I lost Happy St. Patrick's Day. We're here today with Charlie Nardosi doing a workshop about gardening. My name's Megan Humphrey. I'm the Executive Director of Hands. We're a small nonprofit in Burlington, Vermont. And we offer all kinds of programs regarding food security for low-income seniors in our county. And we also have a holiday dinner where we delivered over 1,000 meals on Christmas Day this year, during a pandemic and in the pouring rain. And we have Hands in the Kitchen, Nutrition Education workshops. And we also have a program called Support Buddies, which we implemented when COVID hit a year ago, right about now. And that helps get food and supplies and other resources to folks that are isolated at home. So I wanna welcome everyone today. And we're going to talk about seed starting indoors, which is great. And because it's green, it's kind of perfect for St. Patrick's Day as well. And the next workshop is going to be on April 21st and where we will be talking about companion planting. So here you go, Charlie. Thanks so much for joining us. Yes, it's great being here as usual. We're doing these once a month all through the growing season. So we started last month with indoor herb gardening, which I did more as a demonstration because I had a bunch of herbs here. And then to this one, I thought I would do more as a photo or digital image presentation, kind of giving you the basics of seed starting, because it is the time to start your seeds. March and April is traditionally the time to do it so you can get things up and growing, ready to put in the ground, at least by Memorial Day, maybe earlier or a little later, depending on where you are. So without further ado, let me share my screen. Here we go. Seed starting 101, the basics. There's lots of reasons to start your own seed. And I'll go through a bunch of those in a minute here, but one of the things I really love about seed starting is that it gets you into the soil, be it potting soil, much earlier than we normally can in this kind of climate. You normally hear if we're out in April and May doing some gardening, cleaning up a little bit, we're feeling good. But with seed starting, you could be starting a month or two before that and you have that smell and the aesthetics and everyone needs a little relaxation and kind of revitalization of our mental health because of the pandemic and all the things we've gone through this past year. So having some things growing inside is really a great idea. So it all starts though with what seeds you wanna start indoors. So you don't have to start everything indoors. I'm gonna really gear this more towards vegetables and annual flowers and herbs. Even though we can't start perennials, I'll talk a little bit about that. But what seeds you wanna start indoors? So let me just kind of go through a checklist here for the vegetables that you can directly seed in the garden, meaning you don't have to start them indoors early. You can just put them in the garden, they'll grow and they'll do fine. So any of the legumes, the beans, the peas, the soybeans, those are big seeded vegetables. You have to wait, of course, for the beans and the soybeans so it gets warmer and more like Memorial Day, but the peas, you can put out probably even the end of April, depending on where you are in the Champlain Valley or the lower Connecticut River Valley is a little bit warmer. If we have a warm April, you can be popping your peas into the ground so they're up and growing really fast. You could be doing all the root crops directly sown in the ground. In fact, you probably want to do these directly sown. Carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, parsnips and potatoes. All of these either are started from seed or from, of course, little spud potatoes. And they don't transplant that well. The group above there, I've actually seen people buy beans and peas as transplants, which is kind of interesting. I guess if you have a small garden, it works. With the root crops though, you might find beets as a transplant, but mostly you have to direct sow them. Any of the greens, any of the leafy greens, and these kind of go both ways. They can be as a transplant or as a direct sown seed, the Swiss chards, lettuce, arugula, all of these. And these will be ones, again, especially arugula and spinach that we'll be sowing pretty soon. Once we get into April, get some warm days and the soil dries out a little bit. We can put those in the ground. And then finally, so other seeds you can directly sow are cucumbers, melons, squash and corn. Corn is funny because I've seen that as a transplant too. And all of those can be grown as transplants. So let's talk about that for a minute. There are certain veggies that you really have to have as transplants. You can't direct sow a tomato, pepper or eggplant from seed into the ground in end of May and really expect to get much production out of them because they're long-seasoned plants. So those you have to do as transplants, the ones I just mentioned, the cucumber, squash and melon, those you can do as transplants. And in fact, in our cold climate, especially if you're up in the hills a little bit, you probably wanna do these as transplants. I've started doing that much more with these about four weeks or so before your last frost date or when you're gonna put them in the ground. So probably early May in our climate in most areas. You can start these seeds indoors. They have four weeks of growing under lights with some nice warm temperatures. So when you transplant them, they're gonna be more likely to be successful. Then the greens and what we could do with the greens is we can stagger them. So you can put some transplants out early. You can put some seed in.  And then anything in the broccoli family, the cabbage, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, all of these again, kind of like the tomato family, they're long-seasoned crops. So you could probably try to throw some broccoli seed in the ground and you might get a broccoli by the end of the summer, but it's much better if you can start them as a transplant and then have them growing in the ground. And then a few herbs like basil, parsley and chives are all good to grow as transplants to get them started. Certainly basil, you can grow direct seed in the ground, but I like it growing as a transplant to really get it off and running fast. Just a few flowers that you could start from transplant. Here are ones that you will be sowing indoors. One that I sow indoors is zinnias. I love zinnias. We got so many zinnias. What's great about zinnias and marigolds and calendulums, there's so many varieties. So you can really go kind of crazy with the seeds. That's one of the nice benefits of starting some of your own seed indoors with vegetables and flowers. You can try some unusual varieties of things. I'm growing a plant this year. It's a solosia, an annual flower that's called the Chinese wool plant. And it produces these bundles of flowers that are burgundy color that look like bundles of wool. You're not gonna find that in most garden centers. So you can really experiment with different varieties.  Like regular garden peas, these plants like a cool soil. And so a little tip when you're trying to sow the sweet peas or the garden peas is to scrape them a little bit with either sandpaper or a nail file, just enough to mark or scar the seed surface. Then soak them in warm water overnight, the night before you're transplanting them. So the next morning you get up, you put them into the garden or you put the seeds into the garden or you put the seeds into a pot if you're growing them indoors. But sweet peas are nice because, once they get them up and growing, that's the key thing with sweet peas and garden peas. Once they're up and growing, they're less likely to rot in the soil. And sweet peas are just magnificent, especially if you get those heirloom varieties like Couponny and America and Miss Wilmot. These are all really fragrant varieties that are really nice to have as a cut flower in the house too. Cosmos, another great one kind of like the zinnias. We love growing those and you can grow those as transplants and you can even grow in the sturchums. The sturchums, of course, you can start from seed, just put in the ground in the summer.  Sunflowers, you can even start those as transplants and that's a nice thing to do because a lot of times birds will go after the seed if you put them in the ground just as seed and you think you planted a whole row of them and you only have one or two coming up. Well, it might have been the birds or even the squirrels going in there digging them up. If it's a transplant, they're gonna be a little less likely to go after them. Four o'clock's are beautiful, fragrant flowers that do really well and in fact, they do open in the afternoon. That's why they call it four o'clock. And then some perennials like Columbines and Lupins are nice to start indoors. You're gonna start perennials indoors. Again, make sure you know the timing of it when you wanna start them. But also look at getting some deeper pots, deep-rooted pots because these, especially the Lupins, have deep roots on them. So when you transplant them, you're less likely to damage those pots and the roots of that plant. So the different kinds of seeds that are out there, one of the things that a lot of us have to deal with is, well, we got all these seeds from last year. Can I grow them again this year? And the answer is maybe. Like so many things in life. So you can do a germination test. If you have some old seed that's, if it's last year's seed is probably gonna be okay for everything except maybe onions and leeks. They're kind of iffy as far as germinating the second year. But most, any other seed, if you stored it in a cool dark place and it was dry, the seed is probably fine. But if you have seed that's three, four, five years old, old tomato seed, for example, you wanna do a germination test. And simply what you're going to do is just get a paper towel, take about 10 seeds if you have enough of them, extra of course, take about 10 seeds, put them in the paper towel, moisten the paper towel, put it in a Ziploc bag and keep it in a warm place, but out of direct sun. Just leave it there for about a week and then check it again. If you get seven or eight out of those 10 seeds germinating, you probably can use that seed. If you get less than that, if you get even sevens, it's kind of iffy. But if you get less than seven, throw the seed out, buy some new seeds, probably a better idea. How many seeds to start? Well, that's always a good question because lots of people will start too many seeds. We always do that. We sprinkle maybe three or four or five tomato seeds in one pot and we have all these tomatoes and then like most gardeners, we don't wanna kill anything, especially a little seedling. So we end up growing them all out to a transplant size and now instead of having five tomatoes, we'd have 25 tomatoes, right? So we do have to be careful about how many seeds you wanna start in the garden. One of the ways to know how many seeds you really should start based on the size of your garden is these online garden planners. This is one from the San Francisco gardener that's up and they're really simple to use and really fun. You can see the grid that's here and each one of those squares is literally a one foot square. So it tells you how many vegetables or flowers can fit in that one foot square. And this one even tells you when you should actually be starting them, which I'll get into in a minute. So with this, what you do is you can't really demonstrate it here but you would drag and drop. So they have a list of the different vegetables and flowers. You drag them and drop them into each square. They automatically fill that square and it tells you, oh, I need four arugulas per square. I need nine, I can plant nine leeks per square. I can put one tomato in a square. I can put four chives in a square. So you kinda see the idea. And this gives you an idea of not only how many plants to start to transplant in there, but also how far apart they need to be. Because if you space the four lettuces in there, you're spacing them evenly apart. You'll see how they fit in pretty well. So look for these online planners. This is one from San Francisco. It's free, it's online. I know Gardener Supply used to have one. I think they've redone their website so they may not be as available right now. But there are other ones online too that'd be good to have. So your indoor seed starting setup, before I get into this, let's talk a little bit about when to start your seeds. So I know lots of people tend to go by the tradition of starting seeds at a town meeting