G'day, how are you going? Welcome to my channel Bootlossophy and my name is Ted. Today I'll be reviewing these beauties, the Grant Stone Diesel Boots in a makeup from Betterlassie Carlo Tannery in Italy, that Grant Stone call the Settle Tan Vige. So this little beauty is the Grant Stone Diesel Boot Settle Tan Vige. I've had these for about seven months and while I have worn them regularly, because of my huge rotation of over 50 boots at this stage, I haven't worn them particularly hard. But as you can see they have been worn in and I think enough now that I can give you a fair review of these boots and how they wear in everyday use. As you can see the style falls into what can be classed as a service or dress boot of the plain toe variety. It has classic simple elegant lines. The profile is sleek and the sleekness creates a little optical illusion aided by the flange of the storm or split reverse wealth, more of that later, which makes it look like a very flat shoe. But there is plenty of room for your instep and toes in there. Viewed from the top it has a very anatomical shape rounding the ball of your feet into rounded toes. Despite the rounded toe box they don't look blocky like Redwing's Iron Ranges or their blacksmith plain toe boot. The veg tan leather from Italy which I'll go into more detail later on comes out of the box quite orange but as you can see it darkens with wear into a warm honey and when you look down is framed by the lighter natural color of the veg tan wealth. All in all it looks like a very stylish boot. Let's talk a bit about the company that makes these boots. Grant Stone started in 2016 and was founded by Wyatt Gilmore and Josh Lane. They are a direct customer company in that they sell only through their website thus keeping prices down. Although at time of filming I believe they're now available through the two or three standard and strange physical stores across various US cities. The Gilmore family has a long connection with quality footwear starting I believe with Wyatt's grandfather who worked for Alden for decades. For many years Wyatt's father worked with a family in China who owned a factory in Xiamen and Wyatt himself worked in that factory learning his business for eight years before the idea of starting Grant Stone started to crystallize. Yes the factory is in China. Grant Stone boots are made in China. Let's get this quality thing out of the way. People may have many objections to items made in China and poor quality is definitely one of them. If you want to hear my rant about all the reasons why people should not necessarily object to made in China you can check out my review of the Grant Stone diesel boot in coffee suede that you can catch up on over here. But let me just deal with the if it's made in China it's poor quality objection. Let's just deal with that one. Quality is not about geography. I'm a management consultant I know. Quality is about processing procedure and about specifications. If you specify poor materials and a specific cost you will get a bad product. If you specify good materials and a higher target of manufacturing cost and you impose QC processes and continuous inspections you will get an ace product. So let's just say Grant Stone made their boots wherever with some very clear quality based specs and processes and they make a stunning variety of boots and shoes. Six different styles of boots and seven different styles of shoes. They apply different makeup severe different styles so that for example the diesel boot design comes in 12 different makeups a variation of leathers and soles and that's not counting the limited releases that they run from time to time including exotic leathers like Maduro shell kangaroo and ostrich. I'm going to put a link in the description below to an interview why it took part in on the stitch down website. I recommend you read it to see the vision and mission that shines through this company and the work in design and innovation that these guys undertake as well as some very revealing facts about how they handle customer service and QC. The link is in the description box below. Okay now let's take a look at how this diesel boot is put together. I'll start from the top down. As I said earlier the uppers are vegetarian full grain leather from Italian tannery vettelasi color in a color that Grant Stone calls saddle tan. Let's unpack that a little. There are primarily three ways of tanning leather vegetable tanning tanning using minerals primarily chromium salts and oil tanning. You either use vegetable tannins or chromium salts or fats and oils to preserve the leather when you tan it. Sometimes the leather goes through two more processes and that's referred to as combination tanning. Obviously veg tanning is a more natural way and is arguably kinder to the environment. Veg tanning takes longer could be up to several months in fact and tends to produce tougher more rugged leather often used in making things like saddles for example. In this case vettelasi put their hides into a huge barrel called a botali and cycles the hides for 30 to 35 days. The leather that comes out is tough and smells like saddles. It's a gorgeous smell and if we had a smell of vision television even after seven months where you'd be able to appreciate this earthy natural leather like smell. In this particular saddle tan color it's a very light colored so it develops light and dark hues as you wear it and as rain and weather gets on it. You can see in the vab that it rolls as well as breaks with wear. I mentioned it came out of the box quite orange and has now got to be warm honey but you can see the patina. This is a patina machine and I look forward to keeping on in the development of this patina. It's fully lined even the tongue which is semi-gusseted up to the second eyelid. This helps to avoid that slipping tongue syndrome that you get in some un-gusseted tongue boots when the tongue slipped to one side you wear. The lining is full four grain American cow leather and together with the vettelasi leather combines to a thickness of nearly four mils that's pretty thick and when you put the boot on you know it's sturdy. It has the typical grandstone brass hardware of four large eyelets and three speed hooks. In my view the perfect combination to help you put these on and off. Grandstone gives you two pairs of laces a flat cotton pair of these leather laces. One thing grandstone laces are long like very long. I'm not a huge fan of wrapping the laces around the shaft before I knot them but unless you cut the laces this is what you have to do here. I haven't cut the laces yet maybe I will one day. Coming down the boot there's basically only the van and the tongue, the two quarters and the two-piece backstay. Very simple panels so very elegant. The stitching is very even and secure. Triple stitching on the quarters, double stitching on the backstays, the stitch density per inch is even. The toebox is structured I believe using real leather as stiffeners. That's almost unheard of these days with the increasing use of leather board or thermal plastics or elastic stiffeners. The heel counter inside is also real leather sandwiched between the lining and the uppers and capped by this two-piece backstay. If we start to move into the sole construction this boot uses a veg tan leather insole and under that is a cork filling and a steel shack. A shack is a piece of material usually steel as in this case that's inserted between here and here as a stiffener and arch support so that when your feet compress into the sole it supports your arch and doesn't sink into this gap and it also stops you from getting tired arches of your standing all day. The midsole and outsole are also a veg tan leather attached to the uppers using Goodyear Well construction. A welt is a strip of leather that's sewn on the inside of the turning uppers and the outside edge of the welt is then Goodyear stitch through the midsole and outsole. You can see the outsole stitch from above the welt and here under the sole. A Goodyear welt constructed boot provides the ability to re-sole the boot where you can simply undo the stitches here and replace the outsole without damaging the welt or the uppers. It's also more water resistant than other methods because the welt forms a barrier between the outside and the inside. In this case it's even more water resistant because of this. Either a storm milk or split reverse quilt I can't tell the difference but basically part of the welt is flanged up against the outside of the uppers and that creates an extra barrier and check this out. A welt being a strip of leather has a beginning and an end. Usually the joint is placed here on the inside of the boot against your arch in order to hide it. Often you'll be able to see the joint and sometimes the ends even overlap. In this case you can play the spot the welt joint game because Grant Stone do it so well that it's near impossible to pick where the welt joins. As I kind of alluded to at the beginning quality control is excellent. The factory goes through its QC processes as dictated by Grant Stone so they know the level of performance required and then back in Grant Stone's Michigan store each shipment is looked over again and just before each individual pair is sent out there's a final inspection and a brush and polish. If we keep moving down now in construction we see the heel is a full leather stacked heel with this rubber insert for a bit of grip and shock absorption which brings us to comfort, fit and sizing. Some people are wary of leather sold shoes. Of course they can be very slippery especially when new and before it scuffs and creates its own friction surface as you see here and once they scuff they start to look a little ugly maybe. They also show wear more dramatically. Some people put toe taps on the tips here I'm fine with that. The toe tap protect the wear on the toes. I like leather soles. I feel that they feel better. There seems a level of natural shock absorption. I'm careful when I walk in potentially slippery places like wet cement surfaces or well polished shopping center floors. I've worn leather soles since I was a kid and as long as you're aware of them I've found them quite safe. One thing with these though they are a series of leather, cork and more leather pretty thick and they took a while to break in. Nothing too dramatic or painful just awkward. That by the way was all the breaking required. These diesel boots were a great fit and comfy out of the box. The Leo Lass with the wide toe box is anatomically perfect for my feet. The heel and middle of my feet feel hugged and snug while I have space to wiggle my toes up front. The tough thick uppers did need a bit of flexing like the sole but a couple of days did it. All that leather and cork does provide a reasonable level of shock absorption and arch support. These are not soft sneakers though. You know you're wearing a boot your feet are gripped but each step feels comfortable. There's no jarring and the arch support stops your feet from getting tired at the end of the day.  