of Technology of Ireland. Hi, I'm Helen Murphy, I'm working for the Institute of Technology. Hello, I'm Dr McLean, I'm a letter-canning Institute of Technology. Hi, I'm Maureen Wyrton, and I'm the Institute of Technology. So, just by way of background, the Learning Innovation Network was established in 2006 with SIF funding, Strategic Innovation Funding, and it was specifically geared towards the Institute of Technology sector. IOTs are teaching intensive institutes, and our key objective at the time was to scope the parameters of a professional development programme. But as you can see, we went far beyond that. We were given a second cycle of funding under SIF 2, and we've now come under the auspices of Thea. Also, we're chaired by an academic registrar, and we contribute as the Learning and Teaching Network for that group. So, as part of our work, we developed a flexible pathway to a postgraduate diploma award. And in addition to that, we've developed a variety of supports, APD opportunities, and symposi, et cetera, for the sharing of good practice in learning and teaching. So, in relation to our partners, as you can see, Athlone is at the centre of everything. Literally, et cetera. So, we would have validated the postgraduate diploma award on behalf of the sector. And in addition to that, our modules were shared across to other institutes as well who didn't have that capacity. So, we went through a process of capacity building. Other partners such as Waterford and Dondog, prior to 2011, had established their own master's programmes. And in addition to that, Carlo, for example, would have contributed to the postgraduate diploma and also developed their own multi-program. And then, for example, AIT and Dondog would have assisted letter-ken AIT in the development of their own master's programme and contributed modules there. In addition, we have some supporting partners from SligoIT, GMIT, IADT, Mary Ann is here today, and also from LIT. And they would come under AIT in that. Their modules have either been developed in AIT and have been shared or else they have developed other modules. For example, in student at learning or in RPL, which are now also coming under our postgraduate diploma. So, in relation to rationale for our proposal, we have all evidenced and observed the transformation that can occur amongst staff when they undertake accredited professional training. And in particular, I think one of the key transformations that happens is when they cross the threshold and become students, because then they start engaging from a student perspective and they're seeing the issues around things like assessment, dealing with technology, etc. And so, that's a really key thing for us. Obviously, our proposal is underpinned by current strategic policy documents, particularly in relation to flexible learning and also in relation to competence, etc. I'm going to hand you over to Gina now who's going to continue and focus on rationale. Thanks very much, Gina. So, the broad aim of, like in the rationale of this particular project is to interpret the professional development framework within the context of our existing accredited provision. So, we're looking at typology number four in the professional development activities. And we want to examine and address that these professional development needs under a reflective and very evidence-based approach, which is the approach we've always taken under the Linn modules and has also mirrored them within the framework. So, our key objective is to interpret existing provision. We've been doing this, it's a really exciting time for us, because as a new outline we've been doing this since 2004. We've got very good experience in it. But this would allow us the opportunity to structure and align our provision against the framework in a very consistent, coherent manner across the entire sector. What we want to do is we want to map the existing provision against the professional development framework. So, that would initially involve a mapping exercise using potentially a matrix of looking at what we're actually offering now and how does it fit against the framework. And really what we're talking about is bringing the framework to the fore so that all future development then in this area would essentially map initially against the framework. This would allow us, again, a very coherent structure for the accredited professional development across the entire sector. So, we are conscious of RPL and we're conscious that we already have some level nine modules in RPL on offer in letter Kenny IT and also in Waterford IT. But we want to explore how we might develop these so that we could offer them out to the other colleges and institutions in the sector. This is a very important part of recognition of professional development later for the framework. So, it would be very important for us to explore this. We're going to hopefully use the National Forum Collaboration Space because we're conscious that the RPL network is already there and present and we'd like to collaborate with them on that. And I suppose additionally we want to align provision against the digital capacity framework. And we're very conscious of the importance of developing digital capacity. In all of our modules, we don't just offer tell modules, we also offer all our modules are kind of delivered using either blended approach or taking into account technology when we're designing, developing, assessing. So, we're very conscious of using digital capacity in order to enhance what we are our suite of offerings. We're conscious as well that one of our partners is also involved in project one proposal which is looking at an online forum for managers and we thought maybe that would offer another kind of collection to our suite of offerings. So, I'm now going to pass you over to Helen who's going to go through the accredited provision that we offered to date. Okay, just in terms of I suppose one question that we might be asked is how can