Hey guys, so We've been doing some watercolor comparison kind of shopping things I've been trying different brands and sharing them with all of you And I've been generally speaking getting sets of things like the Van Gogh one here And the Koi one that I have in my travel bag I have the Sennelier one here and I've been As I get them Swatching them course making color keys. It's usually the first thing I do when I get a kit and I like being able to compare them to some of the others No, I like the Sennelier paints for instance This is a Sennelier half-pan set of cake water colors and I like their colors and everything And I like the set. I like the choice of colors in this set. This is a 18-pan 14-pan set For me, I know I can't really get a selection less than that Because I'm not happy unless there's a larger variety of colors and that I have some darks and some lights for me This is an L.E.A. set. I Love this particular blue color and the Viridian is just fabulous The lemon yellow the yellows like in here. We have lemon yellow here. We have cadmium yellow light These are nice and bright I Prefer this brighter kind of pure or lemony yellow with a cad yellow and the Sennelier sets more like the azo yellow, which is a little Less true to me, but I love the alizarin crimson and the rose matter and It's a good set. I love both of these equally. I wouldn't put one of these over the other necessarily But the van Gogh has more colors in it So for that reason I would choose it you all know I love the Koi and for the price Neither the van Gogh set or the Sennelier or what you would call cheap although I did get a bargain on the price on both of them I had a coupon for one and the other one was in old packaging. So it was discounted The Koi set is still by far the most cost affordable They have it at Hobby Lobby. It's about thirty five thirty six dollars for the set and you can use a coupon Every week Hobby Lobby has a 40% off coupon where I bought these they don't do coupon. So Not all the time anyway. So I do like these and if you want something that's above a Koi I would definitely recommend one of these I did get some new paints to try when Claudia was here visiting and we went and she and Serena And I went on our shopping day to San Francisco and we went to Dick Blick Which I've been to before and I like to go to but they have more things on their website than they do in the store So if you're expecting the same selection is on the website, you won't get it They do have a lot don't get me wrong And if you want to see 99.9% of the products that Golden makes go to Dick Blick because they have one whole aisle It's just golden products. It's fabulous But I did buy some things while I was there and I did buy some things the night before when we went to Hobby Lobby So any of you who are paper crafters and you've heard about the gonzi Tom Tomy Watercolor kit from Japan it comes in a green cardboard box and I will try to include a picture of it right here because okay, so it comes in that green paper cardboard box and I Did get one and I love the paint hated the box now I did get a few tubes of Quar to try and I've added them to One of my metal kits, yeah this one so I have one of these metal This is a Schminck and a Schminck palette, but I bought it empty And it's a Schminck palette that has a selection of paints in it and actually has a couple of empty spots including Quar so this is a Set of paints and colors. I love I love these these kit these cold 48 half pans And 24 full pans these are full pans these littler ones are half pans now in this one I have some senelier tube paints at the bottom and This is a Schminck sample of a Schminck paint that they sent me in a full pan And then these are a variety of other brands including Quar and I like the Quar paints like they have the cobalt teal Which they also do in? Acrylic because Quar is made by Golden in case you didn't know So I put the tubes that came in this tin box I put them in here I squeeze them out to my little pans and then I put the tubes away in my back stock paint grower They came shipped in this metal box, and I always thought what the heck am I gonna do with the box? I didn't really throw it away cuz I thought you know there must be something that's gonna come up eventually And I know I talked in another video about how it seemed like it would be the perfect like watercolor paint palette box And because it's metal that you could probably put a sheet of magnets in the bottom and use like bottle caps or something to Arrange a paint palette and the lid has dimples in it Which is great for mixing because it's already got these dimpled holes When I got the Gonsai tombi watercolors, and I decide I looked at it And I thought it comes in these pans. They're bigger than half palette. I mean in full palette They're bigger than full pan, and I should have an empty full pan so I can show you Empty ones So this is a normal size full pan and The Gonsai are bigger So that okay, so I can't take these out and put them into one of those empty metal Palettes, and then I thought you know I wonder if they fit in that core box. I have out in the garage Sure enough not only did they fit But I have space for a water brush right here So that's convenient way to use them to make some sort of a portable water color palette isn't it and of course I right away did a color key because I always do and I love the colors and I think they're very comparable to my other favorite sets Which would be the van Gogh And so let's see let me get out the Koi one And everybody who came to my house this week to play with Claudia and I got to play with all the watercolors So here's the Koi color key and here's the Sennelier color key Now most of the time on the back of these color keys I write on the back what see that one doesn't have it look This one does so I try to write on the back what said it goes to so in case I have them out like this And I get them mixed up. I know which is which So there's that one And then I have This is just Daniel Smith. This is my mixed one I'm running out of camera space yet And this is making of these now the Daniel Smith one is in my big round palette I do have a smaller metal palette that I've made with the same paint colors that I can take a round with me I do love my Daniel Smith paints. They have colors like a moon glow that nobody else has This is the schmink so I Can see where some of these have really great bright fabulous colors in them and others Are okay, some of them are more Have more granular pigments or ground granular less smooth ways that the paint dries on the paper Like if you look at the schmink compared to some of the colors on the Daniel Smith It just looks like they dry without like almost looks like in some of the colors. There's little bits of grain or sand In the paint when it dries and that you don't see that here. I don't mind that I like those different things that happen in the paint I think if you're just starting out with watercolor that the gonzi is a really great buy and so is the koi both of these are at Hobby Lobby their The gonzi is $40 The koi is About 36. I think Use a coupon you can use a coupon on them My only gripe with the gonzi is not the colors are fabulous And it has a few colors in it like the pale aqua that you don't kind of really see and I mean look at all the Palettes I have and you don't really see that color anywhere I do really like their colors and especially I think for a beginner or A paper craft or maybe somebody who's doing cards either one of these would be great My only gripe with a gonzi is it came in that dumb paper box. I don't like the paper box and the koi Comes in a great box because when I watercolor I Open up my kit and I spray it with water to get that paint going in to get it start to get it juicy And when you if you're doing that and your paints are in a paper box That's not going to work too well that box is going to get soggy and ruin pretty fat dang quickly So that would be my only gripe. I love the paints. I will be using them, but Yeah, that box had got to go so if you have if you have them or you get them this is the selection of 24 colors and I think they had 24 and 12 and if you get them and you have a metal box Think or some kind of a metal or plastic tin That they will fit in I would recommend transferring them this is about It's like eight and a half plus a sixteenth. I don't know what that is and About six and three quarters Just a little bit less than three quarters of an inch deep So that gives you some kind of an idea of how big it is And if you have these paints then you can look for something like this to put them into now I just put them in with e6000 and glued them down You could put little magnets on the back of them and put a sheet of and then met You know stick them down to them because this is metal So you could put little magnets on the back of them and stick them in and then you could move them around if you Wanted I didn't want it to move around and pop out Don't forget when you get a new set of watercolors The first thing you should do is make a color key because the way the colors look in the pan is Very different than how they look when they're painted on paper and you can really tell that with the gonzi because Here's the cobalt blue in the pan and here's the cobalt blue on the paper Very very different. So make sure you right away do a color key Put it in the tin and then you're good to go I do recommend and as you can see I need to catch up with some of my color keys because I haven't done them All but I recommend that you laminate them or put them in some kind of a plastic sleeve I have a video on my channel for that that you can look up It should be a watercolor Wednesday video and I recommend that because you're gonna be here working with the paint and water and You want to protect the color key that you made and not ruin it or contaminate the colors so you have a true idea of what the colors are gonna look like and You know bonus if you get paint splatters on it like is on the Van Gogh one You can just take a baby wipe and wipe them off These I also got and I they're still in the tubes. I haven't opened them yet, but I did play with them a little bit and put them on this card These are may marry blue watercolors Where they made made in Italy and I've heard about them and I wanted to get a few colors to try actually You know I like sets So I wanted to get set they don't carry the sets in the store They do have them on the website, but you know I was there I didn't want to wait so I picked up a few colors and I gotta say that I like them They're really bright and I think they're very comparable to the koi colors I love this one. This one is a was it turquoise green Yes, it's called turquoise green and Is it that the most yummy turquoise color you've seen in a while? This one is called Dragon's blood. I love that color and I wasn't you know You're never sure you can't judge it by the label on the outside because that label is never the same colors The paint in the tube So I just kind of thought well dragons blood sounds interesting. I'll get that one Which one is it though? Here it is dragons blood. So that's what it looks like in the tube. It gives you an idea. What it's like It's pretty you know It's a good impression of the