day, right? Or even St. Patrick's Day. But that's really early for a lot of seeds. We're getting closer to when you start most of your seeds. The only things I have started right now here in mid-March is onions and leeks. And I just started, I just seeded my Brussels sprouts and broccoli and kohlrabi. So because those are cool seeds and vegetables, I'm gonna be able to put those out a little bit earlier. Most seeds need anywhere from four to eight weeks of growing indoors. That's kind of the general rule. The onions and the leeks need more. They need the age or so weeks. And they're easy to grow indoors because once they grow up, you can always give them a little haircut, cut off a third of their growth. And that'll just help them get beefier roots and they'll be fine held underlights eventually put outside like on a deck or patio until it's ready to plant them. But both of those, again, are like the broccoli, are cool season plants. So you can probably plant those. I'll use the Champlain Valley as an example. The last expected frost date in the Champlain Valley is usually around mid-May, around Mother's Day. So with broccoli, with leeks, with onions, with peas, you can plant those plants into the ground usually two weeks or so before that last frost date. So late April, early May, depending on the weather, depending on the year. If it's cold and rainy, you wanna wait. If we get some hot and dry weather, you might even plant a little earlier. All depends on what kind of temperatures and conditions we have. So the cool season props can go out really. So that's how you'd figure it out. So say you said May 1st, I'm gonna put my broccoli and you go back six weeks, you end up mid-March is when you actually want to start them so that you can have them ready to go into the ground on early May. The opposite is, or a different situation, it happens with tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, melons, all those plants. They again need four to six weeks, eggplants and peppers maybe six to eight weeks sometimes, but you're not gonna put those in the garden until it gets really warm, usually at the last frost date and often after the last frost date. So that could be Memorial Day, towards the end of May, which is traditional planting day throughout the state. But I'm again using a Champlain Valley as just an example. So those then you count back from the end of May and you're thinking early to mid-April is when you're gonna start those inside. Same thing is holding true with the flowers. The zinnias, I'll start probably at the same time. Early mid-April, the cosmos, the marigolds, they all need four to six weeks indoors and they like a warmer soil. So kind of knowing what your frost date is, wherever you are in the state and how many weeks those vegetables or flowers or herbs need to grow is gonna help you determine when to start transplanting them and when to start planting them indoors and then moving them outside. The thing that most gardeners do is we get so antsy come January, February, we start things too early and then come April we've got big tomato plants, right? We got big pepper plants and you can't put them out yet because it's too cold and then it's a whole effort to try to hold them back. The best thing to do is have a small transplant that's actively growing and that's the one you wanna put in the ground. To get that, you wanna wait till in most cases, like I'm saying, early to mid-April to plant a lot of these. So let's talk about the indoor seed-starting setup.  Think about the different kinds of containers. I'll go through all of these in more detail. The soil that you're gonna use for them, the lights, because you do wanna use some kind of lights in the most situations. And maybe some extra heat, a little fertilizer to keep them going. I'll talk about watering and then a few things on different problems. So let's just dive in to setting up your own seed-starting situation. And like I said, it's not too late to do this even in mid-March when I'm talking about this right now, because like I said, a lot of things you're not gonna be starting for another two weeks to a month. So we're in the house to start them. You could be a living space, which is great.  You can have it right in your living room area and there's pluses and minuses to that. And I'll talk about that when we get into the lighting. It could be a basement. That's where ours are. I have a very shop-oriented light system. Basically it doesn't look that pretty. So I put it in the basement. It's a little cooler down there. I've got much more room, but it's cooler. And I'll talk about taking care of them down in the basement. That's why I'm gonna talk about heating. If you have a special room, a little mud room, a little alcove, I have a friend who has a whole room dedicated to seed-starting. You can go that far. And windowsills, not highly recommended, especially for plants that you're starting this early, because even though we might be getting sunny days and it seems the days are longer, the sun is stronger, it feels warmer, it's still not enough to keep those little seedlings from getting leggy. And all it takes is a few days right after they germinate, from them not getting enough light. Maybe it's a cloudy period or a rainy period, and they start getting leggy. And once they're leggy, you can't fix them. So the containers. Let's talk about different kinds of containers and different ways to do it. There's basically two types of as far as the layout of the container. You can get certainly plastic containers that are there that either have individual cells like this one, or they're gonna have more like a tray kind of setup. So here's one with the individual cells, and here's one with more of a tray setup. There's advantages and disadvantages to each one of these. So if you have the individual cells, it's nice because you can just pop in that plant that's there, you can thin it out. I use these a lot. So I put two tomato seeds per cell. If I have older seed, maybe just one seed per cell, but I have new seed. And then I thin it out to one plant, and then you grow it up. And it looks pretty well, it does pretty well. Of course, we'll have to transplant, but I'll talk about that in a minute. But for something like this, if you're growing a lot of plants, and that's what I think this is better for these trays, you can look at all the tomatoes that grew in that one big tray.  They're a little leggy too, but it gives you the opportunity to grow a lot of plants in a small space. So transplanting, the rule of thumb for transplanting for a tomato, a pepper, an eggplant, a broccoli, anything like that, usually ones that take a little bit longer, ones that are gonna be more than four weeks growing indoors. So for example, you may not have to transplant basil, because you can grow it for four weeks and pop it right into the soil, or lettuce. But anything that's gonna take longer than that, it's gonna be good to transplant them into a pot one size larger. You don't wanna start them in that big pot because the seed won't germinate as well because of all the soil mass that's there. It needs to have kind of a small little area, a little cozy area to germinate in. So the rule of thumb with when you transplant is when the seedling that you're growing, the height of that seedling is three times the diameter of the pot. So if you have a two inch diameter pot and the seedling is growing up and it's six inches tall, you know you're three times taller, so now you will do your transplanting into a pot one size larger. And that may mean that you have to also transplant when they're small like this. You get a whole bunch of little dill plants and you'll have to kind of tease them out. So it's a little more work when you're transplanting from a big tray because you have a lot of plants, you have to tease them out. Some are more amenable to this like chives for example or basil for that matter, much more amenable. Onions is another one, how I grow onions is in one pot, a whole bunch of seed.  They transplant really well that way. So transplanting those plants that are gonna get larger into a larger pot one size larger. So if you have two inch cells, you go up to about four inch pots. From there, you should be able to grow that to a size that you can transplant into the garden. You won't have to do another transplanting after that. There are different kinds of pots other than plastic that's out there. Plastic's nice because it's reusable and you wanna reuse it because it's hard to recycle unfortunately. But there are other kinds of pots that you can use such as these biodegradable pots. And the biodegradable pots are nice because you can start your plants in them and you don't ever have to disturb the root system when you plant them in the ground. There are pea pots that do this and cow pots. The downside I find with these is that they tend not to degrade very quickly in the soil. So what'll happen is you have say a tomato plant in one, you put it into the soil, you bury it in, you cover the top of the pot and everything. And the tomato keeps growing but the pot's not breaking down really quickly. And if it doesn't break down really quickly then the roots are gonna get constricted. So what I do, if I use these biodegradable pots is I break up the pot bottoms before I put them into the soil and I'm ready to transplant them. That way they have a way to get out into the native soil and continue to grow. You can make your own pots with paper pot makers. It's like a little mortar and pestle almost but you could use something as simple as a little tomato paste can and just cut a piece of newspaper print about the size of that, about the height I guess of the tomato paste can and wrap it around and just scrunch the bottom of it and you can just put soil in it and you get these. And this is a great way not to have to buy anything to start your seed starting and you also, these are biodegradable. And in fact, you probably wanna use them on plants that you're gonna be transplanting into the ground maybe about four weeks or so after seeding them because they will start breaking down in your house and then it kinda makes a little bit of a mess. But if you have something like a nasturtium like this plant or a basil or lettuces and plants like that that only need about four weeks you can use these paper pots, they work pretty well. The seed starting soil you use for it, this can get a little bit confusing because there are so many different kinds of materials out there now. There's germinating mix, there's transplanting mix, there's seed starting mix, there's seed starting mix with fertilizer, there's this and that. What you wanna look for is a germinating mix.  It's gonna germinate a little bit easier in that soil. What's in these soils tends to be pretty consistent. There's gonna be peat moss a lot of times. Now a lot of people don't like using peat moss because it is not really a renewable material. I mean, it's mined and supposedly the bugs come back but it'll be generations before that happens. A lot of growers now are moving more towards quar which is a coconut husk fiber material which is really nice to use because it drains water really well, it holds moisture but doesn't get really wet. It's got a lot of advantages over peat moss and it's a recycled product. So if you're looking at your bag of germinating mix you might wanna look for one that has some quar in it. And then the white stuff is the perlite, the yellow stuff is the vermiculite and often you will get compost especially if you're an organic gardener, you might wanna look for one that has some compost in it. The perlite and the vermiculite by the way are natural materials that are just heated up and then they expand into those a little lightweight little pieces you see in the soil and they're there for water drainage and air flow that's in the soil. So it's very natural to have those. So once you got your soil, your germinating mix, you got your pots, you kinda figured out what system you're gonna use, you're probably gonna wanna do a little bit of lights, do something with lights because as I was saying, the plants get really leggy if they're just in even a self-facing bay window even sometimes even in a greenhouse depending upon how many cloudy days we get when those plants first start germinating, they need as much sun as possible. So the sunny window just doesn't have enough light and this is what happens. You can see some of these little plants just germinated, those are our little cod-leading leaves but look how long the stems are. Because they're long now, that means they're never gonna really get short and stocky like they should be getting and you're gonna have a plant that you probably can still use but it's just not gonna thrive as well as one that's short and stocky and it's had enough light. So when you're getting light setups there's really two main types that I would suggest now, the fluorescent and the LEDs. Now the fluorescent tubes used to be those shop lights you think of, you know, the ones at home and the schools and industrial sites and stuff, those have come a long way from those big tubes. You now get ones that are smaller tubes, they're more energy efficient. They are still not that expensive to get but they have a longer shelf life, they have less energy costs involved with them. So they're called compact fluorescent tubes, that's what you wanna look for. I have one called a T5, a T5 I think I can show it to you, there it is. So the T5 bulbs just like that, those are nice, they'll last a long time, you don't have to replace them very often and they'll give your plants enough light so they can germinate well. The second type of course is the LEDs and this is the one more and more gardeners are using out there. These are much more efficient, energy efficient, they take less energy to actually run the lights, they last a lot longer, they don't have some of the toxic materials that can be in some of those fluorescent tubes like mercury for example, but they're much more expensive and I'd also add they're much brighter. So this is a thing that's gonna come in when we talk about where you wanna do your lighting. So your basic lighting setup, this is something similar to what I have in my basin, very simple, two tiers, having plants in there with trays, it works out really well, you have a T5 setup, you get plenty of light for them to grow.   