so many institutions have a core philosophy? And we felt that maybe putting the Linn values up here and just I won't go through them one by one but one of the tasks and one of the areas that we will be looking to collaborate on is looking at those Linn values which underpin the work of this network since 2006. Values such as learner centredness, I think authenticity and fairness and equity and collaboration are very, very important to us. We've taken the frameworks values as buzzed in the new national strategy and part of this exercise will be us working within the value system that we have and looking at how that is aligned to the framework. Just to give you a sense and Nula and Gina have talked about our experience base across the partner institutions, this experience goes back to 2004 so we've built up, you know, 12, 13 years of experience in the design of these professional development programmes at postgraduate level for people staff, academic staff and indeed support staff working in higher education. I'm not going to go through each programme but I think you can see there it's predominantly level nine postgraduate programmes focusing on learning, teaching, pedagogy in higher education and as well as full award programmes many institutions have special purpose awards or minor awards so we have de-aggregated or disaggregated some of these major awards to I suppose make professional development opportunities attractive to people who can build it up over time and certainly across all of our institutions many of our colleagues have been building up credits that they can do so as part of their own professional development. Just in terms of impact and I think two points here are relevant to this presentation impact in terms of maybe the numbers of people and the numbers of learners, students that we've had across the partner institutions I mean there's almost a thousand students if you like or a thousand graduates between major awards full MA programmes and postgraduate diploma programmes but also minor awards we've completed and there's in and around over 220 current students on the programmes student perspective is something that we're going to engage with and our students like I think one of our earlier presenters commented on our students are our faculty they're our colleagues so we have the advantage of having colleagues who are continuing engaging with our programmes and with elements of professional development modules and then we also have a very very big alumni base which typically can be staff working across our partner institutions but we've also had external people with people working in other aspects of education and further education as well who we have access to through our graduate alumni and their views will be very very important to how this project works so with that I'm going to hand it over to Deirdre who's going to talk about the implementation of the project. Thank you. So this project is designed to run over 18 months so that's from January 2007 to June 2018 and it has three phases and these are broadly around the three semesters involved the first phase which runs from January to June 2017 is broadly project set up and planning and then mapping and consultation and in relation to that then for setup we set up a project team followed by a steering group and my colleague Maura will go into the details of that in a moment we need to audit the existing provision around the supporting institutions and also then agree a mapping framework and an evaluation of that in relation to the mapping framework we don't intend to start from scratch we're very mindful that there is a consultation document from March 2006 a resource for planning and personal professional development consultation document and that would be a starting point for us the next thing in this phase then is around mapping and consultation and in relation to that we need to in the individual institutions complete mapping and find gaps then in relation to alignment and in relation to that as was mentioned earlier would be very much mindful of RPL considerations and also digital capacity Phase two then will run from June to December 2007 in relation to that then firstly there's going to be planning and reflection that's on an overall basis in relation to all parties and also then on a local basis to form plans that will lead then into the interpretation and alignment part of the phase and for that then we need an agreed vision really of how we're going to interpret the professional development framework and particularly in relation to individual programme philosophies having completed that then there's the work of actually aligning the provision and that's going to happen then in the individual partner institutions the final phase then is consolidation and evaluation we are going to have a selection of outputs and the main one in relation to that would be a framework for evidence professional development and then we've various ideas for sharing and disseminating resources which we'll go into in a later slide so we're just going to hand over now to Moran McGuire OK, just very quickly just going to talk really really briefly about our key stakeholders and our consultation strategy has underpinned the management strategy for the project so just briefly to identify them obviously externally and in the sector we have the National Forum, we have Thea, we have Lyn key stakeholders then more immediately are everyone who has will or is currently taking our provision within our institutes those staff teaching on these programmes the wider staff and student body and our institute management so we are setting up a steering group and the steering group allows us to draw on the expertise of Lyn and the wider sector all the partner and supporting institutions will be represented there but we also have a student union representative we have a student union representative who's agreed to join that if it's funded in terms of the more local work I think it's