color. It's not an exact color But it's certainly an interesting color. So I'm going to be putting these into a palette at some point And we'll be playing with these on a watercolor Wednesday And I like them now the Compared to other art and these are artist quality paints compared to some of the artist quality paints These are a lot more affordable. These were Between seven and like eleven dollars a tube. I have series one and series. I Think there's one series three paint here One of them was eleven dollars the rest of them were seven So they're not super expensive Compared to some others that are fifteen to twenty dollars a tube, and I really like the bright colors I Thought they were really easy to use they blended out nicely and yeah, I really was pleased with them So we will definitely be playing with them. I Have to say of the smaller sets. I still think the koi is my favorite or the van go They were inexpensive the koi especially was inexpensive and it had a great color selection So if you're gonna all I know a lot of you are asking me you want to try watercolor What should I get if you can afford it and you have a coupon go to Hobby Lobby and it's going to be you know 35 35 or 36 dollars, you know use a 40% off whatever that is you have to figure out the math Start with this one because it's really nice it has enough darks and enough lights and a white And a purple I use a lot of purple when I paint or I like to anyway And I'm constantly mixing purple and that drives me up the wall So I like sets that have purple in it you can tell because when I bought the mammary look I bought three purples I Should have actually bought another red and I didn't I bought three purples. I don't know what I was thinking Anyway, so you have to figure out also what you like and what you don't and you know start to customize what you have To suit your style accordingly, but you know, I hope this all gives you some idea of what's out there and How expensive they are or aren't The guns I said I know was 40 the Koi set was about 36 this Sonelier set. I want to say it was $60 for this little set And I think this one was about the same price this one should have been more But this Van Gogh one is the one that came with The wrong old packaging and I think if I had a choice again between these two I'd buy this one Instead of this one.  I'll see you later


Volunteers from all over our viewing area were in Bagley today to help feed my starving children. Our own Cheryl Moore tells us the event is helping kids all over the world. Because of the people in this room, hundreds of kids from 70 different countries around the world will be given a nutritious meal. This year we're packaging 24,000 more meals. Last year it was 124,000. This year it's 148,000. Feed My Starving Children is a Christian nonprofit that's committed to feeding children who suffer from malnutrition. This year, there were seven volunteer sessions, hosted over the course of two days. Each session had anywhere between 170 and 200 volunteers. North home, Cast Lake, Infernal, just about a 60 mile radius around Bagley where people are coming to help out. Each volunteer was given a job, which was a part of an even bigger system to package as much as possible in two hours. We'll break up into a few groups, labeling, making sure that all of the bags are ready to go, warehouse crew to support all the packing stations, and then at each of the different packing stations we'll combine four main ingredients, so vitamins, veggies, soy, and rice. This event will usually see about 600 volunteers from all over the state. For this one session alone there was 176. Those 176 volunteers packed more than 170 boxes today, which is equal to more than 37,000 meals. That means 102 kids will be fed for the whole year all because of this one group. When you think about 6,000 kids that die every day, and here we're doing this, I'm just so thankful we're doing it. For the folks who picked up the ladles today, many say getting the chance to help those less fortunate is what makes the experience worthwhile. I just think it's a really amazing thing because it's something that I get to do of my life. All seven sessions combined, this one event in Bagley will give more than 400 kids meals for an entire year. Organizers say they hope they can reach even more people next year. People just need to say, you know what, we need to feed the starving people. We're going to get involved. Reporting in Bagley, Shremor, Lakeland News. Feed My Starving Children will be back in Bagley exactly one year from today in 2019. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Human beings have dreams even dogs have dreams but not you you are just a machine an imitation of life Can a robot write a symphony Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? Can you? That's a clip from the movie iRobot it covers territory that's pretty well worn at this point Will consciousness rise up in the robots and take over the world? But I think there's a deeper and more relevant and certainly more immediate question That comes to mind with what it means to being human and it's explored quite beautifully by today's guest Connor Habib I Now use the question rather than what is consciousness or that that is important to me But I think what is the human being is my question that I try to unfurl everything from I Can't just do this bullshit thing which people do all the time which I find completely interjectionable Which is well you just take the good and you leave the bad Just move on with the good stuff because that doesn't address the foundational thing that you bring up all the time What I need to do is find out how the good and the bad are entangled and liberate that philosophy from itself Welcome to skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers thinkers and their critics I'm your host Alex Sikaris and today we welcome Connor Habib back to skeptico Connor is the creator and host of against everyone with Connor Habib a fantastically named interview podcast video series that explores sexuality spirituality science Oh, and just a whole bunch of other stuff that is always interesting Oh, especially when Connor does it he has a new book in the works or it might even be out we'll have to hear about that it's titled Hawk Mountain and He recently pinged me about why evil matters So we're gonna have to see why he wanted to poke the bear there Welcome back to skeptico. Thanks so much for joining me. Hey Alex. It's really nice to talk with you again. Hi So what is going on? What's going on with against everyone and what's going on with the new book and what's going on in Ireland? Yeah, so I think since we last talked against everyone is pretty much taken off. It's gone. It's going really great and I've just sort of been getting deeper and deeper into the conversations and letting myself go a little bit more Because the whole point was I wanted big talk not small talk and so just letting myself get deeper into topics with thinkers who I respect and Kind of abandoning also at moving away from LA. I moved out of that sort of current of You always have to be visible and successful like I kind of moved out of that when I moved to Ireland I was like, I'm just gonna do what I care about and then surprise surprise Of course the show blows up after that, right? So there's that The the the novel I wrote which is called Hawk Mountain It doesn't come out till next year, but I did sell it which is great. It's a very dark very dark book about repression and and love and And and murder so it's a bit of a crime book And I'm very excited for that. I've always wanted to be a novelist my whole life So that was like one of the unrealized dreams and now that's coming out next year and Ireland's great Yeah, the last time we were I was on your show. We I was just about to move here and Now I'm here and it feels exactly right. So yeah Perfect great to hear and I just popped up for people who are watching the YouTube and we're just chatting about you know This has always been a podcast skeptical when it still is Primarily a podcast. That's how it reaches people But I have this really cool new tool called the script and I was just saying how it allows me to kind of crank out the video at the same time so I Was pulling up the video if you ever want to watch that on YouTube of your excellent Show against everyone and I've listened to a bunch of episodes I've made notes on some of the ones that you sent me that you thought would be particularly relevant to what we might talk About today, but even that might be outdated as this conversation Flows and goes on but I really do Like the way that you're diving deeper and deeper into these topics even though I disagree with you about 90% of the time Intellectual rigor and the depth that you bring to this which is really what these Conversations should be about so let's see. Where would you like to start before I give you the whole skeptical drill? Um Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that I Hear on your show all the time That I think I would like to start with is Something that we do agree on and I want to disagree that we don't agree on 90% but let's see is You know the idea that reality claims are first and foremost It's something that I'm I'm coming up against in in my academic work a lot like I'm reading these anthropology books where Someone will say You know, I met this indigenous person and he told me that a wolf threw up foam on him and gave him the cure for smallpox And then they'll say so what does that tell us about the kinship structure?  Like why are we not talking about the vomiting talking wolf like that's very important You know, so I've been seeing how that sort of rife through everything in a real first-hand way that In a place where it's supposed to be more understood more accepted in anthropology now in fairness in academia I think anthropologists have gone the farthest or the furthest and in Investigating reality claims ontologies metaphysics that kind of stuff and really actually trying to understand but Not I mean it's still not enough as far as I'm concerned so yeah, so I just want to start I think maybe there like the the importance of the reality claims and Well, you know that is an excellent point to start on and agree it totally we are in sync about that and You know, you've kind of heard me go on and on about that in terms of the book why it will matters and the claims of Scientology founder Elron Hubbard and Who was in the desert and is summoning the anti-christ doing this ritual in order to bring forth the anti-christ and the Horibaddle on and all that stuff and then the scholar that I've done and I'm not gonna mention his name because this poor guy You know, I'll mention his name because I really like you Hugh Urban wrote a great book called a magia sexualis about how magic and sexual liberation are tied into certain left-wing Causes and social and cultural change and that's a really great book that I think you're right to To make a point out of that mistake of his which is to be like well it matters that they believed in it It's not that does matter, but that's not all that matters and to stop there is it's not even to stop there It's to start there You know it mean because the starting point needs to be and you know It's