Imagine making your mama's tomato sauce, and you're gonna need a little time and some oregano, you're gonna need some basil, you can have it right there, we can just snip a few and throw it in even on a December or January day. But this setup here is really geared more towards the little seedlings and you can see how well they're doing under these lights. And you can get setups that actually look like pieces of furniture. This is kind of a cool look and these are all grow lights in there and they're all LED. So this is what I was saying about the downside of LED is the brightness of the light. And then that's something, if you're considering doing anything like this or doing seed starting in a living space in your room where you're gonna be there a lot at night, you might wanna just look at the lights and see them in action before you actually buy them because they can be really bright and really glaring. And it could just be too much. If you're looking for a kind of a calm soothing place with just a few little lights on, this could be a little bit much to have. But if you use the right lights in the right setting and it's a good spot for you, you can have something that looks really nice in your home. When you're watering your little seedlings, usually you can do some above ground, you might say, watering. You wanna keep the soil moist, of course, and those potting and germinating mixes are good for that. But you also might wanna think about the type of water. If you're in the city and you have, well, let's go in the other direction first. If you're in the country and you just have a well, tap water usually is fine. If you're in the city and you have water from water treatment facility, you might wanna use filtered water. So we use this a pure water filter. We're out in the country and I use that mostly because we have a lot of minerals in our soil. But I could see using that if you're in the city, if you have things like fluoride and other kinds of materials in there to purify the water, this is a good way to kind of take them out.  And that would be what a lot of real expert growers you might say are going into. That way you're assured that that water is nice and clean and it's gonna be good for your plants. The best way though to do this watering is not so much from the top like I showed you, but through self-watering systems, through bottom watering. So this is one from Gardner Supply, but you've seen many of these out there now. You see that tray in the bottom is a reservoir and then all the plants in those cells are sitting on top of a false bottom. And on top of that, I'll show you a little graphic here, is a little capillary mat. And that capillary mat goes underneath the tray on top and the water goes from the reservoir up into the capillary mat, up into the soil. This way, all you need to do, excuse me, is to fill that water reservoir and keep it filled and it will take up as much water as it needs. This works really well for getting seeds started. And this works really well too if you have a busy life and you forget about things because you have so many other stuff going on. This way, if you didn't water for a day or two, it's gonna be fine, you didn't check your plants. Because when they're small like this, you do need to check them if you don't have a self watering system, probably every day. So this is a nice way to save some time and save a little English. Most of these seedlings, if they're growing, especially in an organic potting mix, you're not gonna need to do much fertilizing of them at all. But if you are gonna fertilize, I would suggest an organic one versus a chemical one. And there are some compost based ones that you put in a jug of water. There are some based on worm poop, vermicompost, which is great, kind of like a compost tea. There are some that are time-release and most of these are the chemical ones with those little pellets, but there are some that are organic as well. And then of course, there's fishy motion, which I always put a little caveat on because with fishy motion, what ends up happening is that even though it's deodorized, it's not.  So that's really a better one for when you're moving them outdoors and you're gonna put them into the garden. Give them a little shot of fishy motion when you water them as you put them into the garden and it's all outdoors so you don't have to smell it. So this is something that you might do if you have long season growing plants, like the tomatoes and eggplants and peppers are a good example of this because you're growing them six to eight weeks indoors, they might need a little shot of fertilizer at some point. If you have an organic soil, like I said, they may not at all, but you can watch the leaves as they're looking a little kind of peeked, not as dark and vibrant green. You might wanna give them a little shot of one of these fertilizers to get them going. There are a few accessories that I always like to talk about that work really well for me and probably would for you depending on your situation. One is a seed heating mat. And this is a mat that has coils running through it that you would plug into a wall and it's waterproof. So you don't have to worry about that. It works really well. It heats up to about 70 or so degrees, I believe. And then you put your seedlings in your little trays right on top of it. I use this because I garden in a basement and the basement is about 45, 50 degrees. So it's cold there and it's not great for seedling germination.  The faster they germinate, the less likely they're gonna have a problem like I'm gonna show you in a minute here. So that might be a consideration. This is something, I have a couple of them. I bought them years ago. They seem to work without any problems. I've never had a problem with them and they come back year after year, I use them. The other thing is your lights. And if you have lights, especially again, if you're in a basement or an area where you're not gonna be frequenting very often, you might wanna put them on a timer. That way you wanna have 14 hours of light on your plants a day. You don't wanna have 20 hours or 22 hours.  They need that just like we do. So 14 hours is usually recommended. A timer like this is not that expensive. Once you have it again, like the heating mat, it's something you'll have for the rest of your growing life. So let's wrap up with a few seed-starting problems. Things that might happen like these poor basals. Oh, look at how leggy they are. So I just wanna talk about this actually before we move on. So they're leggy for two reasons. One, it could be light, but also you could see they weren't transplanted at the right size. Those are little one-inch cells. So if you remember the math, when those basil plants were about four inches tall, three to four inches tall, they should have been transplanted into a bigger pot. That's why they look like this. That's why they're kind of very yellowish color. They're nutrient deprived. Because basil is basil, you can put them in the ground and they still will grow, but they won't be as healthy as ones that you started that were small. So I talked about legginess already and about the light level. They really need a lot of light and they need not just natural light. If you're doing little seed-starting, say you want to grow some things in June to transplant in July for a fall garden, for example. It's okay to put them in a sunny window. That might work okay, even though I would be a little hesitant because those windows often have filters on them in houses, depending on the window. So they do block some of the light that's coming in. But as a most part, you really need to have grow lights and those complex fluorescence and LEDs are full spectrum grow lights that you can grow these kinds of plants in there. The legginess also, by the way, it could be caused by, as I was showing there with the basil before, not transplanting at the right time and sometimes putting too much fertilizer on them. Sometimes people put a lot of fertilizer on them early in their growth and they get these grows so fast that they end up getting leggy. This is probably the number one disease you're gonna find in your transplants. And this is called damping off, it's a fungus. It's often happens you could see there from this UMass photo that happens right around the soil line where the little seedling is growing fine and all of a sudden, seemingly overnight, a whole bunch of these start having this problem. The reason it happens so uniformly is that the soil is too wet. And when the soil is too wet, that's the perfect environment for this fungus to get growing. It's just kind of in the pots or in the soil. It's not something you can really avoid having around, but it's really activated when it's really too wet. So the key with that is if you do have damping off and it does kind of run through like that, look at that. Oh my God. You can see how wet that soil is too. It runs through your seedlings. Then you're gonna have to either start over or if you have some that haven't been affected yet, you might want to just quickly separate them from the ones that are infected and see if they'll survive. And maybe you can get some of them to make it. The same problem that happens when you water too much is you start getting mold. And you can see all that little pearlite I was showing that's supposed to be white. It's all green and that's mold and that's gonna be another reason why you get this damping off is because that mold is forming there. All of this again is because everything is just too wet. So think about that self watering system I mentioned. It's better to be a little bit on the dry side than a little bit on the wet side with a lot of seedlings, especially when they're young. When they're a little older, then it's probably better to keep it consistently moist. But when they're younger, a little on the dry side is not too bad. Once they're up and growing like these pansies here, you can see they can have little yellowness on their leaves. That's usually a lack of nutrients. It could be cold temperatures. If you're growing something indoors and it's close to a window, we have a lot of cold air coming through it. That could also cause this, but mostly it's not having a little nitrogen. So those nitrogen fertilizers I mentioned before, the compost based ones, the worm hoop tea ones, or even a time release ones, they'll all take care of this situation. Go with a liquid fertilizer because that can be taken up by the plant and by the leaves themselves and it'll quickly green it up versus one that's a granular that will take a little time. So if you do all these things, you'll have some healthy seedlings that you'll be ready to just pop into your garden. So you have a nice, healthy vegetable garden. Nice. Gardening always feels hopeful. We need that. Yes, especially this year. Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Charlie. This is great. Yeah, thanks for coming, Megan, Ken. Thank you. This is actually gonna be up on CCTV. So we'll have lots of people watching it.


