My name is Flores. I've been writing Python for quite a while and I've been starting to use Kubernetes for about one and a half years. I think I've worked with it since just before it became 1.0. And this is sort of a number of things that can make your life easier towards building your application more suitable for Kubernetes. Kubernetes is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. That's kind of where the title Cloud Native Python comes from. And one of the things is like it's not really necessary to do all of those things. You can start without actually doing any of these things as soon as you go, you can dockerize your application. You can run it in Kubernetes and start benefiting. It's just a number of things you can start adding to your application gradually as you need them, as you want them kind of thing. This is sort of the roadmap. So I'll go through very quickly, give a bit of background about how Kubernetes actually works. If you know of Kubernetes already, that may be a repetition, but I'll keep it very small and simple. Then I'll sort of say on which parts of the execution environment that you get out of when you're running inside Kubernetes that you can sort of rely on what shortcuts you can use. I'll talk about handling logging. Then I'll go a bit about endpoints and monitoring. This is kind of my summary of Kubernetes. So Kubernetes is inside of in one slide, if you want. So Kubernetes is actually, it's an orchestrator for running your application on our cluster. So the idea is that you just have your process, which you wrap into a container. It's just your single Python process that runs in your container. Currently, that basically means Docker. Kubernetes will just make sure that your application runs somewhere on one of the machines in the cluster. Kubernetes refers to machines as nodes in the cluster. So you've got your application, which is your process wrapped in a container, and Kubernetes abstracts away into a pod. A pod basically has got some extra bells and whistles. For this talk, you don't really have to worry about what else you can do with a pod. Pods don't really have much guarantees when they run on this cluster. If the node goes away for any reason, your pod goes away. Pods may get killed for other reasons because they start using too much resources of some sort or whatever. So they don't provide any consistency. So the next abstraction on top that Kubernetes sort of gives is the replica set. And the replica set kind of monitors your pod. And the idea is that you just say, can I want to have this many copies? I want to have one or whatever number of copies of my application, of this application running. And that will just watch your pod. And if your pod goes away for any reason, you create a new one. And that also allows you to kind of scale up as you get more load, you add more. You just say, I'll give me more replicas and more pods will run. And they'll run distributor over the cluster. There's some shadow re-involved that figures out where the best place is for your pods to run. There's other abstractions other than replica set, but I'm not going to go into those. There's various other ways of looking after your pods, basically. But as concepts for now, that's kind of enough to sort of, everything is built around this concept and a lot of them use replica sets. The other thing is like, because your pods are so ephemeral, they just move around, they come in, they go, you don't know which machine they're on. You need to be able to address them. So there are IP addresses in pods if you have a service that listens for incoming connections need to be addressed. So that's where the service abstraction, the service object comes in with Kubernetes. So the idea there is that it's basically kind of a level for proxy or load balancer. And it just, it's fixed IP address for your pod that anyone in the cluster, there's normally the name associated with that as well. So you can easily find it. And whenever you need to talk to your service, you connect to that IP address and that will route the traffic to wherever the actual pods is. If you have multiple pods, it will round robin between them or something like that. Again, there's mobiles and missiles, but that's kind of, if you got those three things you know enough about, you know, in the basics of both Kubernetes, kind of how Kubernetes manages things around. So it brings us to kind of what you can do in your execution environment. So you're running in your application, your Python program is basically running inside the spot that's being looked after by replica sets, et cetera.  You know, your audience is an operations team that knows how to handle Kubernetes. And also it means you can rely on the architecture for scalability, et cetera. So you can make your internal application actually a lot simpler. You don't have to worry about it as much. One of the, so the first kind of thing I think is kind of useful is don't try and recover errors. If you get an unexpected exception, just make it, just make it crash your whole application. You're probably fine because your application is being watched after. So inside Kubernetes you got a lot, all the operations is kind of done with a lot of YAML files. So if you've played the Kubernetes before you might recognize this, this is just a partial kind of view of that. So this would be some sort of way of defining the application to run. You have an image and some arguments. It's actually a bit, but the bit that matters here is the restart policy at the very last line. That basically ensures that whenever your application dies, it will get restarted. And that allows you to, you know, when you have any unexpected conditions, your request data doesn't validate or something like that. You