tough because we can immediately go to inside baseball and we just might as well go there Because you know the flip side of the reality claim thing is that we really don't have a handle on what reality is to begin with So it's almost like It's like this kind of paradoxical Well, aren't they right in a way that it only matters what you believe since there isn't any grounding in reality Anyway, and the problem with that okay, of course is the same problem that we have with atheism Is that no if you don't get the first question right if you don't understand the nature of consciousness and that You you're not wrestling with whether consciousness is real or an illusion Well, then you can't move on to the second part of the question and say well You know, none of it is is real because we don't really have a handle on whether we're in a simulation or whether Reality is what we think it is in certain terms about five senses or any the rest or extended reality is interfering in their spirit world All those things could come into play But we shouldn't give those guys a pass and let them at the table as if they've Passed the preliminary exam because they haven't so Hugh urban Probably has because he's like you said he's exploring sex magic And he's looking at Tantric cultures in India and all the rest that but when he makes the conscious decision to leave that behind and play the game of Materialistic atheistic Religious studies where consciousness is an illusion then he's I think he's given up his right to engage in that dialogue In a real way he has to pick and he's in a forced Choice kind of position because he can't hold his job. He can't publish. He can't be continue to pick up his paycheck if he Abandons the the dogma, but at the same time he can't really engage in this conversation with you and I if he doesn't go there What do you think about that? Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. I mean, I think you're I think a way to say it is you know If you don't have if you don't pick the right question, you know Like all the answers to the questions that you pose will be skewed. That doesn't mean value less It just means like you're going to further obfuscate as you go on for me. I I now use the question rather than what is consciousness or that that is important to me But I think what is the human being is my question that I try to unfurl everything from that's I think a fundamental question There aren't very many fundamental questions that are close to what is the nature of consciousness? But I think that that one's close and that's closer. It has a parallel course to it and I think You know, I pause it. Can I yeah pause there and tell us more about what you mean? What that means to you particularly in the topic areas that people are gonna most Be associated with your work in terms of social sexuality social justice issues and those kind of things because There's an unwrapping that I want to do there But I'm intrigued by where you're going with that because I think that is maybe you're gonna leapfrog me And I want to be ready for that. That's it What is a human being yeah, I mean I think for me the why I would ask that is because it Just I would say if nothing else, it's it's not nothing else But if nothing else it brings a sense of warmth to the question of consciousness We can ask very cold Disseptive questions about consciousness, but seeing what is the human being? Begins to include I think for me questions about love questions about feeling about relating about connectivity about that kind of stuff in a way that I feel sometimes that even people who are doing this really great Work about consciousness can tend to leave things a little bit cold And then I think well, that's not including everything that we need to include here because there are states of consciousness that lend themselves to warmth States of consciousness that lead themselves to sense of separation to incompleteness to intensities all that kind of stuff to To love to desire and so I think asking this question What is the human being brings in and invites in that? Angle of it, which I think is very important I'm not saying, you know, maybe it's just a semantic issue or you would identify it as such But I just I I think you would know what I mean when I say some people doing consciousness Exploration are also very cold and clinical in a way that excludes a whole aspect of being human which I object to Oh, I think that's I think that's quite brilliant and I think that's also part of the I mean everything Has the potential to be co-opted and I would suggest that you really put your finger on a way that consciousness is and certainly will be Co-opted and that is in this kind of scientific Technocratic, what what is the quantum level understanding of consciousness and that needs to be the base of our understanding of it as if we would even Understand what quantum level stuff is. I think your warmth thing is beautiful Thanks. Thanks.  So I think you're right and Yeah I'm glad you like it good.  So let's crash it into the rock Let's do it. So, you know Related to this I think is the issue of Who is doing that? Social engineering that we're talking about because I think we can easily kind of blow past that right and say they're co-opting And then we never stop and say okay. Well, who And how yeah co-opting or we're saying oh poor Hugh urban He can't keep his job and he can't publish if he doesn't tow the party line Who is maintaining the party line? What how well who is imposing the sanctions on that kind of talk and then I would switch over to kind of the topic in the subject area where you've kind of Made a lot of made a lot of noise and a lot of positive noise and raised a lot of Consciousness about issues that are real and are troubling to people who do care about true social justice And I'm talking about sexuality and LGBTQ and now they have the whole alphabet in there We joke we joke about that, but there's a realness to that there's real social issues there But the part that I want to explore is it's also clearly in my opinion. It's a Psyop, right? It's partially a Psyop and do we have to care? Do we have to deconstruct to the extent to which we're now being pushed town? towards a transgender agenda that may have some real issues in it, but also seems to have issues that Resonate with a very weird AI techno Or well again craziness Tell you what to cap off that little Intro there. I recently did an interview with David Ike who I think is just you know David Ike Yeah, yeah, of course, but David Ike what's first thing comes to mind lizard people exactly Lizard guy right the reptilian guy right which is a wonderful way that we pigeonhole people we limit people's ability to speak although now they've gone the next level with David of course and he's been banned from YouTube and from Facebook Which we now are comfortable with the idea that people can be banned You know David is an advocate of very much a non-violence guy Advocate of kind of love your enemy don't engage at the same Energetic level of the people who are about hate and he's been like that for the longest time This is of course a voice that we don't want to hear right and it's also He the whole idea. I think it's interesting just for us to all look in the mirror and say five years ago Even certainly ten years ago, but even five years ago if someone told you That we would ban people from one of the primary Communication platforms larger than any of the television network platforms that people would be banned for advocating Free speech free thought and open thinking we would have thought that was impossible And now we accept it in the same way we as we just put on that mask to go outside So here's David. I think it touches on a lot of things. We're talking about and I think it'll maybe springboard us into a discussion about evil Consciousness, you know, you are an infinite expression of consciousness and that will never allow itself to be subjugated and intimidated into submission by by the said psychopaths and and idiots You can isolate five cents mind in in this symbolic bubble and then within the bubble feed that Isolated mind a sense of reality by controlling the education system all the way through the formative years by controlling the The mainstream media the Silicon Valley media and and so on then you can first of all Isolate mind from expanded consciousness and then you can program that isolated mind with a sense of reality Which is all about little me. It's all about self-identification with labels what I call I am are I Am our man. I am our woman. I am our black. I am our white I am I am this sexuality. I am all that sexuality Okay, well something there and I'll edit that down a little bit, but I want you to get the full flavor of Lizard guy I use just a lizard guy talks about aliens and reptilians I didn't mention it in that clip, but that's who he is. He's the reptilian guy So what did you think anything popped of mine there? Yeah, okay? So a few things so first I want to say about David I don't know that much about him other than my general impression and I watched that documentary about him which I thought was which he made with his Family I think and was I'm gonna get to the clip in a second But which I thought was actually a tremendous disappointment and disservice because he self-censored like there was nothing about lizard people in that Documentary I thought was the lizard people thing. I know that that's real So why wasn't there any of this and it was all about consciousness this consciousness that in a way that I actually thought With due respect to him, even though I don't know if he deserves it because I don't really know him that well That that I thought was rather actually basic. I think that those kinds of thoughts about consciousness Yeah, sure. They're interesting. I mean there the things that pop out about Silicon Valley and How we deal with identities and all that but I don't find anything that like Wow, we need to like turn to David Ike for answers here It seems actually rather simplistic for me. I am definitely interested in how identities become I I said years ago that I thought that they were becoming new nationalism that as our faith In relationship to the state started to erode we started building what we considered to be new states and those are identities and we can tell that we treat them like states because When someone gets the language wrong, we banish them and we exile them from the state if they don't say the right, you know words Now I also think we're getting something from it. It's informing us. It's educating us all that kind of stuff I don't want to just say oh, it's purely bad. I think we get something from it but then I've also You know recently on my show talked to a political philosopher Michael Hart and you know, he and his Writing partner Antonio Negri designate these identities as instances of extensions of private property and I find that very interesting too And those things do overlap with some of what's David David saying in that clip, which I find, you know, that's that's provocative that Actually, we're being told to sort of densify our sense of I am this I am that but in terms of property in terms of nationalism and in ways that create walls between us that become almost Or