VMA Q4's mission in Afghanistan is basically to control signal assets. It's classified, but high tempo. I'm used to working quick, fast, so it all feels the same for me here and stateside. Felix is one of the squadron's plane captains sending the pilots safely on their way. This is his second deployment, but for about half the squadron's Marines and Sailors, it's their first. This is why My focus has been on the fundamentals, the basics. Making sure we get those right so that we can do those electronic warfare tactics that we need to do while we're here. This equates to about 120 sorties or 500 flight hours per month. It's a lot of work, but at the same time, at the end, it pays off to know that you sent off a jet to do its mission, and it succeeded. From Balgram Airfield, Afghanistan, I'm Sergeant Andrew Milner.


I've been asked this morning to introduce Carl Hess. And that's an easy task. The hard thing is to keep it down to a minute or so. Carl is one of my favorite people in this movement, probably, I guess you could say, in the world. Many of you probably know the Carl Hess story. He started out posing as a conventional Republican. This man actually wrote speeches for the National Association of Manufacturers back in the early 60s. And then when something of the magnitude of the Goldwater presidential campaign came along in 1964, Carl signed on as, I think, chief speechwriter and was responsible for many stirring lines defending the principles of liberty, including the most famous one, that extremism and defense of liberty is no vice, which we all know and love. And I believe it was 1969, he authored an article for Playboy magazine called The Death of Politics, which for many years has been considered one of the best basic introductions to libertarian thought and libertarian analysis aimed at a general reader. And that magazine, I think, won an award for best article of the year and has been reprinted widely, and I think probably is still in circulation. Carl, in the late 60s, decided that he'd had it with posing as anything conventional and decided to really live his life as a libertarian resisting the state and has dropped out of organized things like paying taxes and lived first in Washington, DC, working with neighborhood groups, and later moved to West Virginia, where he has continued to live as a person active on the community level in very decentralized, spontaneous order kinds of activities. I think it's an interesting reflection of the diversity of the libertarian movement that Carl Hess and I have a great deal of admiration for each other's efforts and feel very comfortable being in the same movement together. We are each working in our own ways to achieve the goal of greater liberty, and it gives me very great pleasure this morning to introduce to you Carl Hess. This is the first time I've ever been to a libertarian convention as a delegate. I'd like you to hear my side of the story. Just as it took Murray Rothbard to tell me I was an anarchist, it took our new state chairman, Steve Fielder in West Virginia to tell me that I probably was a libertarian party member. But my real intention in being a delegate, because I'm sure I'll serve no useful political purpose at all, not understanding Robert's rules of order, or anything else about that, my real purpose is to tell you that at a time when so many people are jumping on the party and doing things that my feeling is that no activity by a libertarian that I can think of is harmful to me, and that every activity by every libertarian in any crazy direction they go is probably in the long term helpful to me. And so I would like to say that although I'm not a very political person, that I support the party absolutely in its activities these days, and I hope not to be too much of a drag on it. I'm a sort of anarcho-rothbardian craniac with distinct tendencies toward pulism. I find that it hasn't disturbed my health or sleep too greatly. I suppose talk about practical tools, and that, it seems to me, is the first practical tool, although it's sort of a wispy one. And that is tolerance and trust. I'm amazed that there are people in the world who have so much excess time and energy that they can spend time fighting their friends rather than their enemies. But everyone has to have a hobby, I suppose. I subscribe wholly to the Leonard Ligio theory of friendship. Leonard told me a long time ago there's the only gauge of the potential friendliness of a person was whether or not that person would call the police. Any non-aggressive action? That seemed rather reasonable to me. I've long since disparate of changing the world, having had enough trouble changing me. And I look around at all of you, and I know that there isn't a single one of you as the correct line on anything. And you're well aware of the fact that I don't. And yet, for some strange reason, we're all here together, and the bloodletting is usually philosophical rather than real. And I think you should never let a person's crazy ideologies interfere with your friendships, because ideologies are, after all, an explanation of the way people act at their very best. You should keep track, mainly, of how they act. If they won't call the police, then that's a good step forward. If they have some variant of opinion, I think you can probably learn to live with it. I live in a neighborhood in West Virginia where people's opinions are absolutely incredibly, they're horrifying, absolutely horrifying. But every now and then, when I don't show up at the right place at the right time for a long period, people will drive down into our little valley and ask if there's anything wrong. And I rather appreciate that. I remember that one of the major assholes of history was where all the people associated with Adolf Hitler, and particularly a street brawler named, I believe, Ernst Röhm, who bled to death once on a street by refusing the services of a Jewish doctor. Now, that's carrying ideology to a rather dangerous point. And I would hope that it would not be true that anybody in this room would bleed to death because they were refusing the services of a men's orchestra or something of that sort. There's no step toward liberty, it seems to me, that it's so slight that it shouldn't be wildly applauded. I listened yesterday to part of a discussion in which people seemed to be angry at a local official, a libertarian who won a local office, because he wasn't perfect. What's very difficult to be perfect is an anti-statist in a state system. And the person who was able to do anything is doing something, which is a tad better than doing nothing. So I think it would be very nice for us to, one, celebrate small victories. That's another sort of psychological tool. Celebrate small victories, because you're not likely to be able to celebrate many very big ones.  But every one of you will live long enough to see a perfected you. It occurs to me as your major project is perfecting you, not the universe. You have to do something first there. Now, in your process, as in my process, you will do things that will offend most of your friends, probably, but they can still remain your friends. Well, anyway, so much for the sermon. But I really mean that. I know some people, I'm sure, in here who have the most incredibly bad opinions on things. But there's not a person I feel in this room that I wouldn't welcome if they were fleeing from authority in our little valley in West Virginia and wouldn't want to protect and love. I can't say that of very many FBI agents. Also, now for two practical tools and things. First of all, for probably the 9 millionth time, I would like to read something from the notebooks of Lazarus Long that strikes me as fairly important because it leads to as a tool. It's the sort of, see, I'm attacked often because I'm not the world's greatest fan of the division of labor. To me, it may be necessary, but it's a great inconvenience. I would really like to be able to do everything in the world. That would be very pleasant to me. I'd like to know everything in the world. The division of labor is necessary, I know. But the fact that I don't like it doesn't mean that I don't like you. And I don't like people who say that it is sacred in nature. It's simply that I don't like it. Now, what possible differences I'd make? I will not call the police on you, and I'll try to, I will divide labor when necessary. But here's a statement about a sort of person that I feel is equal to all of the tasks of liberty. And it might be something toward which we might all aspire. This is from Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein, a notorious fascist libertarian. Whose various idiosyncrasies certainly doesn't stop me from admiring him as one of the finest writers in the world. As a human being, should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying.  Specialization is for insects. I'd like to do that. I want to talk about tools, so I want to try to make a point about tools. I am not a renowned theoretician of anything, unfortunately, so I have to fall back on tools as the most comforting part of my life. But I would like to make a point about them. Although it may be true that ideas change the world, it may not be true that we can easily identify those ideas. I understand that there are people who automatically assume that it is only social ideas that have changed the world, forgetting the fact that there are ideas involved in the creation of tools and that these tools, both intellectual and material, have changed the world considerably. And I made a list of a few events that I'd like to share with you. I'd like to share some contrast with you. In 1000 AD, Venice was consolidating its empire in the Adriatic, and an Indian mathematician invented zero. Now, we all know about the Venetian Empire, but what really changed the world most, the concept of zero, clearly. In the 1660s, there were 50 major treaties in war going on. I'm sure a lot of the people here know about them and can expound elegantly at great length on their impact, but that was the period in which Newton invented differential calculus, which ideas really changed the world the most. I think the tool did. In 1793, there was the reign of terror, and Whitney marketed or began to market a musket with interchangeable parts. Again, it's curious as to what changed the world most. The Monroe Doctrine was in 1823, and everybody knows about that, a great turning point in the world's history, but that was when Babbage began work on his calculating machine. Babbage's work has changed the world probably more than any event in the history of the world. And I dare say that when the aberrations of the great religions are forgotten will probably be a time when people will say that when Babbage and the woman who inspired and sponsored him began his work, that the world really changed substantially. Well, we go on. The Mexican-American War was in 1846, and John Deere introduced the steel moldboard plow. And here's a biggie. In 1847, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, an answer, of course, to Pradone's work. That same year, a bull presented the foundations of Boolean algebra. Now, there's no contest. Marx may be said to have caused a good deal of mischief in the world, but the impact has nothing. It's seriously very slight compared to the impact of Boolean algebra, on which much of our future is firmly based today. Well, here was a big one. In 1865, the worst president in the history of the United States, the patron saint of bureaucrats and of imperial government, went to his reward. That was Abraham Lincoln, of course. And in that very same year, MIT was founded. I would celebrate both events a bit, but I celebrate MIT a bit more. Then in 1903, Lenin and Trotsky formed the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Big deal. The Wright brothers also flew that year, which has impacted the world the most. Without aircraft, as a matter of fact, the Russian aggressions wouldn't be nearly as effective as they are. They should also celebrate the Wright brothers. Well, in 1932, now we're getting into an era that I could remember. Actually, I was in, oh my god. Well, at any rate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the second worst president in the history of America, won his election. And then by stunning congruity, the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag of plurality. So it fascists everywhere. We're beginning to do rather well. When I was about 18, I was city editor of a major metropolitan daily, having had the good sense to not go to school, but to go to work instead. And I got fired from this job because they asked me to come in to direct the sorrow, the journalistic sorrow at the passing of Roosevelt. And I told them I certainly wouldn't do it, because I was too drunk from celebrating. I've never had very good taste or good sense about gestures. But at any rate, that infamous year was also the year that Heisenberg got his Nobel Prize for the Matrix Theory of Quantum Mechanics. I'm happy to see that Quantum Mechanics is doing us a little more good than those other handshadows. In 47, there was the Marshall Plan, that glorious transfer of resources. And it had its mirror image in the Soviet Union and the foundation of the common form, which was the Russian version of the Marshall Plan. Except it was a good deal cheaper. And that was also the year of the transistor.  