I don't find it a problem. I find it like the gorgeous smell just the characteristic of the saddle tan veg tan leather. It's real leather. As for sizing like almost all my American boots I ordered a half size down from true to size. Assuming that true to size is as measured on the brand device that you stand on in true stores. I'm a US 8 and a half in a D width in US sizing and I bought these 8 D which is perfect. If you're in any doubt at all I contact Grant Stone by phone if you're in the US or at least by email and chances are you might even speak to the wire of Josh but whoever it is you'll find him extremely knowledgeable and informative and helpful about the sizing. Okay so it's a tough boot. When and where would you wear it and what would you wear it with? Well firstly it is a tough boot so technically apart from the slippery leather sole I guess you could wear it as a work boot in a shop like say a hardware store where you're moving and kicking boxes or a carpentry shop or something like that. I wouldn't though mainly because it's such a beautiful leather. It's a casual boot as far as I would go. It's smart casual and maybe a stretch to business casual. So my use case scenarios include going to my office, going shopping, going to friends for dinner or a barbecue, drinks and meals at the pub, even nice date night dinners. So I wear them with smarter jeans, brown or gray or black, any kind of chinos on top of a polo shirt, button downs, button ups, flannels, sports coats, blazers, bomber jackets, leather jackets. Funny I don't see myself wearing them with blue jeans and t-shirt. They're casual but not in that way in my mind. Because of the leather I think they're dressy casual. At the end of the video I'm going to put a few more stills and b-rolls of what I wear them with so watch this video to the end. Now let's take a look at how you look after these boots. Instruction number one brush, brush, brush with a good horsehair brush. A horsehair brush has really fine soft bristles that removes dirt and dust, moves the waxes and oils around and the heat of the brushing actually brings up a luster in the leather. Brush after everywhere, I don't but you should do what I say not what I do but at least brush them once a week. Don't let dirt and dust build up. Definitely put shoe trees in them after everywhere. Shoe trees help them to retain the shape and stop curling up into an ugly toe spring and shoe trees can help to reduce the rolls and creases if you don't want them.  If you really have to use a mild leather cleaner like leather honey and if you really really have to they've got a real muck and grease layer a mild saddle soap but read the instructions. You don't want to be stripping the leather of the natural oils and waxes. It's a smooth leather so when you feel the need to apply conditioner my go-to for smooth leathers is Venetian Shoe Cream in neutral. This will not only condition and moisturize the leather but it will also buff it through a nice sheen. I'll put a link to some of these products in the description box below. Once the Venetian Shoe Cream dries to a haze, 10 minutes, brush to a nice sheen and you can also use a polishing cloth to buff it small. If the leather feels really dry apply more Venetian Shoe Cream before you brush and leave it for a couple of hours before you brush if not overnight. With this leather I would avoid boot oils and mink oils. I think that would really darken the leather and turn it into a brown shoe. Now that you've got it nice and clean and buffed let's look at the value. I bought these boots for US 360 dollars at the time it was a little over 500 Aussie dollars. For Australia that is not cheap when you consider the number of fashion brands producing boots at 200 dollars or less. But those are fashion brands. They are constructed in a wear, wear out, throw away manner.   It'll smell of cannibals. I wouldn't even compare them with Thursday boots as much as I love them. Thursday are entry-level boots. They sell for 200 US dollars in about 375 Aussie through Amazon in Australia. The real comparison is with quality boots like Australia's Aaron Williams Chelsea boots that sell for nearly 600 Aussie dollars. American Heritage Boots like Red Wing and Wolverine sell here in Australia for over 500 dollars. Parkhurst, another of my favorite brands, costs around 500 Aussie as well. If you bought Alden from a US website it would cost you close to a thousand dollars landed. So if you agree with me that Grandstone boots are a quality boot then it is in the ballpark with those competitors. But I can't stress this enough, I think they are excellent quality. Some people have compared the way they're made, their attention to detail, the stitching, the QC as being Alden or better than Vibeau quality. I agree. I think made in China and direct to consumer obviously play a role in pricing because quality-wise I think these are worth another 100 to 200 dollars more, that's US dollars.  I like their pricing and at that pricing I'll keep buying. So that's it. That's what I think about the Grandstone diesel boot in Saddle Town, Beijing. If you have a pair, join in the conversation in the comments below. Do you agree with my assessment? If you don't have a pair yet, tell me what you think of what you see. Would you buy a pair? Leave a few comments below and if you like this video, I hope you did.  I'm like all the other YouTube channels. Liking one of my videos will mean that YouTube will show this to more people and that will help me build my channel. And if you haven't already, why don't you subscribe to my channel by clicking the subscribe button as well. I'm not going to send you scam emails or anything. All that'll do is that it'll tell YouTube that people like the channel enough to follow me and that will also help me grow my channel and get it to more viewers. And when I release more boot reviews and boot related content, which I hope you like, YouTube will let you know it's up and you can watch it. So help me out. Like and subscribe below. Now just watch to the end because I'll put some vision of what I wear with these boots after the credits. I hope to see you again soon. Till next time, bye.


Hi guys this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this lesson we are going to dive into piano octaves. We are going to look at what it is, how you play them, some technical aspects, what are the advantages of playing them which you need to know otherwise sometimes people avoid them because octaves pretty much sound the same. You are taking a G and stacking it with another G so why do you need to bother? It's the same note isn't it? Same color and so on. So we look at some applications of octaves where all you can use them in different genres and also the posture when you play octaves technically it's a bit different than playing linear scales you know okay and through the lesson we are going to look at two exercises one exercise for the left hand and one for the right hand which involve octaves. So before we get started it'll be awesome if you could turn on the subscribe button and hit the bell icon for regular notifications. Also the notation for this lesson is waiting for you on Patreon along with my handwritten notes, midi files, backing tracks for a lot of the lessons which we've been doing on our YouTube channel for all these years. So let's get cracking. So first of all what is an octave? An octave is not playing a scale and then reaching the octave. No an octave is the distance it's an interval between two notes and those two notes are any note any of the 12 notes on the piano keyboard or guitar or whatever instrument you play and in addition to that you stack it up with either the same note but higher pitch. One octave higher or one octave lower and incidentally the frequency the vibrating frequencies of these notes get doubled up. For example if you play an A here which is at 220 Hertz you can octave it to play 440 octave it again to play 880 Hertz octave that to play 1,760 Hertz and so on and so forth but then beyond a point you lose notes on the piano and a human ear cannot even make out stuff so it doesn't even matter. Now if you're half if you want to go below the octave you have the frequency so that's 440 that's 220, 110, 55 and then 27.5 Hertz which you can barely hear right. So that's the fundamental frequency and it doubles. So octave is kind of the way they used to calibrate instruments in the first place back in the day. Few things while playing the octaves which I find some students doing even I used to do by the way and then kind of fixed along the way because it gets very tough if you don't follow the right posture and the finger technique while playing the octave. So if you play like this in either hand what tends to happen is these three fingers the ring finger middle and index they tend to either they tend to lock themselves to each other or they tend to just go in the air they just tend to be in the air and if you have to reuse them for some other note you know you're gonna find that process very difficult because you develop the wrong muscle memory to keep these in the air.  So this is the gentle technique which you should follow keeping your other fingers not in the air but and not even and not keeping it flat. Don't play flat like this. You don't want your hand to be like this.  