seemingly insurmountable and in fact a very many of the same people who say that they are against walls Against borders and all that kind of stuff are creating infinitely dense borders by turning aspects of their consciousness into bound up walled, you know communities So I would agree with him there but I did think I needed to add that caveat because I get a little frustrated turning to him In the sense that there are lots of people working on this problem and very interesting and I think more complicated ways So I listened to a bunch of those shows that you sent me and I I don't see where We're really getting at some of the issues that we're that you're talking about in this deeper Way because I think fundamental to what Ike is saying there what I want you to respond to Is that fundamentally? No, well, no, it's okay because I like everything that you said. I love No, no, I said okay because I want to hear you Cool with that. No, I just want to hear okay. Like what what was it? Okay? What do you have? Okay? What do you have bring it? Okay? Yeah, I'm just saying I'm sorry got out of life, but I really appreciate and I want people to know this I really appreciate the the level of it and from the beginning You know, we've known each other for a long time. Yeah, yeah You reached out to me years ago and I was like this guy's brilliant This guy's brilliant. You know, he's on all this stuff and then the last time we talked and Uh, oh, you know, you've always had the Rudolph Steiner stuff, which I never quite understood and unpacked And I still remember the quote I use it all the time You know in the quote about uh about rudolf steiner steiner in evil and you're kind of we're having this conversation I love where we kind of get frustrated with each other and you reach a point You go look here's what steiner said You can be the biggest creep in the world the biggest evil doer in the world And then you die and you have to deal with the consequences that and then you come back and you can do it again and again and again And steiner says here's the the ultimate consequence If you do it 13 times in a row, then your soul is destroyed I think that's I think that's kind of Absurd in a way and it's a strange kind of backdoor materialism in in a Kind of way, but at the same time it gets at something that is probably a core truth That I think you were pointing to and that's that let's not get too hung up on The evil that you may be subjecting your soul to because you will deal with the consequences of that And you will leave the the havoc behind with the other people that you encounter And that's a horrible thing and you should definitely try and avoid doing that But from a societal cultural level, let's not get too worked up about that That has to do with you and your life review, buddy And if you can handle the karma Have at it So I think where I appreciate what Ike is saying and I think that it really Is deep in its simplicity in a way that I don't think you really responded to so I'd go back to your comment I'd wind it all the way back to the beginning and I'd say You know in his uh in his Movie or whatever and I haven't seen the movie you're referring to he doesn't talk about lizard people You know it didn't talk about lizard people with me either because we got it We had a million other things to kind of uh talk about but I would say that that is also An unfair criticism of anyone who's been in the public arena, you know and has Talked about a lot of things. I mean if every time you came on a show You had to talk about porn You know, I mean you you could be comfortable doing that because you've covered that topic But after a while you'd be kind of like I don't need to cover that territory Every time you know, I think about a lot of different things and I've investigated a lot of different things and you know For you to kind of pigeonhole it is part of the process too But that's kind of an aside, but that addresses that first point But the second point that I think is really central to this that I wanted you to respond to is that A lot of these social issues That you seem to care about and you seem to put a lot of energy into To me they face the same dilemma that we're facing with the Hugh urban dilemma And that is we have to get to the bottom Of whether or not there is an element of social engineering control behind it so Is the transgender movement transgender rights in particular that's one that particularly jumps out to me as being kind of a carrier virus for A larger agenda that we seem to be that seems to be cropping up again and again So I think it's totally fine for someone to go. That is absurdly crazy conspiracy nonsense That's an appropriate response to that But the the the counter to that would be to say is there any element of truth to it? And if there is then how would that change? How we think about that as a social issue right, okay, so Yeah, I have plenty to say on that. Um So I don't so I've had trans and non-binary binary people on my show. Um who I love I don't think that I don't think that it is a particular or particularly Or singled out or singular issue as far as any kind of op or social control codes right, I think that There are not a singular just just to keep it on track not a single issue. No not at all Okay, okay, so so but but I think that that's important, right? I think you're right all social issues in some way Are part of some op and part of social control a hundred percent I mean this is something that you and now I am going to talk about one But it's something that you learn when you do sex work right away Because you have people attacking you instantly and saying well Yeah, you said you consent to that but actually you're just part of the patriarchy and you've been brainwashed And then you have to be like, how do you know you haven't been brainwashed? And so you have a lot of people sort of pointing fingers at each other being like no, you're the one in the social control You're the one in the social control But the fact is we all are to varying degrees and we're all experiencing that and that unfurls into our causes So you're absolutely right to identify the fact that when we start at any level beyond what I think the fundamental question is Which is what is the human being the unfurling of the issues becomes completely distorted in a way That makes it more susceptible to social control that can sometimes even turn it into social engineering and social control That can rip it away from its sort of earlier warmer You know, I don't know that you know person human being based context It's consciousness context and distorted and make it terrible. So I think you're absolutely right Um, I just I'm just pushing back on the trans thing because I don't think that that's uh any different than any other issue Let's say it's not different than any other issue. I do I want to Push a little bit further on this because I think you're kind of pulling up right at the point where it becomes interesting It's kind of like the huber urban thing. Well, it it it yeah, it doesn't matter It only matters what people believe. Well, it only matters that yes It could be an element of social control. Don't we have to do a full stop? Don't we have to do a reboot? Don't we have to completely? Deconstruct and re-examine everything we thought we knew I think we do Let me play a little clip clip again Because I think the the feminism movement and I just had an interview with yesterday with this wonderful wonderful person Dr. Gail Kimball and she was she actually founded the women's studies program at Cal State Chico And a professor emeriti written some fantastic books But You know, I was hitting her up about the glorious steinham thing. I go glorious steinham Outed as a lifetime CIA player And what she said that I think relates to this interview we're having here She says it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me because she did a lot of good And that's what I hear so many people Who are interested in social issues to talk about It doesn't matter And and stop right there I think it may not matter. I think that's a potentially valid point. It may not matter But it may matter. I I agree. Yeah, I agree with you.  He said you want me to tell you what that was about We the Rockefellers funded that We funded women's lib, you know And we're the ones who got all over the newspapers and television the Rockefeller Foundation He says and you want to why he said there were two primary reasons And they were one reason was We couldn't tax half the population Before women's lib And the second reason was Now we get the kids in school at an early age We can indoctrinate the kids how to think Which breaks up their family The the kids start looking at the state as the family as the school as the officials As their family not as the parents teaching them And so those are the two primary the primary reasons for women's lib Which I thought up to that point was a noble thing You know when I saw their intentions behind it Where they were coming from when they created it the thought of it I saw I saw the evil behind what I thought was a noble adventure Um, so lots of things to pull apart there So one it does absolutely matter that Gloria Steinham worked for the CIA Because what we see there is a complete compromise in the ethical and moral framework in which she presented as having So we understand that she's a liar and a phony And that she's just a posturing figurehead So we will get back to something deeper than that but that on its own should matter to us Right, so even if you want to not accept any idea that the women's liberation movement was created by the Rockefellers or whatever That should matter to people. But the other thing I want to say is Here's where we run into some some complication You know my friend Monalta we you know, she writes a lot about female genital mutilation in uh, well in many in many different countries including the u.s And it happens to young girls and it is I mean truly horrific, right and part of the resistance to uh, the In what I think is rightly called, uh ritual abuse of young girls Um, part of the opposition to that comes from the sort of knock-on effect from this, you know women's liberation movement Which I think in in some ways was As your guest points out funded and run by Uh institutions of power In other ways not so much because there are lots of women liberation women's liberation movements that predate that one That have their roots in spiritual You know practice that have their roots in other kinds of you know, uh traditions, you know, the the spiritualist movement for instance Was a great, you know, uh entanglement with female sexual and political liberation in the 19th century So there are all these other sort of precursors and then there are also these knock-on effects where Uh, a lot of people in certain countries feel empowered to fight against fgm to fight against their husbands literally owning them because Of certain feminist texts that they've gotten so I do think on the one hand it matters and on the other hand It doesn't matter. So we have a much more complicated picture than being able to say one or the other Um, well, you know what actually I'm going to roll that back It always matters it always matters But that doesn't mean that we