Well, I just got a couple more, two more. There was 62 in which the US established the first mission in Vietnam, an infamous and terrible thing. But on the other hand, it was balanced off because Crick Wilkins and Watson got their Nobel Prize that year for the molecular structure of DNA. And even though the Vietnamese War killed so many hundreds of thousands of people, intimate knowledge of the structure of DNA is going to keep many more millions alive in the future. So it does work out. Now, this might expose the final and favored one is, in 69, Nixon was inaugurated. And this was either the beginning or the end of everything according to your position. That was the year that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Well, that to me is one of the most, that's one of the really great moments, because we're not going to stay here. We've been embarked on a slow journey to the stars ever since the first person started banging things around in a cave and looking at the stars and wondering what they were and realizing they weren't God's eyes. And we'll get there. And it's very difficult for me, looking at this list and thinking about this list, it strikes me as being presumptuous and probably a little crazy to try to predict very accurately what is going to happen tomorrow because you don't know somebody may come up with something equivalent to this, which will change everything in reality. Well, the feeling is that libertarians in particular need not predict the future. They must instead be in a position personally to take advantage of it, to be incredibly flexible, very flexible, to know that there may be some material fact tomorrow that will shake the roots of most of their prejudices without having to shake their root notions of liberty, whatever they are, the non-intervention notions, the feeling that the only responsible project in your life is you and that to take on the responsibility of trying to make other people good or bad or anything is either not worthy of you or is just a waste of time when you could be getting on with the project of you. Now for more practical tools, let me say that there is a form of economic development that I think may commend itself to libertarians. I don't know what sort of productive work the people in this room represent, but I am always astonished to know that people who say that they live their life in opinion and that that's the most important thing and they go around bothering everybody with their opinions that they also do real work. And in this real work, they probably accomplish where they do that work more to establish a good name for liberty than in harassing their friends with their factional differences. Every libertarian who is a good, skillful, creative producer of anything is likely in their neighborhood to impress their neighbors and to be able to talk to them about the character involved in loving liberty. The advantages that this gives for a person producing things, after all, it is now abundantly clear that having tried every other nutty system to get things done, to grow food, to invent things, to have good music, and so forth around the world, that they've all failed save one. That is the notion of letting people free to do things for themselves. And Jefferson, oh, good old Jefferson. Jefferson said, you know that humans were not born with saddles, nor other humans born with boots and spurs to ride them. He knew everybody is known for a long time, and we have tried every alternative to it. None of it works. Ronald Reagan is the only person I know who thinks the Soviet Union is a dangerously competent society. I mean, most people understand that these people are really bumble-footed. They don't do anything terribly well.  I saw it some TV program showing a Red Square recently. There was somebody walking around with a Pink Floyd t-shirt on, and it occurred to me. I hope it wasn't a tourist, because it occurred to me that if we could open one McDonald's and get you two over to play some good rock for them, it would probably subvert them more than anything the CIA could come up with. And this will reveal a personal prejudice of a deep sort. We could somehow manage to smuggle a lot of Macintoshes into the Soviet Union. It would all be over. But we trade so well, and we war so poorly, that it occurs to me that, like any good general, you look to your strengths for combat. There's no question about our excellence and superiority in matters of trade. We're a merchant people. All of us.  As a matter of fact, the only communist I know terribly well is an extraordinarily rich and successful person.  So I think we might stick to that libertarian. Now, libertarians, what are libertarians good at? Well, there are several kinds of libertarians I have observed. There are political ones, and there are commercial ones, and there are cultural ones. And in all of these areas, they do quite well, it seems to me. I'm, I guess, I tend a bit toward the cultural, not out of absolutely a choice, but because when, thanks to Murray Rothbard again, Murray gets me in more trouble. He suggested that I write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, telling them that in eloquent terms, why I was ceasing to pay taxes. And so I did, not taking fully, I wasn't fully aware of the consequences, because I thought, you see, like many libertarians at that stage of development, I thought that sweet reason sways everyone. And that all you had to do was explain this to these thugs and brigands, and they would suddenly come around. Well, that's not their job. Their job is certainly not to be reasonable. And so they divested me of all material possessions very quickly and left me, as I've often said, with only one thing, which was me, for which I thank them heartily, because it has kept me from backsliding, which would be tempting from time to time. I now have to make out in the cracks of the society, which I find is a very fine place to be. The underground economy in this country is probably less inflation-prone and is expanding faster than any other part of it. And it's where many libertarians should be, probably are. The French historian Fernand Brodell, who is certainly a great favorite of mine, seems to have found that this is a characteristic of history that, when people want to survive, they join or form an underground economy. He ascribes the existence of Italy today, almost completely, to the underground economy. They have at two levels of an economy. They have the visible economy, as he puts it, and then they have the underground. So I think that's true here. We have both. To rail against the visible only is fun. To be part of the invisible is practical. And so I would hope that everybody here is involved in some way in the black market. In the Winston Churchill, not a renowned libertarian, did say at one time that the only contact with freedom that the British had had during the Second World War was the black market. And may still be true. But I just said, oh my god, such whimpery in high places. I remember that Ronald Reagan once actually said, he actually said once that if the underground economy would pay its taxes, he could balance his budget. Extraordinary. I have a little interest in his budget. But at any rate, so we have these various kinds of libertarian. And it's led me to this sort of feeling. I think that libertarians require to be extraordinarily competent at what they do and at where they fit into this equation so that being very, very rich, I don't mean moderately rich. I mean filthy rich. Is really a sensible libertarian position. On the other hand, being absolutely poor but creative is an alternative to a really good libertarian position. I've chosen to be poor, but it's been arranged for me that I am officially poor, so I have to be unofficially rich. And that I am. I am not a millionaire. I do live exactly like one. And I find this too is an acceptable alternative. Now in between, there are the commercial libertarians. And it is to them, I feel that there falls the major task of promulgating notions of liberty. I cannot think of a single business or productive activity in which you can engage, in which you cannot influence customers, neighbors, and suppliers with ideas of liberty. A very homely example, there is in Berkeley, California, notorious libertarian territory, there is the chain of top dog sausage stands, run by a man whom Murray refers to as the hot dog anarchist. And indeed he is in every one of the top dog sausage places, which have a superb product. For those of you who have no concern about your health, I hope suicide also be a very reasonable alternative. But in every one of these shops, there are an immense number of clippings up on the wall, explanations of outrages of the state. And it's a nice atmosphere in which to get messages across. The same thing can happen in anything you do. I know that I'm a welder and lately a woodworker. And I find that the transition from discussing the fabrication of some stuff out of a quarter inch plate to discussing the enormous folly of government and the great desirability of working for cash and not paying taxes and things, easy transition to make. Most people who are engaged in any useful activity have a practical sense that the government is their major enemy these days. And most people begin to maintain two price schedules, as you know, with a significantly lower price for cash. Now, I don't think they're doing this out of a regard for greenbacks or the color or anything. They're doing it because it's protective. They are all, we are all parts of an underground economy. And it's really not terribly subversive because it is what will save this country, the landscape of this country and the people of this country, against the follies of the political people. Well, now, in terms of commerce, what are the practical tools that we can employ as libertarians? First of all, there's attitude of resistance, which means we'll try anything. We do not look up the zoning code first. A sense of libertarian adventure impels you to do it and then let them complain about it and to make an issue out of it and to probably influence people on your side. There are very few people, except you're possibly the immediate landholders, who will be offended by your establishing the world's largest whatever on your property. Other people will be drawn to your courageous stand. And if, in fact, you lose and the state finally tears down what you built, it is likely that the state will appear to be worse than you. Now, you say, oh, but I will have lost everything. Nonsense. Libertarians can't lose anything because they start again tomorrow and build something else. I've just come from a meeting with people who wouldn't be caught dead here, as a matter of fact, but every one of whom is a first-class practicing libertarian. And as we spoke and gave our little biographical sketches to each other, it was apparent that characteristic of all of them was the fact that they had lost millions. And as I pointed out, reported gross income of $6.19. But they had made and lost millions, and they had no fear of this. So I think a great psychologically good tool for libertarians is not to be obsessed with a fear of failure, but to be obsessed instead with the successes that are always intermittent with any series of failures, to be prepared to finally be comfortable with themselves if they had nothing else, but to dare and to venture, to build, and to talk on the basis of accomplishment and not simply on the basis of theory. The tools of practical accomplishment have been too little extolled in libertarian circles. Now, if you are in any sort of business, it occurs to me there would behoove you to try to find other people of a similar disposition and urge them to work, locate, and to operate near you. In our part of the Shenandoah Valley, we have discovered that there are numbers like Australia. It's now filling up with misfits and people have been rejected by the society at large, people who really are entrepreneurial in nature and extremely skillful in practice. One of the most notable examples are the folks who made this shirt as a matter of fact, a little manufacturer in a company called Deva, and they have done some extraordinarily good libertarian educating in the Shenandoah Valley because they work with piecework and they farm out stuff to people in the neighborhood.  