This seems to work well. You also reduce the strain on your fingers. See here there is a lot of strain as I'm finding if I play like this there's almost no strain sort of like you're eating a meal so with your hands. So octaves with the pinky and the thumb and with the thumb what people tend to do is sometimes we keep the thumb in a kind of a chopping style like you're trying to chop thumb something with your thumb rather than that give your thumb a slight curve a slight curve and you can play it with the bony a part of the thumb rather than from the tip you can play it from the bony a part around here so you'll also get more power okay and don't be afraid of if you're playing a black note you don't have to hit it with the pinky on the tip you can hit it slightly curved as well because some of you I'm sure cannot stretch that much so if you try to play like this then you're putting a lot of pressure on the stretching so try to play with as much of ease as possible so if you take this octave I'm not bending the fingers like this in a claw shape or anything I'm just keeping it naturally down and another thing some people do is we push our entire arm to play the octave because it gets a bit tricky and con and constrained for our fingers so I would encourage you to not use your shoulder just use either your fingers only fingers or if you're not getting any power with the fingers then check this out you can get more power through your wrist as you can see the shoulder is fine and I'm not some people tend to push it this way this is an absolute no it's okay fine use a bit of your shoulder I would encourage no shoulder but more forearm and wrist see and you get some volume as well zero shoulder my shoulder is just there to support the body the upper body so let's try that with the right hand now don't keep your fingers in the air right and there's something your mind also has to think I've talked about the technicality your mind has to always think of this distance and it should not leave this distance because we are in luck you can go you can do any of the 12 notes on the piano with the same distance so it's almost like a divider which you have in a geometry class which we use to kind of remember distances so f to f that distance try to remember and just push it here and you can kind of play a lot of things you don't really need your eyes or at the most you would need your eyes for just one of the notes of the octave so if you take D flat I'm only looking I'm only looking at here and then when I go to a flat I'm still looking here I'm not looking at the top one so I'm trusting my distance I'm like how we trust a divider in the geometry class we measure it there take it and then go somewhere else and then do whatever we have to do so I'm going to give you some exercises as well so do stay tuned first off if you're playing contemporary music like rock music dance music you know Latin salsa that sort of stuff you'll do a lot of octave movement in the left hand to mimic the drum kit or to mimic the primary percussion instrument in the ensemble so if you take a note like E flat find its octave E flat that's here you can play it with your pinky and your thumb and normally if you play this over a ballad style chord progression the left hand just holding the roots just holding the roots how do you make this more interesting what if the drummer is doing something now what what could that be equated to kick drum snare drum now the drummer is hitting those instruments they are very percussive instruments they don't really produce an audible pitch you can't make out oh the kick is playing an F sharp and there's no point of that the drums are to make people dance not to sing now if you follow the drummer and do something like this let's say the pattern is doop and if you do you're playing a melody so that's counterproductive you're trying to copy a rhythm instrument and then play a melody over that it may be an overkill also of data because everyone should have a different role melody does melody and rhythm does rhythm they don't they shouldn't fight with each other so a good way to compliment the drummer would be to use octaves because it doesn't overdose the notes you're just taking maybe the chord root at the time which let's say if it's E flat taking E flat adding the octave and then like a traditional bass player in a in an ensemble you're just following the drums so there's a very useful use case or advantage of an octave on the piano you can always follow the drummer and the right hand what should it do just the chords I guess what if the chords change and the groove stays the same no problem just go to the root of the new chord and keep the same groove which is kick snare kick kick snare kick snare kick kick snare something like that could also consider a couple of dance grooves maybe you know so this is the support for that groove so in a sense you don't even need a drummer now you are the drummer you can do rock you can do dance you can even do basic disco with octaves you just have to kind of automatically provides energy instead of just doing the pulse which is nice if you split that up you split up the root and the octave you get eight notes one generally a nice disco pattern some right hand chord it's or a melody okay so rock dance disco definitely very useful and it makes everything thicker so if you take even melodies sounds a lot better I think with octaves makes everything a lot thicker even in the bass even in the left hand so it's very important that you learn them and you with octave playing you have the opportunity to do a lot more with your harmony and melody so what I mean by that is a simple a simple trick if you take an e major chord or an e minor chord let's say I'm playing it with an inversion GbE which ends up being the first inversion this is your root if I just stack an octave the nearest note of the chord and add from this G to that it makes the chord a lot thicker and B if I'm a pageating this I have the opportunity to make a melody out of all this stuff by just floating the top note stuff like that maybe a G major so it can be useful when you're trying to bring in a melody line while there are chords already like maybe this pattern like a Montuno Latin salsa kind of pattern really need octaves to be able to play that so octaves are very useful you have to learn them and we are going to now do two exercises one for the left hand and the other for the right hand so for the left hand I'm just going to consider something very bluesy and rock and roll like I'm starting on a and here's your drill a a c d e these are your notes so you go with a little bit of swing I think that sounds pretty good a c d so the challenge is a c you have to immediately go to see you don't want to do a c d you don't want to have that gap no one's going to allow you to play in their band if you have that gap so while you're playing a you need to think oh I have to now play c so a c d e a c d e a c d e a c and you can pretty much play anything in your right hand which suits this if you want a variation we can do a slide from the D sharp to the E which is a tritone going to the perfect fifth speed this up maybe we can start in the right end with a simple chord a minor should work build from there and play any of your favorite songs or destroy some of your favorite songs like sorry about that but you get the idea so you have you can even use this over a 12 bar blues you can transpose this back it's a nice pattern to get your octaves going now it also may cause a little bit of hand burning what happens when your hands hurt is generally it's your forearms which will hurt the most so my advice to you is if you're playing for 10 minutes take a break for five minutes sort of like that especially at the earlier stages or another way to put this in your practice routine is use this as your warm-up you always if ever you want to warm up on an instrument you need to literally warm up the the you you have to be warm your hands have to be capable to play anything so especially if you're playing a gig your outdoor it's cold these sort of exercises are nice I tend to practice this before a gig I will probably just do a kind of a shiver as I call it I will shiver on the on the root and octave after I've done a little bit of warm-up like this so let's say I do this shows starting in about 10 minutes and I'll just keep doing this speed it up a bit more and then shiver a bit you feel pretty warmed up right you don't want to overdo it otherwise your forearm will get busted you it'll be a lot of strain so do it you'll have to know so you have to experiment octaves are going to stretch out your hand so you don't have that freedom to kind of relax your fingers your fingers are always kind of stretched out so you need to practice with breaks that is very important now let's move on to a right hand melody which I've composed and I'm also going to teach you a nice chord progression which will go with that so then you've got a left hand octave pattern and we've got a right hand melody to be played with octaves then we are going to conclude the lesson with a lot of interesting tricks with octaves so I'll play you the melody it's on E minor and then we'll break it down so the melody goes so that's E G F sharp D B E D D G B A you could argue that this is in the G major scale E G F sharp D B E D D G B A you could read the notation it's available for you E G F sharp D B E D D G B G F sharp D B now let's stack each of these notes with octaves and see how we go from there definitely sounds a lot a lot more impactful now you can play this the normal way just with the thumb and the pinky thumb for the low one and pinky for the high octave but to make right hand melodies sound more usable with octaves especially for a non groovy genre like a more ballad style which I'm trying now you hold down your sustain pedal the sustain pedal is a double-edged sword because if you hold it down it's gonna sustain everything as you can hear so be a bit careful it can also make you sound even worse than where you started so you want to lift the pedal just before or at the point of the next chord so if ever you're using the pedal you have to be responsible and lift it before the next chord otherwise you defeat the purpose so E minor B minor lift and press lift every time the chord changes and now your melody gets that sustain and not just sustain it gets this resonance as well that additional resonance which the actual acoustic piano offers because a hammer is hitting two strings or sometimes three strings in a grand piano they will resonate with each other and then that has to be amplified through the soundboard the sustain pedal makes that come out a lot more grander it adds more of the harmonic content of the vibrations it's gonna bring out the harmonics of the sound and you're gonna hear those harmonics play almost like an electronic pad or a string chord it will sound see you can hear that sustain it's almost like you have another patch like a pad or a some ooo of a choir kind of playing for you so the pedal is very powerful but use it wisely so the melody is there we go let's use let's play that together forget the left hand I'm going to teach you the left hand shortly E G F sharp D B with the pedal for the most part now let's get the chords first chord is E minor B minor C major G major if you can do D major over F sharp at the very end so B minor C major G major D over F sharp you can also break break up your chord like this maybe an arpeggio so E minor B minor C major G D are your left hand chords so in the lesson we've covered a left hand pattern and a right hand melody both using octaves and hopefully showing you the importance of octaves now let's conclude our discussion by looking at the challenges of playing octaves first of all we looked at the posture and all that there are challenges you know but there are some musical challenges so we look at the challenges and how to overcome them of course and what happens if octaves get boring I don't think they generally do but if ever they do let's figure out a few solutions for that problem as well so if things I think the main challenge is what if things are too fast what if you know it just gets too fast on the piano so here's what you could try and do let's say you take a melody like this is near impossible at least for me to play as octaves very tough needs a lot of training so you don't have to do all the notes as octaves you can do something like like that stuff like that versus that sounds quite plain and simple but with octaves well I could do for the whole tune