very important to use the structures that already exist in our institutes for example key committees such as teaching and learning committees most of us have those they have staff and student representation and management representation so at the higher level they're important in terms of providing guidance all of our programmes have programme boards with staff, student management representation so these will be key in implementing the work on the ground the student perspective is much more than this and we will be drawing on a wide evidence based particularly our survey of student engagement, local data and the projects that many of the institutions are involved in such as your one feedback project team and so on we'll be consulting extensively with current students and graduates and the steering committee also represents the wider student body the steering group gives strategic direction at a high level whereas the operational level is the core project team and partner institutions I know this may be how you're feeling right now at this stage in the day but for us what was really exciting about this opportunity was the chance for us all to reflect on our provision in a really collaborative way where we can align it in a coherent way for us the collaboration is a really important part of this project for us and it was very attractive about it and just finally I was going to hand back to Nula just to very quickly say a word about impact so we were just asked to consider impact there are some headings that were given to us by the forum around learning and teaching impact on learners I think we've covered those in terms of what impact this could have also we've identified some areas in terms of dissemination we are already currently involved in a publication around APD and then there are other areas in which we can also disseminate and also encourage the dialogue etc in relation to sustainability I suppose the fact that our programmes are already embedded within our institutes is very important and I think it will be a key aspect for us going forward as well as our continued relationship with Lyn and Thea Thank you very much for your time


Hi, I want to tell you one way that I introduce the concept of water as an element that are characteristic of all living things, a need of the human experience for sure. When working with four to six year olds, children don't really understand, especially if they are in a place where water is not difficult to find, for them to comprehend that there might be places where people can't find good water and what does that mean? For four to six year olds, it's really hard to explain that. So what we can, though, talk about is that it's a human basic need and it's also a source of joy and comfort and beauty. And I want to introduce that to students with a book called A Cool Drink of Water. And I think I'm going to go ahead and read this to you because it's so quick and the pictures tell you far more than what I can explain. Somewhere right now, someone is drinking water, scooped from the river, drawn from a well, caught as it drips from the roof, everyone, everywhere, a nice, cool drink of water. And in this book, there's a nice resource for the connection to the locations geographically of the photos, which were beautiful in this particular book. It's a starting point for lots of conversations, but I think when you're talking with four to six year olds, you have to talk to them from their point of reference and ask them where they get their water, where does it come from. You could extend this to why is it important to conserve water, to take care of the amount of water that we use and the daily activities that we have. So this is a discussion starting point and you would springboard other activities off of it.


What are blocks? As a teacher you can add blocks to the sides of your main learning area. Here there are blocks only on the right, but it's possible also to add blocks to the left or to both sides of your course page, such as here, depending on your theme and administration settings. Blocks are elements which add extra information or learning content to your course. Individual users can usually hide blocks by clicking the icon and then by clicking the plus icon to open them up again. And it's important to remember this in case your learners get confused. With some themes, such as this theme, it's possible to move blocks to the side in a narrow tab. The navigation block here has done that, and it's called docking. With docker block, you click the icon next to the hide icon. If you do this, it's important also to remember that the blocks have been docked so that you, or your learners, don't get confused. This is an individual setting. To undock them, click them and then click the undock icon, or if several blocks have been docked, you can go down to the bottom to undock them all. Recent Moodle themes are responsive, and that means that when you have a smaller screen size, when you're looking on a device, such as a smartphone or tablet, the blocks are actually moved down to the bottom of the screen, as you can see here. As a teacher, if you want to add extra blocks, you click the turn editing on button top right or scroll down to administration and click the turn editing on link. This then gives you editing options for each of the blocks, where you can remove them if you don't need them, for example. However, the administration block and the navigation block don't have that X Remove option, as they must appear everywhere. And if you see other blocks without the X Remove option, this is because the administrator has fixed them throughout the site. Some people call that making blocks sticky. To add a new block, you go to the add block dropdown and select the block you want. And we'll take a look at some blocks in the next videos. Blocks can also be moved simply by dragging them into the place you wish to move them to, or clicking on them, and then choosing the area to relocate them.