They grossed a million bucks last year and they play volleyball every afternoon. And they have managed to make significant inroads against bureaucratic interference with piecework. Now, that's an important lesson. Now, they don't want to grow because they're at an absolutely perfect size. And the purpose of an enterprise, to many libertarians, I find, is that enterprise which makes possible their perfect vision of the way they want to live. Now, they're not really trying to serve society. They're not really trying to do anything except live exactly the way they want. These people would be unable to live that way if the place got any larger, a million bucks a year is okay. So, how do they protect themselves? How do we protect ourselves without going to the inconvenience of becoming large enough to hire a lobbyist to go to Washington? One way is by federation and by encouraging other people of a like mind to come into your geographical, your regional area, which incidentally is very likely not to accord with political boundaries. I live in the Shenandoah Valley in a political subdivision called Berkeley County, West Virginia, but I feel I'm a resident of that nation. Oh, pardon me, I meant country called the Shenandoah Valley. Now, one way we're approaching it is to try to encourage other people to come in, people who have the same vision of working in order to make their lives possible, absolutely on their own terms. The more of them there are, the more impact they will have in the area, the more protected they will be from reckless political activity, without any one of them having to spend full time on it or to be huge in nature. I believe this is going to work and the variety of people now in our valley strike me as being remarkable because we have biotechnologists, very important. Genetic engineering is clearly one of the most important activities in which a libertarian could involve themselves. So we do have several genetic engineers in the area that programmers all over the place. And fortunately, one of them as a matter of fact is involved in a very high level computer security work, which means we have somebody who knows how to defeat any known security system, since he's designed half of them. So we have, down to people who are making a good point about non-chemical farming these days, more productive, less costly, to people who do any number of things, small fabricators, artists, crafts people, all sorts of things. I think that by encouraging economic development in our valley along those lines will all be very much better off. Now, there is a particular tool or area of practical work that I like myself very much because I think it's most important, that involves schools. So long as a substantial number of children are subjected to a public education, which is education to be a member of the public. It strikes me that we're in very deep trouble. So that any libertarian that can, either as a public school teacher, I know it doesn't seem to me offensive. If you're going to be a saboteur, where else would you be? But in the bowels of the ship. As a public school teacher or as the proprietor of a private school, it occurs to me that beginning to work with children is massively important. Children who are taught, I try to make this as a broad a statement as possible. We are at a point, I believe, of conflict between people who teach facts and people who revere inquiry. As of course I do, Bob. But at any rate, there is another meaning to that. Children who are taught facts are usually by the time they're eight or nine almost lost. It's difficult to retrieve a fact-taught person back to the world of thinking. Now there are some 600 schools in this country, I believe 600 may be much more. Already, who are using materials from the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, which means that they will not teach facts to any young child. That's a terrible thing to do to a child. They are teaching instead thinking and the process is involved in thinking. Now these schools, all impossibly small in number, are turning out people who may be irretrievably thoughtful. And infinite and great pests to the state. If you can do anything to hasten that, you will probably do more to deserve your crown of glory than anything else that you can do.  And you will have to depend on some of these young folks to do the heavy lifting. I now have to depend on it. You will want them to be thoughtful. They will not be thoughtful unless they have had the good fortune to be in a school that uses thinking rather than fact material. So schools are an essential libertarian project, it seems to me. And again, whether you're a public school teacher or not is not the point. I'm really, I do not have tremendous amount of patience with people who feel that you can only be a libertarian if you are perfect in all ways. I don't feel, I feel like working in the public school system in order to teach children, to encourage them to think is itself a sort of sanctuary movement of infinite importance. Oh, on sanctuary movements. It occurs to me that it might be very pleasant to have a libertarian type sanctuary movement of a special sort to protect and encourage and indeed to smuggle in those folks from Hong Kong who are anxious to come here but have no encouragement whatsoever. Now they come with vast amounts of money which strikes me as being useful and they usually, and they usually are very productive and creative people. So you can be quite selective about it. Now I don't know what church, in what church we could shelter these people but it seems to me it would be a very pleasant addition to the more indiscriminate sheltering of people in some of the traditional churches. I would like to provide sanctuary for a rich citizen from Hong Kong that could potentially help my cash flow a great deal. So that, but that's an aside. There are so many other things. I spoke just earlier in this meeting to someone who was developing a new building material, fine. The construction of buildings is an endless opportunity to engage in arguments with the bureaucracy, good. And to say good things to your neighbors, also good. I remember when I started building the house in which I now live, people in our neighborhood referred to it as a Polish swimming pool because it had three sides in a hill and the fourth side was empty. And they thought this was the silliest thing they'd ever heard of. When I built the house finally, without any consultation with any zoning administrator, so an electrical inspector came out once and asked me what I was doing and I explained it in such a way that he either didn't understand it or actually sympathized with it. He went away and he's never been back. But when we got the house built and people came out in the dead of winter and below zero temperature and discovered that the stove, which is at this 2,000 square foot houses, only heating source with dead cold and that they were warm, they understood that our Polish swimming pool with its 54 feet of glass facing south actually worked. Well now, this disturbed a number of prejudices that they'd had about building things. First of all, somebody who was obviously inept at most things had built it. Secondly, it defied their conventional notions of building from such an entry to a person's consciousness you can go anywhere. In short, if the house in which my grandparents lived was crudely and wrongly built, silly sort of structure, maybe everything else deserves re-examination. There is nothing that you can do that doesn't open a good conversation. So building, I think, is fine. The other day in the paper here, there was notice that Arizona University has begun a project in which they will try to find people who produce toxic waste and bring them together with people who can utilize the toxic waste. Well that's, to me, one of the most disappointing things of the year has been the fact that that was announced by a state university and not by a libertarian toxic waste company. Because it's such a perfectly sound, free market answer to a very complicated question. So I would urge somebody in here to spend a little time thinking about that. Of course if a libertarian can cure cancer that would be an excellent boost for things because when you accepted the Nobel Prize you could demand that it be paid in gold. And thus raising all sorts of new questions. And so it goes. Now another thing is, this is another warning, and I suppose I'm talking more about psychological tools, aren't I? But what the hell, I got to thinking about it. There is something I've noticed that some libertarians are prone to that I'm not too sure is a terribly useful tool. Although I love you, I'm sure that there's great merit in your practice of it. But that's the assumption that they have power. So they will argue about things as though they had power. And other people will make counter arguments as though they had power so that when Colonel Poole recommends something I may because I am of a different disposition, I may say well I wouldn't do it that way and we square off. This is silly. He has about as much chance of influencing the Joint Chiefs of Staff as I have of influencing the Quaker Church. So what we need to do, except he does have, I mean it may rub off, which is why I delight in the fact that he says these things. It wouldn't occur to me to say them. It's dirty work and somebody has to do it. The reason that I, Bob Poole could, as a matter of fact, come along and tell me that he was actually an undercover agent for the IRS. And I would smile and invite him to dinner figuring that he just may be needed a job. Because my feeling is that there's nothing he could do that could possibly counterbalance the incredible value that he has added to all of our lives by cutting back City Hall and by concentrating on local activities. I think it is probably in a social or political sense the most important thing that a libertarian has done in my lifetime. So that's the way that goes. Well, finally, what can I say about these tools? You have to invent them yourself. You have to use them yourself. And you have to take them very seriously. And as you use them, put little clippings up on the wall for your neighbors to see. You will never make much of an impact in your neighborhood unless you are respected, I believe. Not for what your opinion is, but for what you do. In West Virginia, nobody knew that I had a strange and curious life. They knew that I was a welder. And the first job I did on a farm in West Virginia, the entire family came out. And as I finished, it was welding up a big dump truck. And as I finished, the kids in the family, well, turned to their father and said, hey, daddy, that's not a bad bead. Looks like it'll hold. And I occurred to me, my God, that's the important thing. If my weld doesn't hold, I'll never be able to talk to these people about anything. But the weld held and I was able to talk to them. When it finally, they saw some article I'd written in one of the magazines for which I most often have written in the past few years, Gallery or Playboy or something like that. And that's what they all read, which is why I all write for. They thought it was just funny. You know, ha, ha, ha, ha. That's something, see, they think that what I do is weld and that what I do when I don't have anything else to do, which is almost true, is write articles for these people. And they don't mind that stuff. They have wonderful character along those lines.  If you want to, that's really an option, isn't it? So that's my, I guess my advice is simply that you should be, because you represent a strange position in the world today, you should be very competent at some familiar task and then talk to your neighbors. And my, what else can I say? I think we should all leave here and go forth and prosper mightily in each and our own way.