can't still say complicated things about the good that kind came out of it So I guess I would actually revise my statement But how it matters to us and the kinds of because what I worry about alex And I think you've seen this before is that people will hear something like that interview and be like Well, it was all just a great conspiracy. I mean Women's liberation. It's just, you know, Rockefeller, you know, whatever planned up and it's like well, okay But that's not giving us a fuller picture. And by the way, I don't know about that information quite so much I know about the gloria steinham cia connection and some of the other feminists who Uh, you know, it's tried to you know, incite war and support, uh, the israeli government and all that kind of stuff But I don't know and certainly all the anti-sex work Worker feminists, um, but I don't exactly know about That exact thing that erin russo is talking about erin russo was that is yeah, yeah So you bring up a number of interesting points and there is no substitute for deep thinking And again, that's what I love about what you do with your guests and people can see that from this interview is You have the ability to kind of probe all the different sides of the issue and I don't I don't apologize for kind of pushing you because that's when this stuff gets interesting And I think it's also where where we have to go because if you are so easily manipulated by this, it's like the trigger Alert or a trigger warning and you know, I I love gordon gordon white who was I was on rune soup and that's what originally brought you back to me, but it's like He just frustrates me to no end like the deep in our interview. He does this trigger warning Oh, this is a trigger warning.   There you go. Don't be triggered. Don't allow it to happen So and then I want to kind of add that back into the discussion where I have me because You're so right about the knock-on effects But I would suggest that that is really the power of the co-op If you co-op a non issue Then you have no power If you co-op a real injustice Then it has power My mother I'm old enough that I can tell you my mother was completely oppressed She wasn't particularly a good person that had a problem with drug and alcohol abuse But still I can have tremendous empathy for the fact that she had zero opportunity Other than to get married She had a zero opportunity to express herself as an artist without being labeled and all the rest of these things Those were the very rigid structural elements of our society that she lived in So for her Women's liberation was a real thing and I get where someone would say I don't care Because they look at how they've been oppressed and how their group has been oppressed and they say I don't understand how the whole thing works, but I understand we're on the We're on the short end of the stick here and we need to change that I certainly understand that. I don't know what your background was like But growing up gay Arab in the midwest, right? Wasn't it Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania. Yeah. Hey, man. Not so easy. Not so great You were battling against Social construct social prejudices that shouldn't be there. They're not a good thing So I I can totally understand someone coming back and saying hey I'm not against everyone you've chosen to be everyone is against me So my counter is to say, okay. I accept that. So that's a beautiful thing But I would suggest that that is Right out of the playbook. Of course, that's what they're going to co-opt is real issues and I and I kind of wrap up the Grant here by pointing out like a tiny mistake you made with gloria steinham Which is really the whole mistake and it's the whole mistake with the transgender guy The muslim transgender. I mean they have all these kind of mixed kind of things where it just sends your head spinning And it's really just a psi-op kind of thing, but it's not that gloria steinham was a figurehead Gloria steinham was a lifetime player She was she was recruited early on Yeah to go to the social to go to the student movement things And she came back at her cia opposite. She's thynomite. She's a whiz kid Steinemite We have an we have a job to do here buddy and she gets the job done So it's not that she was a figurehead for feminism. That's really irrelevant What's important is How she played into this social engineering machine and I would come back again and say until we're really Until we're willing to address that straight on Then I don't think we can get there and that's why yeah, I so like and respect david eich And even though he has a million crazy ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny And even though sometimes he's weak on the science as I pointed out to him in our interview He is fundamentally putting his finger on the issue that there is an organized effort a conspiracy if you will to to to Mold you into thinking that what he calls your five sense mind your Biological robot in a meaningless universe meme that that is who you are and that you are meaningless You are helpless. You are powerless and that is part of this agenda in terms of identifying people Sexually which is such a bizarre and absurd notion to begin with because anyone with half a Sensibility says what business do I have? How is it even a concern? It's some kind of Crazy cult thing that's associated with religion that even gave us the notion that we have any business that even have an opinion on someone's sexuality. Yeah, yeah, okay, so There's so there's so much. So let me just like try to let let me just try to go on my own sort of Ran here. Let's see if I can pull it off um So first of all to say That some of the best people examining those issues Are trans people, right? So when you have people that are in the fray Of the deepening of their sense of identity Around gender and gender expression a lot of times they're the ones going so deep into that that they're able to experience a kind of A different kind of revelation about it. That's certainly true about sex work and me.  You can bring real questions But why is this important in regards to evil? so as you said before using my The the thing I said that rudolf steiner said which is on the one hand absurd and on the other hand completely true um When we do evil in our own lives we through our own freedom and effort And uh and and incarnations we work that out, right? We take it on and we redeem it in ourselves through karma and process There is evil Located and lodged in so many different social issues which relate to social engineering in one way or the other We can see this in a very easy way if we look at someone like Martin heidegger the philosopher who ended up being a nazi But we can see that there's value in some of the things that he says as a philosopher We can see it in Nietzsche. We can see it in all these people, right? So when I look at philosophers like that I need to look at I I can't just do this bullshit thing which people do all the time Which I find completely interjectionable, which is well, you just take the good and you leave the bad Just move on with the good stuff because that doesn't address the foundational thing that you bring up all the time What I need to do is find out how the good and the bad are entangled and liberate that philosophy from itself So it becomes redeemed because evil almost always not always But almost always wants to actually be redeemed and saved by us and by our fruitful action So when I look at these social movements, whatever they are and the ways that they are either created or entangled in social engineering My job is not to be like, well, you know, there's good stuff that came out of it So just ignore the bad or it's all bad. So condemn it My work is to go deep into that and transform it by seeing those connections and liberate it from itself And that's what we do in the task of evil all the time in ourselves through our karma But we also need to do it socially and in these issues I think that's wonderful. And I think that you're talking about something very spiritual there in terms of Your spiritual journey and your personal spiritual journey and about transformation But I am going to kind of persist on this other issue because I think it gets us back to the evil question in a larger sense because I'm totally down with what you're saying about from a personal evil thing And a personal evil thing in a lot of ways is so so easy Because we all confront our personal evil all the time And we identify with it and we are struggling with it in a way that we Usually have to come to grips with sooner or later The collective evil I think is a little bit harder And what I notice and what I'm calling out is a certain avoidance Of wanting to look at that collective evil and I'd return to my buddy David Ike again Because I think I think what he's saying is quite profound If there is an overall agenda aimed at consciousness To intentionally separate you from your connection to higher consciousness And part of that agenda is to reinforce your connection to technology to materialism to biological robot in a meaningless universe Then I think we need to understand if that's real If that's in play And I think we need to take action Accordingly and we could talk about what that action is Do you get why I'm persisting on that? Do you do you think we've nailed that or no? Yeah, I'm a little confused because I think what I said sort of addresses what you're talking about so 100% I agree with you and I by the way agree with David Ike's assessment Um, at least in the terms that you framed it in that there is a technocratic control project underway And it is linked to definitive evil not just Hurt people hurting people or people being confused or whatever, but there is actually an agenda Now there's a deeper question as to whether or not that agenda is actually set by the spiritual world Or if it's set by individuals or individuals influenced by the spiritual realm in a specific way Or acting it out So I think there are all these questions that we have to sort through as well But that seems very clear to me I agree with you there and that presses a question upon us of tactics and strategy But I think what I'm talking about is actually part of it, which is um We need to have a certain approach to evil when we see it Which is one knowing that it wants to be liberated from itself that it wants to be redeemed Um, and we can see that in our own anatomy and experience If we accept to the principle of reincarnation, which I'm not going to go into whether or not we should You've done a lot of shows on it. I think it's pretty definitive that that's the thing but I think um we So we know from our own spiritual anatomy that that's happening and we need to bring that intentionally to the way that we approach evil in the world, which is What matters is how I greet you Evil what matters is how I greet you because that's the only way it's like a chinese finger trap The more I struggle in the wrong way the the tighter it gets But I need to find the right way to let that it relax so I can remove myself so I can approach in the proper way so After that there's still our syntactic.  