this is like some serious you know workout is happening for my hand so you may not want to shock your hand so much and it's too much so a good way to have a good way to play octaves but not burn your hand would be use octaves only when you when you need to like maybe the first note or wherever the important notes are maybe maybe not all those five but at the land maybe just at the e and then drop them you need that divider with your hand you can't lose that shape or that distance so when things get fast you have to pick and choose which notes you need to kind of octave and this could serve to our advantage in in case of songs with lyrics because the important words of the song maybe the word better in he jude for example you don't have to play octaves for all that you can do or not play octaves at all for that one word whenever notes are simple or long in duration see I didn't use any octaves there because it's too fast for me so that works so you can pick and choose so when the melody gets too linear too technical too fast you don't need octaves so that's generally the way you would overcome the challenge of playing octaves but keep the right posture that is the geometrical the divider shape of your hand is very important not straining your fingers don't keep it flat keep it curved and lastly I wanted to address the question what happens if octaves get boring so you could do a couple of things which will make it a lot more interesting let's say we'll go back to the melody we learnt earlier which is when I played flat I'm striking both the notes together at the same time but one technique you would apply is this flamming octave technique I call it flam because that's what we say on a snare drum as opposed to it's not one hit so they use both the sticks and hit the same drum just a little a few milliseconds apart this is the flam octaves as I call it so I think that automatically sounds a lot more human lot more interesting I think and wherever you have these long notes you can use what I could call as a fluttered octave technique or I also sometimes call it shivering octaves okay that adds a very sitar like vibe to it because they they'll be picking the stringed instruments both down stroke and up stroke so they can go really fast there you can kind of add some dynamics around that shiver maybe you need to play in an environment which is about 15 or 10 degrees maybe you'll get the shiver automatically who knows you can add the shiver everywhere if you want but you don't want to over have an overkill there now if you feel there's not enough harmonic content in the melody what you can do is stack up a third alongside the octave so if you take you can add a third to each of the notes so what's a third from E you can refer to this E diatonic third would be G because I'm in the E minor scale so that definitely makes it a lot thicker but again you don't want to overdo it so maybe a combination of all three flutter then third in the second bar shiver thirds shiver and something like that so these things should not happen as a specific plan as you play a song it should just kind of organically flow through it just happens so with your experience practicing these techniques you will kind of bring it out based on your natural inclination based on the emotion of the song it should just happen automatically but the techniques are flaming fluttering or shivering very flamenco guitar like and then adding thirds if ever you want to if you want to add more thickness thickness or harmonic flavor right guys so this was an octave lesson there are a couple of other octave lessons we've done on our YouTube channel over the years we'll put them in the description those will give you more technical workouts like scale exercises practicing octaves in thirds you know like all these things are very important so you can check out some of those exercises to go forward with octaves all the best and do consider getting the notation on patreon and let us know what you thought about the video in the comments give the video a like share and don't forget to hit that subscribe if you haven't already cheers and catch you in the next video


Thank you very much. So good afternoon and welcome to the IIDS and IoT intrusion detection system talk. My name is Vivek Ramachandran. My team members Nishant and Ashish were also responsible for a lot of work. They aren't here unfortunately but just so you know. A little bit about myself. I started as a programmer in the Layer 2 security team. Wrote a lot of the 802.1x and port security for Cisco SCAT 6K. Moved on to do security research. Broke web cloaking in DC-15. This is actually my 10th year here. And discovered a lot of other wireless attacks. I speak and train at a lot of conferences. I run the Wi-Fi class at Black Hat for the past five years. I also run Pentester Academy and SecurityTube.net.  And for today's talk. So why an IoT IDS? We all know how secure IoT devices are, right? And when I actually looked at the problem for the last six months. What I was trying to do is come up with a solution where we could go ahead and monitor IoT devices on the network and try to see if we can create an intrusion detection and then a prevention system. So as a lot of people have predicted an average home will have 10 or more devices. Of course you have industrial IoT and enterprise IoT devices as well. The key challenge in IoT devices is the fact that there is no built-in protection, right? There is no built-in firewall, no IDS, no AV. Unfortunately, most of these devices do not even have good logging capabilities. So we cannot rely on the device itself to send us any sensible information in order to do any form of threat hunting or intrusion detection. So this is where I went ahead and defined the problem scope. Now IoT is vast, right? You have devices communicating over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, custom frequencies and what not. What I did find is most IoT devices seem to be converging towards Wi-Fi as the back-haul network with 11 AC and extremely high bandwidth. Additionally, of course, most IoT devices do not send out a lot of data, right? It's pretty bursty. They could be sensors and such devices which might not always be communicating. Now when I looked at creating an intrusion detection system, the only option was to take an overlay network approach. And what I mean by that is because we cannot have code running on the IoT devices as well as maybe even on the network the devices connect to, I'd like to monitor the air with different IoT IDS sensors, gather information of how these devices are communicating and see if we can do any form of threat detection. So when you look at the architecture, of course, you can have a single standalone sensor, right? So one sensor plugged in running your code, trying to figure out if intrusion detection is happening. The other possibility is more of a spatially distributed sensor network. So we distribute them, they push whatever metadata packets or whatever we decide towards the central collector and that is where all the intelligence resides. So I'm going to talk about both these architectures today. Probably if I were to do each and every demo, I would take five to six hours. So I'm going to do a couple of them in the initial ones at least live. I have videos, all the source code is open source, feel free to download. If you'd like to see more live demos, you can even talk to me after the talk. And of course it's DEF CON and I wouldn't want to be running a Wi-Fi sensor. So IDS sensors. Now when you look at securing IoT devices, the question of course is how do you want to build your sensor? So I decided to pick up an IoT platform for it. So I've chosen the ESP8266. Anyone's used it? Okay, two, three people. The ESP8266 is an SOC. It has a full Wi-Fi stack in it, capable of BGNN. It supports web, WPA, and WPA2 networks. I think the latest update even supports WPA2 enterprise. It's a 32-bit risk can run up to 160 megahertz. In my demos we're going to be using the 80 megahertz option. But you can go ahead and run it at 160. Now ESP8266 has been created by this company called Esprit. And in the early days their SDK wasn't well documented. So unfortunately a lot of the work which I had to do and early for this was probably a year back was really just looking at how they've programmed a couple of things and even reverse engineering some components. Good news. Now they have a much better SDK. So should be easy for anyone who'd like to extend my code. The ESP8266 comes in the different shapes and sizes. The one I'm actually going to be using is the NodeMCU. The key difference between the regular chip and this is this has the chip and the USB to TTL converter. So I can just plug it to the USB on my computer and program it rather than having to build a circuit just for this purpose. So there it is NodeMCU. I think this retails for $3 on AliExpress. So $3 to $3.5. If you are willing to go a little back and forth on the chat with some of the vendors they can even give it to you for $3 for 10 pieces. Okay. The programming environment. Now the ESP8266 has its own SDK as I mentioned but what people have done is they've wrapped around a lot of that functionality using the Arduino framework. So a lot of code which you'll actually see looks like regular Arduino but I have to go ahead and add a lot of SDK specific functionality and call those functions as and when we need to do things. The code which I'm going to give out is very well commented so hopefully you shouldn't have trouble using it but you can always contact me later. So what could be the building blocks of an intrusion detection system over Wi-Fi? To begin with of course you have to have scanning functionality, right? You plug in your IoT IDS, scans the air, starts looking at which access points are around, eventually can start monitoring certain access points of interest which is your home AP or your office AP and also starts monitoring clients. Now what this means is you have to have some kind of a raw interface so you can get the packets directly. How many of you have programmed with raw sockets? Okay. Three people? Okay. So we will be using something similar. They are SDKs do expose some low level APIs which functions similar to raw sockets. After that once we start the monitoring exercise then detecting mis-association. So what is mis-association? Let's say I have an authorized client connected to an access point, right? Now an attacker creates a honeypot and he starts sending de-auth packets. So the client may get disconnected with the authorized AP and connect to the attacker's honeypot. This is one example of a mis-association attack. So a wireless IDS ideally should look at this and say hey, this authorized client should only be connected to this authorized AP or set of APs. Now when I say AP or set of APs we define them using the access points MAC address and SSID. I will also talk about how to detect MAC address spoofing, right? That's for the very end. Detecting