can just crash and you can rely on the infrastructure to take care of it. Again, it will be logged that the crash happened and you have all the information to look at what went wrong. The one thing to think about is if you have a service that accepts incoming connections and processes requests that way, you do have to worry about when you crash what you're going to lose. So if you have a number of requests queued up inside your application, if you crash and you lose all those requests, they will start timing out. And that might not be as ideal. So you may want to think a little bit about your architecture there and make sure that maybe you can use a messaging bus to process your requests so that when you crash you don't lose all of those. So you have to look out a little bit for those. But yeah, otherwise, don't try and make your application too robust, really. And the other thing kind of linking into that is you can also make your application a lot easier. You don't have to handle a lot of scale. The idea is to scale by the process model, which means you just run more processes in parallel. And if you have a messaging system already to talk between your services, it's very easy. So as I showed earlier in the Kubernetes slide, the idea of scaling is just to create more of your pods with your application running into. And that means you're not terminating kind of the end user request. You should have a load balancer or reverse proxy if you're handling an HTTP traffic. You'll have a reverse proxy in front of that. So you're not handling directly the end user requests. So you can just, your internal architecture can be very simple. You just have a main loop. You handle one request at a time. You don't, and making this architecture that way means you don't have to worry about the scale too much because the scaling is done on a different level, really. Yeah, so next on, I think it's useful to say a little bit about logging. So again, kind of on a very simple level, if you have ever played with Docker or Kubernetes, by default things go to standard out. If you're the main process in your container, and I would recommend you just run one single main process in your container anyways, then anything you write to standard out or standard error will be captured in the logs. And these logs will be sent through from Docker to Kubernetes, and Kubernetes will then keep these logs. It's very simple. It works nice while developing. But it does have its downsides because records are basically line-based. So if you have one line, that's your log message. If you got a trace back that you got in your logs, that spans multiple lines. That's kind of no longer one logical. Once it's gone through the Docker and Kubernetes logging, that's no longer one logical line. So oftentimes, the sort of log aggregation that might be running, your operations will probably start running only once they deal with lots of logs. We'll try and join back together these records into single records. But the thing here is that even though it's just standard out, you want to make sure that it is configurable. It's up to you, depending on how your operations manages things. So if they want to send all the logs to something like the Elkstack Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana, or something like that, so if they want to index it, search it and make it search, all that sort of stuff, that kind of gets built on top. But you still want to give the option to the operations to configure their logging. And so you don't want to beg that completely into your application. So it's often very, very useful. I prefer it as combined line arguments. You can stick things into the environment variables as well. But yeah, make sure to sort of make it configurable so your operations can choose what they do there. The other thing is don't skip using logging libraries because it's just standard out. The logging libraries, just to get things going on standard out, are very easy to set up anyway. It means you straight away get your different log levels that you can use. All logging libraries are basically kind of wrappers around the horrible amount of global state that it's quite terrifying. Pick the one you like most, I would say. Some handle the global state in different ways. The thing I'm showing in the middle block with the logbook example, it sort of kind of leads on to the next step that you might want to take with logging is once you're using a logging library and your operations have started moving to a log aggregator, you might actually want to, instead of going via the docker and Kubernetes route of letting your logs be captured, you might actually want to start bypassing and start things directly into your log aggregation via something like a gray log or system D. You could set that up to send. So you can add your additional log handlers to your log library. In that case, you probably want to put the exception logging right wrapped around your main function basically because that will actually allow your whole exception to be sent as one single log record rather than what you, if you just let it up to Python to bubble out, it will end up on the normal Python handler, will print it on standard out again and it goes back as a bunch of unrelated records again. The last one, struct log, I think is very nice, especially if you aggregate just lots of things because it allows you to put a lot more machine passable data in. So it's kind of a nice wrapper around things as well. Yeah, so that's pretty much everything around logging, I think. So basically, yeah, standard out is not amazing, but using a log library allows you to evolve towards better log record handling. Next on, I would like to talk about the health endpoints that Kubernetes kind of provides. The