What do we do about the fact that our media including this that we're on right now is carried by uh microwaves That are divided like a flip book You know to carry certain amounts of information and suddenly lo and behold People have a hard time paying attention to things things come to us in sound bites Things come in little blips and sort of bizarro like you know two second things It's because the actual medium of transfer of information is affecting how we receive and reflect on the world in general So how do we deal with the fact that the actual media like not the actual Transfer of information is having a disruptive effect on our consciousness Do we tear down cell phone towers? Do we take material action? Do we find the culprit and punish them? Do we create counter devices? Do we engage in occult technologies? Do we practice magic? Do we pray those questions all rise to the surface when we look around and we find ourselves in a pool of evil in a pool of a problem And so we have tactical questions ahead of us that aren't just Um, well, I'll just be a good person Right now you can do that and everything will be all right Sure, but the question is do we want a thousand years of suffering before everything's all right?  You know, I mean, I think that that's a real question and um, Maybe that sounds materialistic, but I also don't like suffering So I'm just going to go with my own, you know likes and desires there And I don't think other people do either and I think it's part of my spiritual responsibility to help people with that And not just leave the earth in my thinking and be like well, everything's going to be okay. Who cares, you know What are your thoughts on? Right action because I think this is something that we all wrestle with And that is the being versus doing question and is working on myself working to not be triggered working to Find the warmth and humanity as you talked about in the beginning Is that enough? Does god need our help the gods need our help, but god does not so, um The gods if you're serious about that you would have to break that down. Well, you know, we still have 20 minutes Or or more maybe a half hour before I have to go. So let me just let me just lay it on you Yes, yeah, um, I wouldn't call it a hierarchy of consciousness. I would call it a hierarchy of consciousness or a hierarchy of conscious of evolving states of consciousness that appear as entities um From the vantage point that we're at when actually it's just more sort of topple topological, but um Yeah, so kind of topology Yeah, so um Well, let me let me let me get back to the original statement, which is the gods need our help But god does not I mean god is first of all god is so far beyond What most of us understand that I can't I'm not going to even It's hard for me to apprehend that from my standpoint and from my vantage point Um, but okay, if you want to say some sort of totality or whatever um The the totality of the consciousness state But as far as the other beings go, we even see this weird turning point in mythology You know with with with theseus and the minotaur and all this kind of stuff where the gods are suddenly asking for humans to help them Complete their tasks and before that you see the gods sort of you know, I'm not using this as a reality claim I'm just using as a metaphor where you see the gods sort of um Positioning people as pawns and moving them around and all that kind of stuff and then suddenly as consciousness begins to change and evolve The gods are like hey, could you help me with this thing? You know, and so we see in our in our own lives as the sort of uh The way that consciousness evolves to reflect a certain kind of freedom a certain kind of free will a certain kind of uh difference from the kind of deterministic ways that we might have lived in before um Then we have different duties and different responsibilities And with those come different dangers. And so yes, there are Uh, I'll just state outright. There are angelic beings or archangels That want us to align with them for this battle against evil um And from very their vantage point the battle against evil looks very different than from ours um But they can't do it on their own because we have free will because we're not biological Robots that invites in the possibility what we talked about this the last time I was on the show But that invites in the possibility of us doing evil. So we actually have to Uh get right with them and that includes a lot of different things that includes study contemplation prayer It also includes the very basic guiding principles for us, which are freedom and compassion I mean, that's really it like if you can just drill down But that sounds easy, but it's not easy and that sounds simple, but it's not simple I appreciate you laying all that out and just being so direct about it I am not sure that I agree and I really want to get out there an alternative perspective I mean, I may agree You know a lot of people are saying what you're saying and they make a good case forward And there's certainly a lot of uh human experience that would pack up what you're saying in terms of I love angel stories I love angel accounts. I'm not inclined to dismiss them because they have a lot of connection, but here is kind of the The kind of yogic non dual perspective, however it gets cast But I think is important and I'm particularly drawn to western interpretations of that non dual perspective and one is kind of an eastern and the guy's a creep and uh, This is back to your work of all these complicated people, but the tm guy Maharashi Mahesh yogi, you know who is a creep and is a cult kind of founder But at the same time I've talked to enough of his people that He had some spiritual energy some pure spiritual power and some spiritual insights that we shouldn't ignore And I love the way that you talk about Uh, you know liberating the truths from the falsehoods in a way that kind of empowers us to transform anyways long way around the barn of saying It's all in the middle is the essence of that if you want to play that game with demons and angels have at it But you are ultimately trying to transcend all of that So if your transcendence of that is to engage Well, that may be good or it may not be good But what some of those folks are advising us and it seems to make sense to me is that You don't need to engage because your ultimate goal is to transcend that as well And get down to the core essence of your connection to that higher consciousness without the need for the Intermediary realm and you know, it's consistent. What I've heard about that is that most of this evil we're talking about is Not very powerful in the bigger scheme of things and we often engage in empowering it by Engaging with it and that can go in a million different directions If we don't have time to go this could be I've talked really fast because you only have 20 minutes left, but There we go. Well, okay. So, um, first of all, that's to me an op Um, so I want to address that as an op in and of itself Why because the idea of transcendence um Is this this is what people who do like Advaita Vedanta like oh all is energy. It's all well. Everything's perfect all that That's true But you can't I think that that's true on a certain level But pretending that you're accessing that when there are people suffering And those people are a part of you and you have a deep connection to them through Consciousness and through what it means to be human is a dereliction of duty to yourself to heaven Um, whatever you want to call it to the cosmos And I think that you know this idea of transcendence people are gonna people are gonna get tired of the same old skeptical stories But and I think I haven't shared this with you on the last one We did but you got the the amma example that I always go to right so amma the hugging saint Fully engaged in life Working with people tirelessly. She's an old lady. I don't know how she does it 18 hours a day Of hugging people the ultimate gift of connection or digging trenches with the untouchables in india What a contradiction that is that we have this gift of a jewel of spirituality of india and then This system where they have untouchables. It's another Way that evil manifests itself So you have a person it is totally engaged in the act of loving and giving and engagement and warmth and humanity But when pressed for why she does that when the whole thing is supposed to be transcended She says world what world? She is not even in this world on her spiritual level But she realizes that the the paradox that in her actions. She can be totally engaged She can be the guy who will Jump in front of the bullet to save someone else who will save anica lucas from Ritual sexual abuse and murder and will ultimately die because of it So there's many acts great and small of kindness from people who are committed to transcendence Yeah, so okay, you're right like i'm not i'm not typifying like the entire idea of I live At least partially in the spiritual realm because i've Transcended i'm talking about the idea of transcendence like um you know like the idea of leaving the kind of responsibility Of materiality behind Here's the reason and this goes back to the reality claim The being that is causing the trouble right now That is the you know, lots of people like to use this term archon. I'm not a fan of it But for people to understand the archon or whatever The being that's causing all the trouble right now is a being whose anatomy is composed of materialism When we decide to transcend this plane, we're actually leaving that being behind So we might be doing all the kinds of work that we're supposed to be doing for each other and all that But the spiritual realm is being neglected because that being Out of its own essence has no choice but to draw us all towards materialistic Uh existence and so we think we're being so great because we With all due respect to ama who seems pretty great We think we're doing so great because we are transcending and and hugging people and saying well What world is there and all that kind of stuff? But as long as we even if we just did all that and every other human being was perfect We're leaving the spiritual beings behind and we have a responsibility to them as well Now, I don't think that's all that's happening there But I just want to bring that up as one point That evil waits to be redeemed by us through love And when we don't do that because we just live in the spiritual realm We're actually giving up on suffering that needs to be transformed Your awesomeness continues to shine car. What's going on with against everyone and you said the books next year What other projects are you working on there in ireland and what's going on? I'm I'm trying to like take in as much of ireland as possible. I'd like to know The land and the the the spiritual beings here better. I'd like to understand A lot, you know, so I'm trying to learn the language learn music all that kind of stuff Like just take it all in Give us a little give us a little uh a bit of the language Oh god, I didn't know not yet Conest at that too. No, I'm terrible at it. Um, the the irish language is very complicated Well, all languages are complicated for me because I'm a total dummy about them, but uh, except english so, um So I'm not the Don't ask me to do that. That's the most challenging skeptical question so far Um, but uh, yeah, and against everyone