honeypots. So what are honeypots? Same SSID as that of the authorized access point. The attacker brings it up, authorized clients may try to connect to it. After that we look at distributed sensors, central collector. We'll talk about advanced attack detection. I'm going to pick up some examples of how to detect evil twins, MAC address spoofing and at the very end even how we can use machine learning to do device finger printing and automatic learning. Okay, so the Wi-Fi scanner functionality. So that is the attacker, the graphic is custom made. So typically what you want to do is have the ability to monitor what is happening, right? That is the only way you can actually pick up that there is an attacker in the vicinity. So I'm sure the code is visible at the end. So the whole idea is not to make this a coding exercise. I'm going to give out all the code for free, completely open source, use as you want. What I'm going to do is I'm going to run a couple of these snippets and for the more complicated examples with APs and clients, I have videos but you can always catch me after the talk. So let me go ahead and run this. I have my ESP 8266 connected. So this is a simple scanning program. All it does is it scans Wi-Fi and figures out the list of APs, their MAC addresses, the channel, the RSSI levels, encryption and all of that. So this is one of the core building blocks which is the ability to first find the access point, SSID, BSSID, you know, of the network you're interested in protecting. So once this runs, let's open up the serial monitor and if you notice it says starting to scan and it immediately starts scanning all of that. Why isn't anyone clapping? It's $3. It's a $3 device. So as you can clearly see it has a reasonably robust implementation of the low level Wi-Fi scanning stack. Some of the SDK is open source. I've been a C programmer for over 16 years. I think it's pretty high quality code from what I've seen. So this is how we go ahead implement a simple scanner on this $3.5 chip so that you can look at what is around. Monitoring access points and clients. Now scanning is actually generally quite easy. Why? Every operating system has low level APIs with which you can query the card, talk to the card, have it scan. But when you talk about monitoring this is really where it kind of becomes very, very architecture and system specific. So you have to figure out how to sniff packets using this device. Now the good news is that they did provide some low level APIs. All of this code is going to be available. I wrote part of this code which we released at Black Hat Singapore called YD. But typically what I'm doing here is going ahead, getting the packet in promise course mode and parsing that to look at if this is a management packet, data control. Based on that what I really do is create these flows. So a flow could be an access point in connected clients. That's an example of a flow. So what you ideally want is an authorized AP should only talk to authorized clients, right? Of course you will have to have the admin give the list of authorized clients. We'll talk about some machine learning techniques with which you can auto detect some of those as well. But I'll save it for the end. So I'm not going to go ahead and run this code. Let me just go ahead show you a quick demo. So what this code does is low level sniffing, gets the packet, parses it and now starts looking at what APs are there and what clients are connected. This code is specific to AP enumeration. All of this code is available after the talk. So right now we are enumerating the access point. The key difference is this is using absolute low level raw sockets, right? So people who haven't programmed with raw sockets this is like trying to reimplement what TCP dump or some of those APIs do, right? Lip, P-cap. Trying to implement that. That's supposed to be me. So we've looked at the monitoring APs. Let's look at the monitoring clients. So what we have here is the left most column is the MAC address of the client. The column after that is the SSID that client is connected to. And then of course you have the BSID in some cases. Is it probing? Is it connected? Have you seen data packets? So think of basically this as a state machine. So if we actually see a client probing, we say hey this is in probing state. Once we end up seeing it send a couple of data packets, we know it's in connected state, right? So you have different client and APs moving through these multiple state machines at the same time. And what you ideally want to do is find anomalies in this. So as you can clearly see, total number of clients detected is three. These are the MAC addresses. This is the SSID they are probing for. And two of them are actually in probing state. They haven't yet connected. The video actually looks pretty good on my screen. But I apologize the way it looks here. So you'll have it after the talk. One of the clients, the third one is actually connected to the AP because we can see the AP's MAC address, right? So this shows there have been data packets exchanged. So let's step back and summarize what we've done so far. We have used the ESP8266. We've put it in monitor mode. We are sniffing packets. We are figuring out which access points exist, which clients exist, which clients are talking to which APs. And when I say talking, that could mean probe request, trying to just figure out what capabilities the AP has or actual data packets, which means both the client and AP are already connected and exchanging information, right? So that is what we've accomplished so far. Now, in order to go ahead and convert this into an IDS, we will require a little bit of more information. And that information is the list of BSSIDs of APs which are authorized and the list of MAC addresses of the clients which are authorized, right? You could use some interesting learning techniques. As I said, I'll talk about that at the very end so that you can try to auto-learn, assuming of course you don't have an attack under way. So let's actually move forward. Detecting mis-association attacks and detecting honeypots. I'm going to increase the font size a bit. Is this a little bit more visible? Okay. I'm going to take you. So what we've done is we've gone ahead and commented every part of the code so later on you can just add whatever MAC address belongs to your network, right? You can add a BSSID or a set of BSSIDs and that's basically the BSSID of the access point serving our network. The clients over here which is client one, two and three, these are supposed to be the authorized clients. Again, you can fill these up. You don't need to have only three clients. You can have a hundred. Whatever count you have, just make sure that you can have changed it. I'm also documenting the code on how to use it. Hopefully you should have that next week so you know where to change what. So what we do now is we use all of that state machine which we created by monitoring the APs and the clients and now we combine that with this additional knowledge of first which AP are we interested in because as you can imagine if you're just monitoring the air you're probably seeing dozens of access points and you really don't want to spend a lot of time monitoring everything. At the very same time this only has one radio. So you probably want to go ahead scan, figure out the AP of interest which is your authorized AP, change the card's channel, go to that channel and just monitor that access points MAC address. This is exactly what the code does. So it'll scan and find MAC addresses of all the APs around. The moment it sees that matching with that in the config file it'll automatically change its channel, put itself on that network. One of the things which have also added is let's say the AP automatically changes channel. So if this does not find that AP there it'll automatically go back into scanning mode. So a little bit more intelligence built into it. This is really important because you have a lot of access points which do automatic channel hopping based on the interference in the channels where they are in. Right? So once we do that we know this is the authorized AP. We immediately start just monitoring packets from that access point. And then we create these flow graphs which I talked about. These are just internal data structures. At that point what we really have is what we see on the network which is one whole tree versus what is allowed or the white list. Right? Which is a separate tree. Any time there is any mismatch we automatically go ahead and send out an alert saying hey this client or this AP is probably malicious. Right? AP malicious is honeypot which is trying to broadcast the same network. Client malicious really is an external client not on the authorized list trying to connect to the authorized AP. And misassociation is an authorized AP trying to connect to an external AP. Right? So let me show you how this looks like when we run it. Okay? So now the code is running and what we automatically do of course we want to show attacks. So these are different clients trying to connect to our authorized AP. So what IIDS does is any time a client sends a probe request or a data packet or for that matter any management or control packet a management or data packet it automatically figures out that this MAC address doesn't belong to the list of authorized MACs and starts flagging it. We also have a back end MQTT integration. So the radio once in a while can go into client mode connect to a back end access point and send you an MQTT message. Anyone MQTT? Okay. It's basically short bursty messaging for IoT devices extremely popular. Some people like to call it Twitter for IoT devices and some people hate calling that. So either way. So it's a very flexible simple protocol where you can just put a message inside and off it goes. The good news is if you have an MQTT server you can even have client apps on your phone and you can automatically get alerts. So you don't even have to do all of that alerting mechanism and workflow on your own. It's kind of built into most apps nowadays. So in this example we have multiple clients. If you notice now we have one that says misassociating and the others which says intruding. Right? I explain the difference misassociation is an authorized client trying to connect out to an external AP. This could be a honeypot while intruding is an external unauthorized client trying to connect to one of our authorized APs. Okay. Another custom graphic. Right? Honeypots and misassociation. Okay. So building a distributed sensor collector. Now when you talk about any form of distributed sensor architecture the key question is how much processing you'd like to do on the sensor and how much would you like to ideally offload onto the central collector. Right? And this is really where this is a $3 device. I mean you cannot expect this device to be able to do a lot of heavy duty number crunching metadata and statistics collection. So what I actually did was the device scans the air, figures out a lot of this metadata, immediately flips over to client mode, connects back to our backhaul network and actually sends all of that metadata to a remote server. In this case I've actually sent the whole packet. You can of course do a much more reduced size which is you can have certain header fields depending on whatever your algorithms would probably like to use for threat detection. Right? So once I receive the PCAP files I end up using a tool which I had written two years back and released a DEF CON which is PCAP to XML and SQLite. So what this does is this takes PCAP files and looks at every single header field and maps that to a column in a SQLite database.  