My favorite color is green. My favorite color is blue. My favorite color, well, it's blue. I love blue. It's the best. My favorite color is yellow. My favorite color is yellow and orange. Some things that made me happy are birthday parties and going to the beach and pool. My favorite music is probably hip hop. My favorite music is country music. I have two dogs, two fish and one hamster. My favorite subject will be math. My favorite subject is math. My favorite teacher is Ms. Berry. My favorite teacher is Mr. Bartholomew because he's nice and he always helps me when I need help. Well, because they helped me get through third grade and that's how I became a fourth grader. My favorite teacher was when I was in like, it was like in second grade last year. Ms. Paris remembers, Mr. Molenga and Ms. Jones. They were my teachers and they were my favorite actually. And also my favorite teacher is right now, Mr. Murphy. Elijah, do you know that subways when you buy the kids meal, you know that you actually get the small ones and it costs more money and when you buy the small ones without the kids meal, it's like this big and it only costs $4 and the other costs $5. You know that? I know, right? That's why you always buy the small ones for $5. I am smart. I'm in pre-algebra. Mr. Murphy is my favorite teacher because he helped me in third grade for my math and he was really, he explained it really good so I can get there soon, right? Oh, I'm one of the smartest kids in the school at math. My favorite teacher will be Mr. Ma and my favorite subject is math and he makes it even more fun. My favorite teachers are Ms. Fowler and Ms. Cascades because I've had Ms. Cascades for second grade and I, Ms. Fowler is very nice. I'm like getting so good at it and I get parties. Parties is the thing. I think my mentor is probably Mom and my dad. My mentors are my three brothers Jaylin and Josh and Fabian. My brother Fabian helps me look nice and my brothers Jaylin and Josh teach me how to have fun. She teaches us like that it doesn't matter about who you are, we are all family. I even do math at home. Teachers are important because they help you graduate to high school and middle school and elementary and help you get a class degree. Ms. Bacon was my favorite teacher because she was really fun.  And I'm a cycling worker. I think the world would look like stone, it would look like the stone age and no one would learn anything.  Everybody would be like, oh, let's look at the sun. I don't know, feel blinded and they don't even know those words.  That's my complication. If there was no teachers, I don't think anybody would be really alive.  Crashing. Being a teacher will be a big responsibility because you have to take good care of your kids and teach them good stuff. Teachers have a tough job because like when kids are not following directions, they get them back on track but they still have to make sure that they don't distract the other students.  Toughest part of the job is paying off those bills. I think the toughest job about being a teacher is dealing with the kids, how they act. Sometimes they get frustrated and sometimes they just breeze on it. Now they know what they're doing. The fun part of the job being a teacher is the kids listening. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher. Thank you for being my teacher.


In the long line of historical innovations, perhaps one of the most important ones that had the largest impact on the map today has a rather humble origin of animal excrement. To extract a key ingredient to this groundbreaking invention, I spent several days shoveling, straining, and boiling chicken droppings. Today I'm probably one of the last few crazy people still following this method, but for many centuries this was common practice and was crucial to national security. According to Taoist text, the legend is that in the 9th century, alchemists in China attempted to create the elixir of life, their combination of sulfur and saltpeter. However, instead of creating life, they accidentally discovered perhaps one of the largest harboringers of death, gunpowder. But this video is about one of the three ingredients of gunpowder, saltpeter, the chemical potassium nitrate. This chemical has countless uses, from being an oxidizer and gunpowder, a crucial ingredient for making nitric acid, something important if you were looking to make camera film, a chemical for meat-preserving stump removal, and even as a culinary ingredient. But making this chemical requires some unusual techniques. And for that, I took a visit to the desert in Utah to collect some chicken dung. This is chicken poop, and it holds the seeds of gunpowder. Edging goop here, and we're going to use this for a crucial ingredient for making gunpowder. Assisting me with this dirty deed is Joseph from the YouTube channel Good and Basic. So the ingredient we're looking for is called potassium nitrate, though historically it was called saltpeter. I don't know why Peter got his name in there, but maybe he was responsible for making explosives at one point. The peter and saltpeter is not named after a person, but actually has a similar origin to that common name. Both coming from the Latin name for rock. The mineral is effectively called rock salt in Latin, as it closely resembles the appearance of table salt. It's decomposed manure. If you pee, you produce a substance that's called urea. That substance can actually get broken down by certain types of bacteria into ammonia. Think like the cleaner that you use in your house. And then that ammonia can get broken down by yet more bacteria into nitrites, typically sodium or potassium nitrite. And then that will turn into nitrates with the