it just continues to it continues to grow. I mean, I think Not that anybody's asking this, but I think it like you as an exemplar for me Um and some other podcasters, but there aren't a lot of them Who just decide, you know, I want to have this conversation because it's important For me to have this conversation, but it's also important for this conversation to radiate and to go out there And um, if you don't have a podcast yourself You know the idea behind my show is that and I think yours too in a way is like Maybe these conversations will happen in people's lives if I just display the ones that I'm having You know because that's really important because these questions are important. So I'm just going to keep Following that, you know Right on to that Against everyone with connor habib wouldn't have it any other way connor. Thanks again as awesome Never disappoint my friend. You never disappoint. So thanks so much for coming on Yeah, thanks alex. I love talking with you Thanks again to connor habib for joining me today on skeptico The one question I'd have to tee up from this interview has to do with what I think is his excellent point about Just take the good and leave the bad I I think he's really on to something about it's more complicated Than that and I think we all have misgivings about The bad that we have to swallow with what we're told is good. So What do you think about that? Let me know pop on over to the skeptical forum drop a note or send me an email or however else You would like to connect. Please do so. It's so wonderful to find out who's out there and to find out What's going on in this little community that we have So I have some interesting stuff coming up on skeptical Please stay with me for all of that until next time. Take care and bye for now


Hi everyone! I have an example here for you of another area between two curves problem. So we're going to find the area of the region bounded by the graphs of a cubic equation and then also a parabola. So let's go ahead and get them graphed in our graphing calculator. And you can do zoom six to get yourself a graph started. I did shorten up my x axis though to how you see them here to negative 6 to positive 6. So obviously the blue curve is the cubic and the red curve is the quadratic. And what is different about this problem compared to others that we've looked at is that this is an example of which if you take a look at the functions they almost like flip-flop they turn change places in terms of which one is the one quote on quote on top. Because remember that we want to think of our representative rectangle. In this case if we want that rectangle to hit both curves at the same time it needs to be going vertically therefore it's going to be a dx problem. So if we think of doing that integrand as the top function minus the bottom function that's what's going to change places once you hit the origin going from the left to the right. So this is one we're going to have to set up in two integrals. So you're going to have to find those points of intersection. I shall leave that to you. Again I've already done it so I know what they are. That one down in the third quadrant on the lower left that x value should be negative 2 that you find. Then the curves each pass through the origin and then they cross each other again over at x equals positive 2. Alright so the first integral we're going to go left to right. The first integral is going to go from negative 2 to 0 and it's going to have to be the cubic equation minus the quadratic one. So let's set that up. You could even just call it f of x minus g of x if you'd like. If you don't feel like writing all this out because we'll probably just evaluate it in our calculators. Then for the second integral let's go back to our graph. We're going to go from 0 to 2 but now the quadratic is on top. So we're going to have to think of this as g of x which is the quadratic function minus f of x which was the cubic. So we have two different integrals to do on our calculator. Let's see I know this was y1 in my calculator and this one was y2. So I might be able to make use of that as I go ahead and set them up. So we can do them separately and then just add our answers together if you want. So let's go back to our quit screen and we'll go ahead and do math 9. So the first one was negative 2 to 0. This is the one remember the cubic was on top which is what I had under y1. So that was y1 minus y2. All right so that's my cubic as y1 minus my quadratic as y2 dx. So let's see what we get for that one. 12. Okay let's try the next one. So now we're going from 0 to 2. Now this is where they change places so now the top function was the quadratic which I had under y2. Oops I said y2 minus y1 which was my g of x function the cubic. I actually get 12 for that. So the combined total of course is 24. Now let me show you something with that area between program though because we've been talking about how we could use that to check our answers. So let's go back let's go ahead and run the program and what a lot of people would try to do is they would think okay well I'm just going to run it from negative 2 to positive 2 and just find the whole area in one lump sum. All right so let's try to do that. So negative 2 to positive 2 and look what you get. This is a case in which you actually have to be smarter than your calculator. All right that obviously is scientific notation your 9.174 times 10 to the negative 15th essentially 0. So the calculator does not realize that the functions have switched places that's really what happens. It's almost thinking of this as a positive area and a negative area offsetting each other. Now of course if you were to run this from negative 2 to 0 and then we could do the same from 0 to 2 it will give you the right answer then. So if you wanted to use this to check your answers I would I'd highly advise you to go ahead and do it in two separate integrals but I wanted to show you what happens if you were to run it from the far left end point to the far right end point. It doesn't always work you still have to be smarter than your calculator.


Good morning, everyone. My name is Julian Blanco and I'm going to be giving a talk on C2 over maritime automatic identification system and commercial aggregation websites. A couple favors. If I'm talking too fast, if I'm talking too quietly, please somebody throw something at me, let me know. I hate public speaking, so let's keep this as informal as possible. All right. So the abstract I submitted for this talk was that AIS is a worldwide program that assists vessels in preventing collisions at sea. By compromising an endpoint connected to a vulnerable AIS transmitter or connecting a software defined radio to a traditional IT network, one can bypass web filters, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, the idea is that we have this system known as AIS that works pretty much all over the world, on land and at sea, on land because we have satellites that pass over, we have terrestrial towers that pick up the signal, and anywhere the signal can be picked up, it can then be re-broadcast because it's a mesh protocol and it's collected into a bunch of websites and published. And what that allows you to do is create a low bandwidth throughput connection to wherever you want. And because you're connecting to a bunch of random websites, it's almost anonymous because you'd have to go through a monumental task of trying to figure out who is accessing what websites, where they're coming from with a couple of hops. You basically have a nearly anonymous C2 source that I will talk about a little bit later. Who am I? In my professional life, I'm a Coast Guard officer stationed at Coast Guard Cyber Command. I like doing DFIR, my background is in Electroengineering. I do all cyber IT stuff now. And this talk is completely mine, not the views of the government, and this is not government sponsored work. I'd like to give a shout out to my best friend, Trey Maxim. He helped me tremendously and I'm building off of some of his previous work. I wish you could be here giving the talk with me, but he could not make it out to Vegas. So we've been working on this together and this is probably more his than mine, but we've been working on this for a while. So why do we care? AIS is a system that is crucial to the maritime industry. It's required by SOLAS, which is Safety of Life at Sea, and all international ships with 300 and more gross tonnage and all passenger ships, regardless of size, has to have this system on. And when it has to have the system, it's not just receive, it's transmit. So all of these devices, all of our on commercial ships, they are transmitting, they have transmitters on them that could be useful. Do not know. How does it help? So why we have this system is basically if you're looking at your radar screen and this is not very helpful. I mean, it's helpful. You can see the things that are coming at you. But if I was on a collision course with one of these vessels, it's really hard to see, hey, I need to basically look at the window if I'm in fog, it makes it even harder and say, hey, vessel, you know, white with a black superstructure, come back on the radio.  And now I can just go, hey, vessel Castello, come back on the radio, let's talk, let's pass the port to port, however we need to. And it can also be used with, since it's going to be broadcasting their speed, if they're outside of radar, we can pick them up farther and maybe we can even plan a course around them that's not going to be a collision course whatsoever. There's some previous work. So back at Black Hat in 2014, I believe, Embrite did a AIS exposed where he talked about the protocol. That was very vulnerable, did not have any security built into the protocol. And they did a whole bunch of cool things. They did a lot of spoofing. They did a lot of jamming. They filled up all the time slots in the AIS. And basically it didn't allow legitimate traffic to transmit. And then my buddy Trey and his partner, Shano, did a lot of work with software-defined radios. They created their own protocol to be able to transmit. Trend Micro also has theirs publicly on their GitHub. If you want to use their thing to create your own AIS transmitter, I've never been able to get their code to work, but supposedly it does. So there's that as well. All right. So kind of talked about AIS a little bit. Basically here, you can see this is just a cheesy infographic that the signal is mesh. If I can't see the land-based receiver, it'll transmit over to a ship and then another ship will bounce that signal to land. It is a mesh protocol. That way it gets maximum effectiveness and coverage. It is on VHF. And I believe the frequency is 161.975 is the first channel and 162.025 megahertz is the second. It is GMSK, which is really annoying to work with. If you're not familiar with GMSK, instead of modulating the actual carrier signal, it modulates the phase to encode the data into the carrier signal, which is, it works just a little less documented and a little harder to work with software-defined radios. So my buddy Trey, when they built their own software defined radio, this is what their GNU radio block ended up looking like. They basically had a sync where they created what their message they wanted to look like. They created that in Python, create it into a text file, shoved it into GNU radio, and basically did all this math to get it to actually broadcast a signal. This is what their GMSK ended up looking like. This is what it looks like demodulated. You can see the signal. All the ones and zeros were then transmitted and received on the other end. This is the actual block of Python that they used. So what it looks like is something like this. Excuse the horribly code, and this is probably way too small to see. Basically, we would plug in an MSSI number, what we wanted the name, the ship type, the draft, what their destination was, and we just shoved it into a bunch of hex and transmitted. We're going to publish all this stuff open source once we get it a little bit better documented and commented. So don't feel like you need to take pictures of this. We will put it out there. But basically, the goal was to be able to take something modular. In this case, Python, that's pretty easy to work with for anybody and use that to be able to create new transmissions. Whether that's because you want to legitimately, hey, we want to not buy an expensive transceiver to put on our boat. We want to just use the software to find a radio for 150 bucks, have our own MSSI number put in registration to the FCC, and have basically a low cost transmitter, just because let's say we're doing a Bergata sailing. A lot of people like to do that. But that's why we wanted to create a modular. It also, because it's modular, is easy to be used for nefarious purposes. So we had some fun with it.  