So some attacks which we can detect very easily, deauthentication floods anyone? Wifi? Deauth floods? Okay so deauthentication packets are really packets which are meant to disrupt a connection, terminate a connection between any two devices. It's a very common way by which denial of service attack happens. Right? It's also a common way by which attackers have authorized clients disconnected from the real AP and then have them hop over to their honey pots. So generally deauth attacks are very bursting nature. The attacker is going to be sending a couple of hundred packets a second probably slower speeds will do as well but most people just rely on ready made tools. So what we do is we try to figure out the number of deauth packets we figure out the different time stamps at which they have arrived. Now keep in mind that this is interesting because eventually you also want to do both time based and spatial correlation. Right? Let's say you deploy this sensor around your enterprise and the attacker is actually driving around in the parking lot trying to attack or trying to do something. So you will be able to spatially correlate that if you preserve a lot of that information. Which is really what I was trying to do. Excuse me. After that of course you can run Python. You can pretty much do a lot of things. I prefer Python. It's pretty simple to use. All of this code is available along with the talk slides. So you can try it yourself. What we really try to do here is for every single device we start seeing how many deauth packets it is either sending or receiving over time. And we have time thresholds. Based on that if you see more than n number in a specific time slot we actually say that's a deauth attack. Now what is that threshold? The truth is the thresholds actually change based on the network a lot of times. And this is really at the very end I'll talk about machine learning. So maybe you can even try to decide or learn baselines on your own. Right? My home network might hardly see any deauths but a larger enterprise network might see genuine deauth packets getting sent a lot. So baselining just like any other intrusion detection system is a hard thing to get right. The best way of course is you really know your network well. Alternately at the very end we'll talk about ML. So detecting different attacks, deauth flood, evil twins. Anyone what is an evil twin?  Okay very good. And a lot of times evil twins might even have the same MAC address as the authorized AP but on a different channel. Here you go. Clap. Yeah so what is an evil twin? Evil twin is let's say we have an authorized access point and now an attacker wants to create an AP with the same SSID. A lot of times even with the same BSID. The reason to kind of do that and also mimic all the security parameters is the attacker would ideally want to deauth the client, the authorized client from the real AP and have that client hop over to the attacker's evil twin or honeypot. It's a very common attack and a lot of enterprises actually have to go ahead and deal with this. Okay so evil twin detection. Now evil twin detection with MAC address spoofing is actually very hard to get. There are companies which get bought and sold based on how they solve this problem in Silicon Valley. One of the approaches which is very common is to look at a field called sequence number which is supposed to increment once every packet typically. So when you have two access points with the same MAC addresses and communicating you are going to actually end up seeing different patterns of sequence numbers can of move forward. Even if the attacker were to try to go ahead and trail the authorized AP as close as possible you would still end up seeing a lot of duplicates, right? Because the real AP sends a sequence number 10, the attacker sees that he also sends 10. But now there is a collision in a very small time slot. So you can detect it with Python. Interestingly you can even visualize it. So just by going ahead and plotting the sequence numbers with respect to time for a given MAC address if you actually end up seeing two patterns which are overlapping during the same time slots you actually know for sure that MAC address spoofing is happening. This is one of the most common ways industry intrusion detection systems for Wi-Fi actually pick this up. It's a very common technique. Client spoofing detection very similar to evil twin. The only difference is now you're dealing with a client device and not an access point. Again what we really do is figure out how the sequence numbers are getting bunched over time and then we try to see if there is a feed forward or feedback on the sequence number trails for the same device. In a sense we are essentially doing what we just talked about and again looks pretty similar. So device fingerprinting with ML. How much time do I have? So till now what we've really seen is different mechanisms by which we can go ahead and create an intrusion detection system which requires help. You have to tell it what the authorized devices are. At the very same time think about MAC address spoofing. The case which I've taken right now is really when the real authorized device and the MAC address spoofing device both exist at the same time. So what happens if the attacker brings in his device which spoofs the MAC of an authorized one when the authorized device is not around? How do you detect MAC address spoofing now? Anyone? So the problem is now actually quite difficult because when two devices coexist with the same MAC address at the same time you can do a lot of the analysis which I talked about. But what happens if now only the attacker device exists with the authorized MAC address? The real device is left. Maybe it's 6 p.m. and you know the authorized client device just went home. Okay, what exactly? You're on the right track but what exactly in probe request could be interesting or what are we going to do with that information? So you're actually moving in the right direction. However, keep in mind that even in a probe request packet or a beacon frame where you have all of these information elements, some of them actually end up varying for the same device as well. So we would really have to go ahead and basically hard code those values which isn't scalable. This is really where machine learning comes in. Yeah, go ahead. Absolutely. But keep in mind how do you program that because what you're essentially saying now is learn from data. Right? Because if we just had the code we wouldn't know for your network what could be the inter beacon time or how frequently does the client actually send out probe requests. There is no fixed metric. You can have a new device driver update and that can completely change. So this is a fantastic problem to apply machine learning because essentially what you want to do is look at different characteristics of all of these devices and figure out by looking at more and more data how each of these characteristics or features behave. Some of those features may always be the same value. Some may vary. Some may vary within bounds. Some may vary randomly. So what we also did and I'm going to give that out along with all the code which I showed you today is we looked at different machine learning techniques. Let me kind of get you to a summary slide. So here is what we did. We actually picked up different elements and you can visualize this every element as a dimension in an dimensional space. And based on that we can try to see if we can figure out interesting clusters and patterns. Machine learning is very interesting, a topic by itself. We can talk about it after the talk. But what we did find by using K nearest neighbors and a lot of other algorithms is we actually got pretty high scores of accuracy in detecting at least classes of devices. What I do want to do after this is also see how we can combine different metrics out of different frames and use what are called ensembling techniques. I don't know if any of you have heard of it. Ensembles which is really combining multiple algorithms and taking their scores and weighing them in some logical way and trying to see if we can go ahead and then find out which one is a better predictor. Okay, I'm going to release all of this. A couple of other things I want to mention is when you look at information elements or IEs, it's a pretty big chunk of data. So what I did was first I just took a boolean which is is that IE present or not and use that as a feature vector and then looked at how well the scoring is. The next stage was actually to pick up that along with the length. Then to pick up the length with the hash of the value, right? Because IEs can actually vary in size. So by taking a hash then what you're dealing with is this value fixed, does it vary, what values can we have, etc. And then of course finally the actual value which is very difficult to work with in general. So this is really where we have progress so far. All of this code and everything is going to be released hopefully today. I'm tempted to connect to the DEF CON network and upload everything but I'm not very sure about the kind of security of the server which I've kind of rented out for this. So but I'm going to do it tonight. By tonight you should have all the code. Any questions? Any questions? And that is really what we're kind of looking at is how do you kind of go ahead correlate that with something like time series and see what all we can do. And it's an extremely interesting, challenging problem. But that's where we are, the research. It's a good point. Could you mention? Forgot about it. So his question was what about prevention? Good news. We can actually send out D-auth packets using the ESP8266. So currently the prevention which I haven't implemented but plan to is at any point if we see a mis-association of any kind send D-auths to go ahead and break that connection. That way we can ensure that the authorized client does not get connected to an unauthorized AP. So that's what we can do and that's what actually all the industry AP sorry VIPs do as well. Wireless IDSs and IPSs. So here is an actual D-auth attack using the ESP8266. The code is there as a separate file. I haven't integrated that yet. Questions? Okay. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed it.