addition of one more bacteria. And nitrates are stable, and they also work as a really good oxidizer. Saltpeter works as a great oxidizer because it contains several molecules of oxygen that are easily released when heated, feeding any fire that's near. When you're making gunpowder, the biggest ingredient by far that goes into that recipe is this nitrate, which actually is what makes the charcoal and the sulfur burst forth and burn really quickly instead of doing the smaller thing that they want to do. But what we're going to do is we're going to go through the soil where these chickens have been pooping. We're going to scoop up a whole bunch of their waste, which is hopefully decomposed enough to have nitrates in it. We're going to sift water through it, drain that down into a separate bucket, and then boil the resulting chicken manure soup to make, hopefully, crystals. One extra step that was done historically was to mix in some wood ash. The potassium carbonate and the wood ash would react with any calcium nitrate and convert it into some additional potassium nitrate as the end result. This is a very, very old practice. We stopped really doing this historically after the Haber-Bosch process made it possible for us to extract nitrates from the air, and nowadays we use massive factories to pull this stuff from the air in order to make it into fertilizer and explosives. What we're going to do is hopefully extract poo crystals that were traditionally used for making explosives from chicken poo. So here's precious, precious, nitrated earth. Smells delicious. Yeah. Yep. Yep. I don't know what I'm smelling for, but that's chicken poo. This used to be a national security concern for the countries of Europe. In the 1640s, it was common for European countries to have laws that allowed hired thugs of the state to go around with a warrant that allowed them to enter pretty much anybody's home and scoop up the first couple layers of dirt underneath the houseboards and then bring this dirt to a facility for processing to make gunpowder. And so in the interest of national security, there was permission from these thugs to go into churches and barns and all kinds of places, even your house, barge in, scoop up the first layer of dirt from your dirt floor house and then cart it away in wheelbarrows to try to make boom juice. I have a warrant. I'm coming for your chicken poo. So a certain animal's better for producing this? Any animal. Any animal's good for it. Typically, when we think about guano, we think about bats. And the main reason for that is that you have a stable population of bats living in a cave and it's also sheltered from the weather. And the trouble with these nitrates is we're going to extract them by running water through this soil and then collecting the water. But if it's out in the open like this, the tendency is for that to run out into the lakes and rivers and streams and just run away.  Any cave where there are lots of bats is great because it builds up for decades and sometimes centuries, just soaks onto the rocks and sticks. The native soil around here is a really heavy clay, which is good news for us because clay historically was used to wind ponds and keep the water from flowing down into the subsoil. So all the nitrates are probably still here. Plus, we're also in a desert, so not a lot of rain to begin with. But first, thank you to today's sponsor, Bespoke Post, who sent us a few boxes. Let's check them out. Here we got the Survival 101 kit, and we got a variety of different goods here. We got a little inflatable seat, camp carabiner for hanging your items, and nice knife, three ties, very reusable zip ties. And in another box, we got a nice little hatchet here. Be very useful. And lastly, we got a camp chair. Thanks to Bespoke Post, I now have a nice collection of goodies for my next outdoor expedition. Bespoke Post is a monthly membership club delivering awesome curated boxes of high quality goods from some pretty sweet brands. It's free to join and shows up right at your door.  Bespoke Post has you covered. Boxes are screened based on the preference quiz you fill out. The box lineup changes each month, so you can always discover something new and unique. These boxes value at $70, but only cost you a fraction at $49 a piece. You can also cancel your subscription at any time. 20% off your first box with coupon code htme20 or using link bespokepost.com slash htme20. It's kind of politically interesting to me that farming, which feeds people and gunpowder, which kills people, fighting over the same raw ingredient. Okay, we need a brick. That's a secret ingredient. Okay, two bricks in the bottom to support it. Next, the bucket of precious nitrate and earth. Now we have water. The water will percolate down through bucket number one, and the liquor will come into bucket number two, and then we'll be ready to boil it. We don't want any solids. What we're collecting is a salt. So ideally what we're doing is we're dissolving the salt so that it will go into the water and move all the dirt behind. I actually don't want the dirt. The dirt, which will of course have some leftover nitrate salts in it, we'll just add to the garden as a fertilizer. You can see that kind of yellowish brown color in the water? Yeah. That's really good. That is a good sign. Here we go.  This is the material that is leached out, and clearly there's still some particles in it, but if we boil that down, that should have our crystal material in it. There we go. Okay, what does that smell like?  This is going to sound really weird, but it almost smells like carrot broth.  