We did this null terminated into another software to find radio and then picked up in a open CPN. So this was not broadcast. It looks like Cape Cod. But because we have this modular piece of Python that we can create new AS messages, then it makes it really easy to spit out, in this case, a smiley face or whatever we wanted to do with it. Now, why this is important is when we want to generate messages, let's say for creating C2, the idea is we're not going to be broadcasting a legitimate target. We're going to be broadcasting an illegitimate target. Now, could it look like a legitimate target? Sure, we have a vessel. We make it look like it's navigating. But let's say the least significant digits of the coordinates or something in the info field. We are encoding data into there, depending on how much data we want to get through and how much risk we're willing to take in whether we want to be detected or not, kind of determines whether we want to just use like one single digit on the back of the lat long, or if we're just going to put a bunch of, let's say, encrypted or encoded text into the info field of the AS message. So some of the benefits of doing CTO over AS is it could be extremely hard to trace. It can bypass your IDS and IPS. If you have a traditional SATCOM IP connectivity on your ship and your beaconing traffic, most of the time these are really small links, maybe 250 kilobits per second, five or six end points. If you were having legitimate, let's say, C2 over a common, let's say, a meterpreter shell or power shell empire, it's probably pretty easy to pick up in your IPS, especially since there's not going to be a lot of traffic leaving the vessel. If you were to do something with either a radio link or over AIS, your traditional SOC is not going to be able to notice it. It allows us to connect to air gap networks. If we're at ship and they don't have a SATCOM unit, then we could use AIS as a possible other venue to talk to that air gap network, whether that's on the engine control network, on their traditional IT network, or if we just want a foothold on their network to be able to do something. And it works on land and sea. It's not just limited to vessels. If we wanted to use this method and go plug a software defined radio into a workstation in a bank in Miami, there's plenty of towers in that area that are going to pick up that signal and vessels that are going to relay that signal. If we created a fake vessel that's just sitting in one of the ports and just shove this on a traditional endpoint in a bank, you could smuggle C2 out that way. Is it going to be used? Probably not. It's very niche, but it just highlights a vulnerability in the AIS protocol and the fact that there's no security, which has been discussed before, and I'm not going to really talk about here, but yeah. So to tractors, it is easy to detect. Because all these signals are picked up and you probably have to use an illegitimate MMSI number or an MSI number of a ship that is already broadcasting. It's going to be noticed whether it's going to be traced back to you. Who knows? It is very niche. You're not going to get a lot of data and it's expensive. If you have to plant a software defined radio or let's say one of these, this is a lime SDR. These are tiny. This would be really easy to plant on to a ship. No one would ever notice it, either on a Raspberry Pi or directly into one of their endpoints. It's going to cost you between under 200 bucks a pop for each thing you're going to try to create a transmitter on. Whether that's expensive to you or not depends on your threat model and who you're going up against. So let's talk, how would you get that signal off? So one way you could get the signal off is sit there with another software defined radio or a legitimate AIS receiver and pick up the signal. Now why that is not maybe your best option is because if you're within radio distance of your target then you're probably pretty easy to find. One thing you could do is wait for it to be picked up on either Ship Tracker or MarineTraffic.com and these are commercial aggregation websites that show basically all of your ships in real time. So if we take a look at all the AIS targets that are out in the world right now you can see there's a whole lot of stuff out there. Would someone notice an extra dot on this map? Maybe maybe not. There's also some weird dots on here like this one over here in Vegas not Vegas but in Nevada. Not really sure what that one is but that also shows that there is pretty good coverage inland in the United States and if you look in some of these major rivers in Europe there's also a lot of coverage over there. So what you do is you would basically scrape the website and you would pull depending however you're encoding your message whether you encode it in the coordinates you encode it in the info field or even in the name of the AIS ship that you're broadcasting you would put your signal in there put your message in there and then you'd pick it up on one of these commercial websites. If somebody let's say knew that was an illegitimate target whether let's say the government or somebody who is really curious they would have to rely on cooperation from the website to be able to say hey give us your access log let's pull all the IP addresses of who's reaching out to your website and at that point it's really hard to be able to pinpoint who that is so is it possible to then trace from I plug the software to find radio into a ship it broadcasts a signal and then I go on the other end and I know what website I want to use or what multitude of websites I'm going to use. Technically yes it is possible to trace all that way back although it would be very very difficult. Bypass IDSIPS because you're going to be routing your traffic through the AIS transmitter it's not going to go through your traditional network I think I talked about that a little bit especially on ships where you don't have a lot of throughput this might be important depending on who you are and works on land and sea and that's really important. Airgaps is another one and what we're going to be hoping to do in the next couple months is we want to rewrite everything from GNU radio over to SOPE SDR this is an all python based module that's cross-platform works on Linux Mac Windows. The reason we want to do this is GNU radio is kind of heavy it's very well documented but it is annoying to work with by switching to SOPE SDR we could put it even on the smallest of a Raspberry Pi and be able to you know transmit our signal that way plus working in purely python is preferable to us. We did all of our previous work on really expensive software to find radio so we're hoping to get it working on either a HackRF1 or a line SDR mini just to bring the cost down from you know expensive USRPs that are let's say $8,000 once you buy the right daughter boards to transmit on the signals that you want and we're going to be open sourcing the tools soon. Basically what we'd like to hit is reliable transmission and then commented that way other people can not just look at our code and make fun of us and be able to improve and hopefully make this a useful tool that obviously is not going to be widespread but for a niche client if you're trying to work with an AAS or work with a maritime client you can say hey this is another method that you should be aware of probably not going to happen but another thing to throw in your report and I think that's it we're going to be putting it up on my github so I'll put these slides are going to be up there later and this is where we will put the code once we're done. I got about five minutes for questions before the next person needs a setup. Cool. Appreciate it. I have a question here. Yep. You mentioned when you easily detect world time to the MSI that will register and be not a real ship. Is there anything stopping you from for example more software if I'm radio for example listening or legitimate traveling and then sending out essentially the technical ship again and making them out of my different fields and that would then overlay them. So the question was would it be difficult to listen to existing traffic and then it'd be a detectable because you're using an MSSI number that is either illegitimate already broadcast. No it is possible to just grab somebody MSSI number because there is no encryption or any basically thing protecting the protocol you can easily just spoof somebody else's MSSI number and use that. If they weren't broadcasting it probably not be picked up as easily. There's a lot of work in looking at the data for illegal fishing basically they'll monitor the AS tracks and watch where they go dark especially as they go into protected zones. So it's possible that some of those heuristics would pick up on our stuff if you're broadcasting and then all of a sudden goes dark they might not realize what you're doing but it might show on somebody's screen. The other thing is there's two channels of AS so if you broadcast on the other channel that's not very frequently used there's a chance that nobody would even notice it because nobody's looking and another thing you can do is message 42 I believe in the AS will tell a receiver to switch channels so if I have a legitimate vessel or a buoy that is let's say it's a aton buoy underneath one of the bridges saying hey there's 20 feet of clearance right now if I broadcast at that one and say hey switch to channel B I'm gonna take your main spot on channel A and I'm going to look legitimate maybe even have the legitimate height under the bridge but maybe there's some extra data in there maybe maybe no one would notice that it's really a question of who's looking