Hey everybody, it's Brian wanted to do a follow-up video on predicting SPX with magic eight ball. So I did a video that on my YouTube channel you're watching it now all predicting SPX and it just kind of detailed, you know what I'm working on, which is a Python application. Let me pull it up that pulls down from thinkorswim using their developer API and does a whole lot of math to try to guess where the stock market is going. This is it's given me multiple splitting headaches try to get here. It's actually fairly accurate. I covered that in the previous video and I'm trying to make it even more accurate. Today was kind of like a soft day so far and yesterday was a wacky day on the market.  It was kind of like wow. So for example here's a condor and I'm gonna kind of walk through this in case you're a developer. A condor is a range so you have to be in this range here. So this blue line represents the range. This zero represents the profit line. So if you're above zero, you're in profit. If you're below zero, you're at loss. You see these numbers down here where my mouse is circulating the kind of I'm not good at colors. Magenta that's the time curve or the time decay and the blue is at end of day. So at end of day if it's over here at say 41.73 it'd be a negative 4.60 you'd be a max loss. However if it was in this range it would be a max win of $40. Now if you're like me, $460 to win $40 is a horrible risk to reward ratio but that's how condors are designed. And this pink line you see how the number moves represents if you would hit the eject button in time meaning right now. So if I hit it right now I would be at $34.96 and this condor maxes out at $40. So this is pretty much at max profit. It is late afternoon here and I actually entered this condor early morning based off what Magic Ape Ball predicted and what I mean by that is Magic Ape Ball has been kicking out these predictions and it's this part's experimental but it's been kicking out these predictions and I plug them into thinkorswim. You notice I'm in simulated trading. Option traders take note simulated trading the fills are absolute garbage. So when I do these I'm doing them to expiration meaning I'm going to let this condor run all day long to expiration and then when I'm done with work I'm going to come back and go hey did it win or did it lose? And so far these have been very very good. For example this little line here I don't know if you can see it. That right there is where the current price is and it's almost dead center and when I opened this it was actually over here so it marked open it was up a bit. Let me see if I can pull up the chart here. Yeah kind of like I am so horrible at thinkorswim. There we go. Kind of like jumped up and right around here is when I entered the condor and I said it was going to be down here. All right it should say Magic Ape Ball said it was going to be down there. So enough babbling that's what I'm testing right now is I'm testing different trades that Magic Ape Ball kicks out. How do you find these trades is one of the questions I've gotten asked. Flip over here I did set up a Discord server and I set up a bot channel and it's just in here kicking out predictions all day long. I think I've got it queued for once a minute and it's saying current price closing price and then the range and then it's telling market center market range the volume node target and then the volume node range and that's like the dominant volume node if you know anything about volume profiling. This server Voidrums is not locked down. I literally it's just a test server I opened up. I've got a lot of developers in a Facebook group ironically called Voidrums and I'm probably going to tell them about that and convert this whole thing into a developer chat room and I'm going to once this Discord bot is fully been tested move all of this over to Axe Options and you're wondering what Axe Options is this is a group of professional traders. I am not a professional trader I'm a developer but these folks are nothing short of amazing and they've been super helpful at answering my questions I feel right at home. So if you're an investor or an options trader go to Axe option on YouTube go to about and then like join Axe and I don't get paid I want to make that very clear this is a subscription group and I am a member of that group I'm not an admin or anything I join this group because I want to be around professional traders and take all of their knowledge and plug it into the math behind all this code and so far it's been fairly lucrative for I think me and them I think it's been really good I've actually been winning option trades for a change since I started developing magic eight ball or before I was just losing so I'm kind of crunch for time this is going to be a shorter video I'm going to try and bust through questions real fast a how do I contact you I had a few of those um go to void realms dot com all one word void realms I'm actually a developer and I do online computer instruction as in my spare time I've just been kind of transitioning over to developing the magic eight ball system just because I got into options trading again I was hospitalized recently so if I'm battling or if my voice is going in out forgive me I also have my YouTube channel void realms where I actually teach computer programming I mean I have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos so if you're curious on how to program there's tons of videos there and axe options I'm actually in their discord group pull it up right here I'm not going to go in there because I don't want to give away their secrets accidentally but I'm in there all the time and they actually made like a little channel I think it's called code where me and a few other folks hang out we talk about this all day long so that's how you can get in touch with me another question is what is the future of this look like and this is me just kind of daydreaming I don't know if I have this level of free time but I want to set up something like this right now it's just running on a little server I have at home but I want to you know set up a few back end servers these would be like the number crunchers that are going to run magic eight ball because all of this so far is just the back end if you don't know what a back end is because you're not a computer person it's just a server or code that sits in the background this will pump information over to a database that database will feed a web server so you could go to a web page and of course the discord bot that I'm testing and um probably going to develop a mobile app and the user will be able to do all that I'm not certain if I want to even go down this road but a friend of mine suggested that I sell subscriptions meaning like you would pay to be part of this website or discord or whatever I don't know if I could handle that or if I even have that kind of free time again all of my attention is really on this code and I'm more of a back end developer it's what I enjoy and a lot of this is stuff that I've done and I can do it's just going to take me a bit longer but that being said that's kind of the future is I want to really build this thing out and make it publicly available may charge subscriptions may just you know you know log in and here it is free of charge I don't know discord is what I'm focused on now and I've designed this so these backends can actually pump two multiples so like I can do like see if I can do the power of copy and paste here here we go I can do like multiple discord servers so like we could have axe group my own somebody else's you know somebody else wants it too that kind of thing um my friends are more business savvy than I am and they've told me don't give this away for free so I haven't even entertained the idea of allowing it to go anywhere other than my group and axe's group and once it's tested of course it's going out of my group and fully into axe because this is where the professional options traders are and I want them to be able to give me feedback um beyond that a lot of what I'm testing right now are you know throwing out test trades and then letting them run to end of day to see if they expire now if you don't know what that means in the options world this condor if this price lands in this range I get that full forty dollars credit right forty dollars doesn't sound like a lot but if you multiply that by number of trades five days a week you could pay for a very nice house using this I mean you can make just an ungodly amount of money and of course if you know options you know you can design the trades not just condors I mean this can do butterflies verticals so on and so on you can design trades so that you can win big and lose big I'm just really focused on how accurate is this for end of day expiration um final note I had I had some some actually some harsh critics which you know I kind of took that with a grain of salt people are skeptical of things I am as well being a developer idea with logic and they said you can't possibly predict the stock market because things like the stock market is more than just math and sbx is actually 500 companies not just one thing you can't possibly predict them all you're absolutely right I do agree totally this will never be able to predict like UFOs landing in Times Square or all out nuclear war or you know our president saying something he shouldn't um but it's just it really helps I think people like me that have limited skills in the market really figure out what's going on under the hood so for example that condor I entered here and at that time all signs pointed up everybody thought this market was going to just rip all day long and magic eight ball said nope it's going to be about down here somewhere and that's where it's been all day right where magic eight ball said and actually this trade is pretty much full profit so if I wanted to I could close the trade for full profit right now I'm babbling I'm slightly medicated for my last hospital visit forgive me I will try to make regular updates to this but I'm actually more focused on just family and getting back to life and work and you know this is kind of like just a side project but if you have questions or concerns or if you just want to chat or whatever visit the void realms discord I may I'm leaning towards keeping the server but I may remove it but um I'll be in the void realms server and uh you can always of course go out to my website and just contact me via there talk to you later bye