Well, meanwhile, working on some of the other videos we collaborated on while there, hunting down Bog Or to Smelt Iron, some primitive iron casting and trying to make a cast iron sword, and the ever important poleyth. Joseph from the channel Good and Basic helped organize and coordinate most of these projects with me, and even helped me in all of the arduous tasks. So be sure to check out his channel where he explores a lot of very similar topics to what I do. Our powdered stuff here, from the battery stuff. So we've got our powdered, uh, boiled stuff here. If I put just a little bit on the end of my stick, changes the way the stick burns. So it's doing that hissing, accelerated kind of burning there. When it ran out of air right then. That's so interesting. I think we did it. This obviously isn't super pure, but it's functioning. After concentrating the liquid down, it ended up taking quite a while to purify it and get the distinct long crystal formations of salt peter. Ended up drying it out, dissolving it again, and running it through a filter a few more times, but this still failed to remove much of the brown tint to it. So I tried to recrystallize it to purify it. Salt peter is much more soluble and hot water than cold water, so by dissolving the slurry in hot water and laying it cool, you can get some crystals to form. I did this a few times to try and concentrate it as much as possible. And this is the end result. Perhaps the best way to test this is to make a slow match, also known as a fuse, and is made by soaking a piece of rope in salt peter, forming a slow burning fuse. So the yield of this is pretty small. Of a few more batches of this, so this is not the entire result of everything we did. It is a surprisingly small quantity of actual salt peter, which is really surprising considering the large quantity that we processed, it was at least two wheelbarrows full of excrement that we then processed and boiled off for three days to yield a pretty small amount. There's definitely some inefficiencies in our process. We're probably losing stuff as we try to concentrate and purify it. Probably the big thing is that they don't just process it once when they do it historically. They continuously add to it and keep processing the same stuff over and over again because every time you're going to get more and more nitrates that you can extract. So this is definitely a really important ingredient for gunpowder, probably the most important of all three. I'm hoping to do a few videos exploring some of the early inventions that involved gunpowder. However, trying to do that on YouTube could be a little bit challenging. I'm hoping to find some ways to do it and stay within the community standards and everything. But just because we don't know how the algorithm works with more controversial topics, be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming videos. Probably what I'm most excited for with this compound is it's a crucial step in making nitric acid. Like in my insult Peter with sulfuric acid, which we were able to create at least an ideal amount last year, we can make nitric acid, which is then capable of dissolving silver. In the summer I was able to pay a visit to Cerro Gordo to get a bit of silver ore thanks to Brent. So I'm really excited to be able to turn this rock into a photo. Thanks again to all of our supporters on Patreon as we get into more controversial topics dealing with explosives. I've become a little bit more reliant on our supporters on Patreon. Thanks for watching and thanks again to everyone of our Patreons. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics. Also, if you've enjoyed this series, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are largely a fan-funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going. Thanks for watching.


I'm sorry. Did you just put my soda on top of my play button? I'm sorry. It won't happen again. It's gonna liberate! If any of you out there struggle with things like anxiety or social anxiety or feelings of awkwardness, there is so much that you can learn from the queen of exposure therapy, Shane Dawson. Everybody, this is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And if you're new to my channel, my channel is all about mental health. So what I try to do is pull things from the youtube community and pop culture to teach you how to improve your mental health. And that's why today we're talking about anxiety, exposure therapy, and Shane Dawson. So for any of that kind of stuff, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell. And before I jump into exposure therapy, I have two, yes two, real quick exciting announcements. Alright, so anyways, I want to give a shout out to the channel Dose of Dad.  So my girlfriend actually just designed this and it's mental health and stuff like that. So that is now available in the merch store if you would like to get one to rep the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And by the way, on the back of all the shirts, it says focus on the solution. But anyways, second announcement is thank you to Naruto fan 2003 for reminding me that there are other places than Las Vegas. So here in Las Vegas, it's still bouncing around from like 60 to 80 degrees. It's not that cold. But Naruto fan 2003 was like, yo, why don't you have any sweaters and I'm like snaps? Why don't I have any sweaters? So by the time you're watching this video, all of the designs in the merch store, there are now sweater options available. So now you can be cozy in the wintertime while repping some mental health merch. You know what I mean? Anyways, let's get started with the video. So yeah, again, all of you who know me, what I like to do is try to take things from all the stuff that you're currently consuming and teach you the lessons that you can learn to improve your mental health. And I know a ton, a ton of you have come to my channel because of Shane Dawson. So a lot of you have been watching Shane for a while now. And you might not even notice, but Shane is doing something for his anxiety and awkwardness. And it's called exposure therapy, which is a very, very, very good form of therapy for anybody with anxiety obsessive compulsive disorder. And any kind of any kind of mental illness that involves anxiety, it can also help with PTSD. All right. So what is exposure therapy? Okay, all right, we're just going to do it. I'm not going to plan it out. I'm not going to stress about it. That's a lie. I'm going to stress about it. I'm freaking out. I'm sweating. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I just really wanted to go well. Oh my God. Exposure therapy is a technique in behavior therapy thought to help treat anxiety disorders. Exposure therapy involves exposing the target patient to the anxiety source or its context without the intention to cause any danger. Doing so is thought to help them overcome their anxiety or distress. So yeah, that's what exposure therapy is. So if you've been watching Shane for a while, before he even started doing these docu-series with like Tana and Jeffrey Starr and Jake Paul and Graveyard Girl and stuff like that, you, you can see this kind of change in Shane Dawson's content where, you know, when I first found him, when my girlfriend told me about him, my son and I were watching him because he would eat weird, he would eat a bunch of food and make weird food and like try life hacks and stuff. But then he started getting into like some different content and he wanted to push himself and things like that. And he made some videos about like confronting my ex or talking to this person and stuff. And one of the videos where I just really thought was powerful was he did a short little mini series. It was like three episodes long of him confronting his father. So those of you who aren't familiar with Shane Dawson, Shane's father kind of walked out of his life at a young age and Shane was taking care of his mom. And like his dad and him have talked a few times throughout the years, but he made a whole thing about like just sitting down and talking with his father about these hard questions.  But what Shane's doing is he's exposing himself to those fears.  So Shane, whether he realizes it or not, he is actively decreasing his anxiety and fears by exposing himself to these things. In all honesty, like not joking, I definitely feel like we talked about a lot of stuff today. A lot of it was off camera, but a lot of it was on camera. I don't know. I feel closer. Well, definitely. I mean, I felt closer to Shane. And that's why I think we should just respect him as a whole because of what he's doing and pushing boundaries because it is improving his mental health. Like it is like lifting weights to calm down your amygdala. The amygdala is the part of your brain for fight, fight or freeze. So what exposure therapy does is it actually helps to decrease the activity of the amygdala. So I wanted to make this video after watching Shane Dawson's finale inside the mind of Jake Paul where he was just having this serious one-on-one conversation with Jake. And what's funny is too, real quick, like Shane put a disclaimer like, I'm not out of respect for Jake. I'm not putting any music in. And I tweeted out something along the lines of like, man, this is like extra awkward because there's no music in it. So I don't know.  But anyways, and then he takes it out and I'm sitting there like, I wish there was music to go with this. So again, I made my last video, talked about perspective. Think about it real quick. But anyways, like, you could just see that. And like, I was getting uncomfortable.  Or is he going to talk about this?  How difficult was it for Shane? How difficult was it for Jake? It seemed like this was one of the times the first one of the first times Jake has ever had somebody seriously sit down and have a conversation like this with him. And they did this for over an hour, right? What is your fear of talking about this? My fear with with talking about it is like, it's such like a sticky situation.  So by doing this as part of his job, think about how he's able to have these types of conversations with people like Ryland, or when Ryland made the video about how they were kicking Morgan out, like, these are tough, tough conversations, but he's exposing himself to those things. So again, like, I don't want you to just passively watch content. I want you to really consume the content and realize what these people are doing in their videos. What can you learn from? Are they positive or negative things? Because exposure therapy is definitely, definitely a positive thing. And this is actually something that I've been doing for myself, like, like, I know a lot of you can't afford therapy, or you don't trust therapists or whatever, like, like me personally, like when I started working on my mental health, I was just pushing myself more and more. And what I would do is I would force myself to go into uncomfortable situations so I can learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And here's what I mean by that, like, I used to have crippling social anxiety. It's one of the reasons why I drank and use drugs and stuff like that. I just could not be around people because my mind was always racing, like, what are they thinking about me and all that stuff. So when about six years ago, when I started working on my mental health, like, I was like, I got to learn how to just be okay with this. So people would invite me out for like coffee where they'd be like 30 or 40 people just all meeting up and just hanging out like outside of a coffee shop forever, or they'd invite me to hang out at their house and play board games and whatever. And I just said, yes, I just kept saying yes and kept saying yes. And let me tell you, I used to be so awkward, uncomfortable. There'd be like 20 or 30 people around, everybody's laughing and having a good time.  