All right, okay before we go to photography. I'm gonna take this quick question. Hi. You're new on book show. Who's this? Hey Scarlett you've got a question on topic cuz I've got a lot to cover in minus five minutes Go ahead. Yes, sir You're going to mention Dunkirk I have a question about how photography and film work See in Dunkirk it's actually Vince or it's depiction of real people and is that different from a photograph Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean So I Consider movies to be the most complex art form there is I mean think about it movies entail Not only Acting which is a selective recreation reality and I ran to find art as a selective recreation of reality based on an artist met Metaphysical value judgments, and I'm not gonna get into the whole thing, but but you've got acting which qualifies as art you've got a Story you so you've got a script you've got drama which qualifies as art you've got photography and Direction and and you've got all the and you've got music right music is is art So you've got all these elements, and they all have to be integrated into one aesthetic experience Photography most photography is very different from that. It's static. It's you're taking a picture of something that is Not recreated it just is If you think about a movie all the sets in Dunkirk were recreated there isn't a Dunkirk not in the way. There was a 1940 No, 1939 not in the way. There was a 1939 You had to recreate it and you had to recreate a set you had to bring actors They who don't just live they had to put them in uniforms which they don't usually just have so the difference between photography and Movies is vast photography is just one little element within a vast art form called film which includes all these other elements in addition to the photographic aspect of it and of course movies can be less or more artistic in in Whether they stylized that visual experience more or less in other words whether the visual experience is Is we a recreation versus just accepting the way the world looks and just filming it So and now that would be a pure naturalism or realism There's a whole school of movies of a film called realism and and it just just films it the way it is So there's no attempt to to to recreate Into to shape the world that's being filmed you have to go back to Fitz Lang's old movies where the stats were actually painted and drawn So so the world in which the action happened was actually recreated or even to Hitchcock who in his films every little piece of furniture where every little thing was on the set was completely purposeful and and and intentional and thought about and and that that's great art that's that's you know, that's True art when you're actually recreating that. So let me let me let me get into photography now You got it Scala. We good Thank you. All right so Photography traditional photography I Don't think is art and and the reason is what I just said it doesn't involve recreation. It involves things as they are period It's taking a picture of reality That's out there and I ran did not consider photography art now. It can be aesthetic. It can be pretty. It can be beautiful But in a sense of recreating metaphysical value judgments and everything that entails and and When something recreates value judgments, it has an impact on you as a viewer because it condenses Certain ideas certain views of the world For you and you respond to those that's the kind of unique Aesthetic experience we get we're responding to the artist's Metaphysical value judgments even when we don't identify them. This is again related to the emotion. I motion so automatically giving us back Producing of a spawn to what they're seeing in our artwork to what to what our subconscious is reading in the artwork as The values that are that have been recreated there Photography doesn't really do that on when it does it it does it on a shallow level now The reason I brought this up is if somebody asked well, what about photography in the modern world where you take a photo and then you completely manipulate it using Photoshop using the million different Software programs that are available today and you can actually change what you photographed now, let me say my caveat about anything I talk about When it comes to aesthetics, I'm not an expert and and this is just some preliminary thinking and don't take this as the Objectivist view because this is not I in Rand's view. This is your on To the best of his ability telling you what I think is consistent with the philosophy of objectivism and its view of aesthetics I would say that to the extent that those photographs are manipulated purposefully and systematically in ways in ways That are projecting a particular view That the artist has can't usually subconscious view it's usually art does not usually reflect necessarily the conscious views of You know some artists are very well integrated to the conscious and subconscious But usually what's what you're given as a subconscious view To the extent that it's what I went called a metaphysical mirror right of the artist So the artist is putting down And it's purposeful and it's thoughtful and it's Really does manipulate the image But not just randomly a lot like the software you have on your iPhone where you take you take a photo And then you press a button and it scribbles it all up. That's not art or that that's equivalent of modern non art, right? So yes, I think it can be That's my tenant, but but I haven't seen any that is I've seen beautiful beautiful images I've seen I've seen photographs that I would hang up on the wall that that that I just gorgeous But I haven't seen any way I can't say I've seen photographs that I would describe as art now I've seen photographs where I thought it was a painting. Maybe that's the closest it comes Because of the qualities of the photograph because of the way it was touched up Because of the way everything was positioned because of the way the artist did whatever it did in Photoshop But it looks like a painting. Yeah, no, I can see that but again It's tricky, right? It's tricky So I think it can be it's at the margin and Most photography is ninety nine point nine percent of photographs people take point nine nine nine Not a few artists might exist out there who can Manipulate a photograph and make it an artwork. It's the best formulation. I Can come up with and if anybody has any questions. I'm looking at the Right, so so on on YouTube. It seems like they have the most random conversations So they're talking about Tommy Lahren and the Ben Shapiro on on YouTube I don't know why they're listening to my podcast and on blog talk I Can't can't see Can't see anything relevant to those questions. Alright, so unless somebody has a question I'm gonna go on to talk about done cook but before that I am gonna take a quick commercial break and And then we'll be back 2017 marks the 60th anniversary of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrug 12 years in the writing it is Ayn Rand's masterwork Despite being published six decades ago The novel continues to gain recognition and profoundly influence business leaders thought leaders and a growing number of political leaders Its presence in today's culture cannot be denied The fascination with Atlas Shrug persists because it grapples with the fundamental questions of human existence and presents radically new answers Whether you're an adoring fan who wants to add this new addition to your personal library or someone who wants to read the book for the first Time to see what all the fuss is about Pick up your copy of Atlas Shrug today an updated cover for the mass market edition of the novel recently hit story Check it out. You can order your copy today on Amazon All right, so Let's talk about than coke. I saw the movie a week ago and I don't know I assume everybody knows the story of Don't cook. It's it's a true story In the film is it portraying a true story and the true story is is that in World War two as the Germans swept through Invaded fans swept through Belgium and the rest of northern Europe They cornered I think it was four hundred thousand French and British troops on a small beach called done cook and If the Germans had managed to wipe out those troops capture them or kill them That would have caused the Allies that the French and a British It set them back years in terms of their ability to mount an offensive against the Germans Who knows what would have happened if for the rest of World War two You know many of those the troops on that on that beach who were ultimately saved came back and D-day and fought the Germans and pushed them back. It would have been a Emotionally it would have been a devastating devastating loss for the Brits in particular and it could have very well emboldened Hitler to try to cross the canal and invade in evade a great Britain and That was the real dangers that if he'd captured or killed the all those British troops in that coke He would have probably felt And it felt free to just cross the canal and try to invade Britain and indeed the British knew this so the British Held back from trying to rescue their people. They held back much of their Air Force and held back much of their Navy They were worried they were worried that if they engage the Navy in the Air Force in the battle over Dunkirk that And in the end the Germans would wipe out their soldiers and They would they would destroy many of their planes and and many of their ships that they would be defense less when the Germans actually tried to invade the United Kingdom and So indeed not only with these hundreds of thousands of troops abandoned On these on this beach they were under constant aerial attack from German fighters They weren't under constant bombardment from artillery positions not that far away. They were in within artillery range and Very few Navy ships No Navy ships could come close enough to actually pick up these soldiers. So they there was one Place where you could load soldiers up onto the ship, but that was quickly bombed by the Germans So you couldn't even do that So there was no way for the big ships to come in close enough They would have to send rowing ships rowing boats and it was a slow cumbersome process, but in addition the British Navy did not was not willing to dedicate enough ships to do this The way in which these troops were ultimately saved was that they there was a call the Navy basically used a I Guess a provision that they had where they they took over Civilian boats and so they they they went to And basically confiscated civilian boats small boats and sailed them towards the coast, but what happened was that Even boats that were not commissioned by the Navy Boats and most of the boats that landed up sailing were sailed by civilians Non-commissioned by the Navy and just people voluntarily got in their boats and sailed to then cook I Think the British citizens realized that their future that their lives that everything they cherished Was at stake and that they that they needed to do something that this was a time for action real heroism Heroism for good cause for the cause of defending liberty and defending freedom So Thousands of little boats sailed across the British Channel could get very close to the shore Loaded up soldiers and sailed back And it was one of the greatest rescue missions in human history. Maybe the greatest They got 300,000 British troops off of off of the shores of Dunkirk. All right, that's the story. That's what happened the movie is Is in the theaters right now It's so let me just say It was it was an incredible It's an incredibly It's an incredibly made movie. It's it's made by Christopher Nolan who made the Batman movies Now again, I'm not an expert on film. I'm not an expert on aesthetics But I think this is an incredibly well integrated movie the music the cinematography the acting the storyline He has three storylines and there's a twist in the end in terms