I deleted everything after I posted my last video, which is my reality check. I wanted to disconnect to focus on myself and really just kind of hone in on You know the things I was struggling with at the time and really focused on my mental health Many Mua just released his video where I've been and he's finally come back from a little mental health break And there's a lot a lot that we can learn from it What is up 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, I am not a drama channel My channel is actually all about mental health So what I try to do is pull from different topics going on in the YouTube community and all of that to try to teach you Yeah, you how to improve your mental and emotional well-being So if you're into that kind of stuff make sure you subscribe and ring that notification bell and it's crazy It's crazy because I just made a video a little bit earlier and I was talking a bit about the beauty guru drama So like obviously I don't do makeup, but I was introduced to all this stuff from my amazing girlfriend She loves watching different makeup artists and their channels and her friend Shelby So they kind of got me in the mix and then all this stuff went down You know in the beauty community and I know a lot of you are new here You know you came from the Shane Dawson stuff But before I was talking about some of the stuff going on in the beauty community So a lot of you already know, but I'm not sure how many of you keep up to date with it I'll link some videos up in the info card so you can go check those out But quick recap basically some stuff went down and Manny MUA, you know people were calling him a social climber and he's had a lot of friendships that I Don't know come and go and many is the common denominator and then Gabriel Zamora made a video about it And then Manny made his video and he said he was taking a break So that's a little recap Manny just came back and he made a video and part of it is him announcing that he's doing like Kind of this little mini docu series about where he's been and So one of the things that I want to talk about and there's gonna be a few topics in here So please stay tuned because they're very important and again I make these videos to help you out because I know that some of you can relate to it so Part of this and I haven't been keeping up on you know the comments of that video or Twitter But I guarantee I guarantee there are so many people already who are saying oh, this is just a PR play Oh, he's just doing this to get people back on his side and all that other kind of stuff That's cool. I think it's ridiculous because here's the thing one of the videos I'm linking up here in the info card is how to earn forgiveness.  All right So I just want you to kind of keep that in mind when it comes to you know Different people who are trying to change or trying to get forgiveness But like I said like actions speak louder than words like I think it's crazy for anybody to think like oh Yeah, well, you know, I'll know whether or not I forgive this person like in the next I don't know. He took a month off like what what like he hasn't done anything to show us He's changed and even when he releases these videos like what has he done, right? So I will be like covering it because I've not subscribed to many until today I just subscribed to him because I'm really fascinated by it Like for example, I have an entire playlist about how to apologize because so many people so many people don't know how to apologize, right? And you know, I think it's important to kind of look at these different situations to see what people are doing Are there actions speaking louder than words? And like I want to watch them and I want to review them in a mental health aspect Seeing how he's changing if he's changing what he's actually doing and I work with a bunch of drug addicts and alcoholics So I'm pretty good at seeing through BS So I did subscribe to his channel so I can review those but the next important topic that I want to talk about that I never get to talk about on my channel But this is why I love making videos like this because people like many give me the opportunity to talk about this stuff on my channel So I will preface this by saying like and when it comes to many and what I'm about to talk about It's all speculation like I'll dive back into it after you know We see but I want to plant this seed with you and what this topic is is the topic of mental health breaks All right, like I know so many people I know so many people who take mental health breaks Maybe they take a day off of work or maybe they take a week off and they take this little mental health break, right? And it's like if you're not doing anything with that mental health break you wasted your time All right, and I know like some of you might be getting a little defensive about it But like hear me out hear me out So part of this like a lot of what I try to teach you guys about improving your mental health Not only is it from my education and my research and my studying but a lot of it's from personal experience So a little over six years ago right before I got clean and sober. I was hitting rock bottom I was a crazy person. I had health issues I had all sorts of problems and my the owners of my company they're like Chris You need to take a break like you're losing it you need to take a break So they gave me a week off they gave me a mental health break. Do you know what I did during that week? Can I tell you what I did? I sat in my dark apartment by myself I got drunk and high all day and I watched the entire series of lost That's all it was it was me going in and out of blackouts watching lost like how insane is that?  But I would appreciate if they did that because if they said that it would inspire people to do the same So the last topic I want to talk about is in this clip right here Manny talks about something You know in the beginning of the month, I was like self-medicating Because I was going through it mentally. So yeah, Manny talks about self-medicating and I am interested to see what that is Like as an addict and alcoholic in recovery, I know all about self-medicating Like I have a brain that beats me up constantly and in order to quiet that voice I would self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. So in Manny's case, I'm interested to see I don't know if it was substances, but I know some people they self-medicate with other things like shopping or Gambling or some of them. It's being promiscuous.   Now, here's something that I teach to my clients Here's something I teach to my clients at the rehab I was working at. All right This is a this is a secret hack that I'm gonna teach all of you. Okay. You ready? You ready?  And pretty much everybody really raises their hand, right? I would say how many of you drink or use because of feelings of guilt and shame and Pretty much everybody raises their hand. So I tell them I say I'm gonna teach you the best recovery hack ever You're gonna get rid of two triggers by not doing things that make you feel guilty and ashamed Like it seems that seems too too easy to be true, right? But it's the real stuff like that's what I imagine Man he might talk about is he was self-medicating because he felt he has he has some kind of Conscience in him and he felt bad about the things that he was doing. You know what I mean? So like if you're somebody like that, I can't believe the great timing of this because in my last video I just made about Shane Dawson I was talking about like doing these random acts of kindness if you are somebody who has a lot of Negative self-talk if you judge yourself too harshly if you have problems with self-love and self-compassion I'm telling you go out and do things for other people go out and be kind I guarantee it will make you feel better Go out and do things without expecting anything in return The only thing you should expect is that good feeling you get just by doing something nice But the one of the reasons I love mindfulness is it balances your expectations like don't expect that every time you do A nice thing you're gonna feel great because then you are really trying to get something in return But I would say if you did ten nice things in a day, you'll probably feel good at least at least With about eight of them. All right So this is the way that you counterbalance that negative voice in your head If you're somebody who carries around a lot of guilt or shame or self-criticism Just go out and start helping people like the way I say it is it's really hard for your brain to beat you up And call you a bad person when you're going out and putting so much good into the world like somebody left a comment on my last video about perfectionism and self-criticism and anxiety and I have some videos about self-love and self-compassion that you should check out But I really need to do a video about perfectionism and anxiety because I definitely can relate to that But anyways, I just want to talk about this and again. I will be reviewing Many MUAs videos when they come out. So here's what I want to do down in the comments below Let's do this. Let's talk about mental health breaks Like let me know how you take advantage of a mental health break or what you suggest somebody else could do during a mental health break To really improve their mental health. All right, I can't wait to see what you guys say down in the comments below But anyways, that's all I got for you with this video If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and if you're new I'm always making videos to help you out with your mental and emotional well-being Make sure you subscribe ring that notification bell and a huge Thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on patreon And if you would like to get some merch from the rewired soul shop, which is totally designed by my amazing girlfriend Clicker top right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you next time


How you navigate around a Moodle site will depend partly on the theme and the settings your administrator has decided on. But you can usually expect to see a navigation block and an administration block wherever you go. These might be on the right or the left side of your screen. The links in them are clickable so for example if we click my profile settings in the administration block it opens up to allow us to edit our profile, change our password and other actions. In some Moodle sites and Moodle themes these blocks and other blocks can be moved to the side in a narrow tab to free up more space. For example in this theme here if we look at the navigation block which is on the left we can click and it appears docked to the side. Hovering our cursor over it allows us to see what's there and then we need to make sure that we click to open it up again if we want it full size. Themes in Moodle 2.5 are increasingly responsive. This means that if you look at your screen on a small size for example a smartphone the blocks will appear at the very bottom. In the navigation block if we click the my home link this takes us to a customizable page my home. It's a personal dashboard which gives you an overview of the courses you're enrolled in showing any activities which need to be completed if there are any. And you have a button customizes page which will allow you to add extra blocks. If we now go inside a course by clicking either in the course overview the name of the course or in the navigation block we have the list of my courses and clicking its name there. We can see how the navigation block changes once we're in a course. We have the link current course with the name of the course and then the different sections. These are numbered as topics but it's possible as we'll see in a later video to change them to names. And then when activities are added when we click the topic name the activities will appear underneath. We can also see here a trail taking us back this is the name of the course the category home would take us to the front page. Moodle calls this the navigation bar and it's another way of finding your way around a course. In the navigation block clicking my courses will then take you back to my home. You'll learn more about the navigation and the administration block in further videos.