Everybody must be thinking I'm a moron, all sorts of stuff. But over time, it got better because I just kept pushing myself. I kept moving forward. I kept exposing myself to these uncomfortable situations. When I started working at the Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center a few years ago, I was so afraid to do groups. Like, I was working at a big treatment center. Some of these groups were in front of 50, 60, 70 people sometimes. I was so afraid to do it. But I signed up for as many groups as I could. I just started doing group after group, after group, after group. And eventually I got comfortable. This is something a lot of YouTubers struggle with. Like, when I was at VidSummit, I heard a lot of people talking about how they're still uncomfortable on camera or they're awkward. And it's interesting too, because by the way, YouTubers, I hate to tell you this, but like, I notice it. I definitely notice it. There's so many YouTubers who I met where they're really reserved in their YouTube videos, but they're so much more charismatic in person. I realized that at VidSummit. And like, I get it. Like, I was like that too. If you go back and look at my first videos, they are not nearly, nearly as energetic as these ones were. Like, I was just really uncomfortable on camera. Hello everybody and welcome to The Rewire. My name is Chris Boutay. Yes, you heard it right. My name is Chris Boutay. So one of the reasons I make so many videos is because every execution of a video, I get a little bit more comfortable. I get a little bit more confidence. You know what I mean?  I put out a bunch of content for me. I expose myself to the things that make me uncomfortable. So what can you do in your life? What can you do to expose yourself to these, these situations? But like it says for exposure therapy, like we don't want you to put yourself in danger.  Like just make baby steps. Maybe your baby step is just going to a Starbucks and sitting there, right? And just sitting there around people. Okay. And maybe you do that two times a week. Then you up into three times a week, then four times a week, then five times a week. And then maybe, maybe you start making it a priority to talk to one person, just one person.  They're bored all day. You might as well make some conversation with them. Like expose yourself to these little things because I'm telling you like this is scientifically proven. Okay. Okay. It will strengthen your resilience when it comes to these things. All right.  And I guarantee it will start to reduce your anxiety, your social anxiety, your awkwardness and all of that stuff. A lot of you asked me how I managed to not care so much about what people think is because I've been pushing myself like this for years now. All right. But anyways, I want to hear from all of you. I want to hear from all of you what either A, what do you do right now to expose yourself to get into uncomfortable situations to kind of build up your resiliency or what can you do? All right. Let me know down in the comments. But that's all I got for you today. So if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you're new here, make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and a huge thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. And remember there are some brand new merch and sweaters up in the shop. So make sure you click a tap on that icon right there. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time.


REPORTED SPEECH, STATEMENTS, PART 1, FROM ESPRESSOWINGLISH.NET REPORTED SPEECH IS WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WHAT SOMEONE ELSE SAID IN THE PAST. FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOUR FRIEND Dianna said, I've been to London three times. The reported speech is, Diana said she'd been to London three times. We often use reported speech when talking about a conversation that happened in the past, but there are some changes to the verb tenses in reported speech. Verbs in the simple present become verbs in the simple past. Direct, I want to go home. Reported, she said she wanted to go home. Present continuous verbs become past continuous. Direct, I'm reading a good book. Reported, he said he was reading a good book. Simple past verbs become past perfect. Direct, I ate pasta for dinner. Reported, she said she'd eaten pasta for dinner. Present perfect verbs become past perfect. Direct, I've already finished the report. Reported, she said she'd already finished the report. Here's another example of present perfect to past perfect. Direct, we've never been to Japan. Reported, they said they'd never been to Japan. Statements with can and can't become could and couldn't when they are reported speech. Direct, I can meet with you on Monday. Reported, she said she could meet with me on Monday. Direct, I can't talk now. I'm at work. Reported, she said she couldn't talk at the moment because she was at work. Statements with will and won't become would and wouldn't. Direct, I'll call you later. Reported, she said she'd call me later. Direct, I won't forget to go to the bank. Reported, he said he wouldn't forget to go to the bank. In part two of this lesson, we'll learn reported requests, orders, and questions. Thanks for watching English Tips from espressoenglish.net. If you liked this video, please share it.