of how those three storylines Integrate and they all do integrate in the end and it takes you a little bit of while to catch on to what's exactly happening But it makes it interesting It's intense. You literally my wife at the when we as we movie ended she said Let's go home and get in the jacuzzi. I need to calm down It you're at the edge of your seat And I think he achieves that not only because the story is so intense, but because the music is so effective because The story is so dramatic You've got three stories going on You've got a story of what's going on in the beach and the efforts of two particular soldiers to get off the beach and to do Whatever it takes To survive It's really is a story of survival in the obstacles and the disappointments and the catastrophes and the and the bravery and the heroism and And and and the cheating and and and the cowardice that all goes on when when when you've got Hundreds of thousands of people who are trying to survive and Then you've got one story that happens on one of these boats, you know a Sailed by a civilian heading towards war Not knowing what it they're heading towards but heading towards they they know You know that the future of their country and therefore the future of their freedom depends on it and they're sailing towards something and then you've got a pilot Who is One of the few pilots up in the air trying to protect the evacuation of Dunkirk from the Nazis Air force and from You know from from the the air force just bombing the ships and bombing the beaches and Every one of these stories is anchored by incredible performances acting wise Very dramatic Situations now you never get deep into the characters the movie is not a character movie The movie is almost an atmospheric movie the movie tries to place you there and make you feel Like you're there, but it's not you get a sense of characters But you you don't get much because it's it's partially because the story's jumping within less than two hours between three different story lines So you don't get to know any particular one of the people involved in those three story lines But and it's not a It's not a raw raw Heroism you know wonderful everything is great movie. So it's definitely it's definitely a movie about the horrors of war It's definitely a movie about people being heroic in those horrors But it underplays the heroism and maybe that's a I would say that's a criticism I have of the movie It's definitely not Romantic in that sense. It's romantic in the sense that people are doing courageous heroic things and people are applying that their free will in pursuit of values, but it doesn't it doesn't celebrate those values indeed when they reach home They are convinced that and I'm not giving away anything because they're no spoilers because it's an historical movie You know know what happens, but when they reach home You know they the They are convinced that they have failed right they have lost to the Germans and They think that they are going to be booed and they're going to be spat on and they're going to disrespect it And when they come home, they get the opposite response people are celebrating and people are cheering them and so on And it's it's got the sober mood to it and then one of the big criticisms of the movie is Churchill gives a very famous speech During this I mean maybe his most famous speech during World War two and an amazing speech Well, we will fight them on the beaches. We will fight them here And you know we will survive and we will thrive and we will do this and It's a phenomenal speech and he had Churchill do it or to hear an actor doing Churchill doing it is inspiring But that's not the mood of the movie the mood of the movie is very somber So what it has is it has the soldier reading it at the end on a train when he's in England And it's in the newspaper and he's reading it aloud and I found it very powerful. I found it very poignant You know, it's what it means to him. Yes, it's not a grand statement about Saving Britain, but it's it's much more personal and it's and I found it very meaningful Anyway, I thought the move I enjoyed the movie and I would definitely go see it now It's not it's not a and I think I think the way he ties in the three-story lines pay attention to the three-story lines And pay attention to the and I'm not gonna give it away pay attention to the titles When they first come about It says the beach one week The boat or the ship one day the plane or something like that one hour one hour one day one week Pay attention to that and you'll see how it all comes together at the end. It's it's really really it really is quite quite fascinating and I found the movie inspiring in spite of its kind of kind of attempt to dull down our Emotion our you know, what yeah pro heroism emotions I Found it amazingly well integrated and and and a beautiful experience and very very intense So when I was completely in the movie, I was completely drawn to it. I was coming So I would recommend it again. It's and it's you know what it doesn't have which I loved It doesn't have go So it you're completely at the edge of your seat You're completely in suspense about people dying and how they're gonna die and all this and there's no guts spilling out And there's no blood squirting all over the place It doesn't have that D-Day landing scene from saving private Ryan where people's guts are flowing out of them And all that you don't need that to get at the horror of what their experiences. The mood is Far more powerful. This is what Hitchcock understood if far more powerful than showing you the the real Savagery of war and leaving the savagery Implicit rather than explicit Anyway, very powerful and I would I would I would recommend I would recommend seeing it I mean I'm interested to hear what what you guys think of it. So That is my review of Dunkirk the movie. Let me give


I would like to clarify another nuance, another subtlety, in the endless hole of mirrors that is narcissism. Narcissists idealize themselves, they idealize themselves through the gaze of other people. This is known as narcissistic supply, they regulate the sense of self-worth through input or feedback from other people. But something that is less known is that narcissists make assumptions about the gaze of other people. They observe other people observing them and then they construct a narrative around these gaze of other people. They say they are watching me and this is what they are thinking as they are watching me. This is what they believe and so narcissists react strongly not only to the actual content of the gaze of other people but to assumptions they make about the contents of the gaze of other people. And actually I can say that narcissists react mostly to their assumptions about what other people think about them. They say to themselves they must be admiring me right now or they probably find me irresistible or she definitely finds me attractive or they most assuredly think that I'm a genius. So they impute to other people, they attribute to other people thoughts, beliefs, kind of attitudes, motivations and so on and so forth and then they come to believe their own attribution. This is very typical of narcissists. Narcissists inhabit an internal world. They don't interact with the external world. They don't perceive other people as external objects. Narcissists are bad on reality, strong on fantasy. So they look at other people, they observe the way other people observe them and then they attribute to other people thoughts and beliefs and so on and so forth and then they react to the thoughts and beliefs that they have attributed to other people without bothering to check with these other people whether their assumptions and presumptions are correct. So for example, a cerebral narcissist may say to himself, they find me exceedingly intelligent, amazingly intellectual, a genius. They love me, I am lovable because in their eyes I'm a genius and because they find me lovable, I can find me myself lovable. I can become my own love object. And so this is the way the narcissist experiences something akin to self-love. I would call it infatuation by proxy via the good services of other people, via other people's gaze. So he becomes, or she becomes, the narcissist becomes his or her own love object because he assumes that other people find him or her lovable by virtue of being a genius. That's a cerebral narcissist. A somatic narcissist would say, oh my God, she finds me so irresistible, so attractive. I am, I don't know, a stud, I am amazingly irresistible. So he convinces himself, or she convinces herself, the narcissist convinces himself that he is attractive, that he is irresistible. He attributes this mental content to the observer and then it becomes reality because anything that passes through the narcissist's mind must be reality. The narcissist is never wrong, he is infallible. So then the narcissist says, she thinks I'm irresistible. She finds me super attractive. She's very drawn to me. She wants me. She desires me. She's passionate about me. And gradually he begins to perceive himself as a sex object, irresistible, attractive. He begins to desire himself. He begins to redirect sexual energy, also known as eros, a part of libido. He begins to redirect sexual energy at himself because of the gaze of others.  He begins to be attracted to himself. He arouses himself sexually, a process known as auto-erotism. So idealization is too faced. When the narcissist idealizes other people, he idealizes them in order to give them the power to idealize him. If he associates with high level people, if he is married to a drop dead gorgeous woman, if he is considered a genius by his students, their idealization reflects on him and renders him ideal. So now he can love himself. He can become his own love object. He can be sexually attracted to himself. He can find himself sexually attractive. Somatic narcissists must debate with other people's bodies. They are not attracted to anyone whatsoever. They are attracted only to their own bodies. They find themselves the primary sex object. Other people are there to remind them how attractive and irresistible they are. Okay, one last thing. Remember, there's no type constancy. When the cerebral fails, when there's a state of collapse, when the cerebral fails to obtain narcissistic supply or narcissistic supply is deficient and irregular, the cerebral becomes temporarily a somatic.  Okay, but there's no type constancy. A cerebral can become somatic even for years, and a somatic can attempt to become cerebral even for years. So when they do, the locus of the idealization changes. The cerebral used to idealize himself as a genius through other people's eyes. Now, having become somatic, he idealizes himself as an irresistible, attractive hunk or stud or whatever. And he finds himself sexually attractive to himself through the attribution of such attractiveness and irresistibility to the gaze of others. Similarly, the somatic begins to consider himself a philosopher, a genius, an amazing mind, a public intellectual, a somatic. So remember that what I've just said, narcissists transition between states. What remains constant is the need, the desperate need for the gaze of other people, for input and feedback from other people. Even though these other people, they are not perceived as external objects, they're perceived as internal objects. Still, their input and feedback is regulatory.  Now, of course, when I say love in this video, this is not love as we know it. It's much closer, I would say, to limerence or infatuation or lust even. It's not deep, it's not profound. Narcissists don't love themselves. They actually loathe and hate and reject themselves, which is why they need other people to tell them that they are lovable, they are sexy, they are irresistible, they are amazing. Okay, that's known as co-idealization, another twist and turn in the endless saga of narcissism.