thing here that we're trying to address here is when your application starts up, it might be initializing some data and it might be contacting various other things to collect data or whatever, but between process start and being ready to accept connections, this is obviously in the case your application is one that receives connections, there is a non-finite time. Unfortunately, as soon as your application starts up, your pod gets created in Kubernetes. It will be if you have a service pointing to it, which you need to accept your connections. So as soon as that happens, traffic will start flowing towards you. If you haven't opened your socket yet, then those connections are just going to get connection refused and you're losing your requests basically. So the idea here is that you tell Kubernetes to wait to add your pod to the service as one of the handles of that service until you're actually ready to accept connections. And they do this with a readiness probe and there's various probes, various types here. Basically, the three types that they support is a TCP socket and HTTP request and a command to execute inside your container itself. The last one is not always terribly useful, I find, but the first two are very useful. So if you're for the TCP socket example, which is the top one here, if your service basically opens a socket for whatever, maybe 0 and Q, G, R, P, C, whatever, something like that, if it directly opens a socket, once the socket is open, basically you can use your main listening socket for this probe in this case because once the socket is open, connections will start to be able to be made. They'll queue up in the kernel until you call accept on your socket. So it's a very useful probe. In this case, when you start the pod, it will try to port. If it's not ready yet, it will just wait. You can again configure this more detailed, how often to try and all the sort of things, how long to wait. If you're having a service which handles HTTP that's even simpler, you can just add basically another root to your API that you got. It's kind of okay to just this health set root basically. So this configuration will do a simple plain HTTP request.  And the other thing is because you have your reverse proxy in front, you don't have to worry about putting that health endpoint on a different port really because your reverse proxy is not going to root any request to that endpoint anyway. So if you're accepting direct user request, users are still not going to see that endpoint because of your reverse proxy. So you can just do that in line with your main request and that gives you a very good sense of when your application is actually really handling the requests because it's not in special anymore. That kind of brings us to the next step on that, this kind of liveness checking on this. The idea here is that if your application hangs or something like that, you don't want it to be included in the set of endpoints for that service. This kind of depends on your application. Oftentimes, you shouldn't really just randomly hang because you don't know anything. If you can, you should just crash and raise an exception and crash basically. But if you do want, it's most useful probably if you have an HTTP service or API or something because then you can just handle it in line and that kind of gives you that guarantee. If yes, I'm handling requests in line. The exact example here, I'm not sure. Kat is certainly not a very practical example, but it just shows how that third kind of live probe. They're basically the same three types of probes that you have for readiness that you can use here as well. The one thing to look out with doing your HTTP requests in line is that you do have to balance it off like if you request a cued and taking a bit too long so you have to check that your timeouts on your liveness probes are okay because otherwise you might still be handling requests, but Kubernetes then decides that you're taking too long. There's lots of trade-offs and tuning to be done there. So it's kind of, it can be useful. It's a more advanced kind of probe or end point to add to it. But it does kind of lead on to save pod termination in the way of container application termination because it is something to kind of think about because basically what Kubernetes will do when you're asked to terminate, so say a node you're running on is taken into maintenance, so Kubernetes will kind of shut down all the pods on that node. That's not a problem for your application because your application should be making sure that new pods appear somewhere else. But your pod is still healthy and servicing requests at that point. So for a pod that's, or your application that's servicing user requests, what happens is basically it will send you a term. And in Python normally you get a keyboard interrupt for that. So you will want to register a signal handler for it. So you can do that gracefully instead of just straight away crashing. Once you sort of, in your signal handler you can wrap that up more nicely. You can say I'm going to shut down. As soon as you've got saved term you've basically already been removed from the service. So you're not going to get new requests, but you might still have requests currently queued up.  Make sure all your requests are handled so you don't drop any of the requests and only then carry on shutting down. Then the last kind of step into this is kind of monitoring or maybe I think more of it as application instrumentation. So monitoring wise there's already a bunch of kind of monitoring that operators can do out of the box with Kubernetes by running stuff like C-Advisor or something. They'll have an idea of your container and resources to consume, et cetera. Prometheus is a different project that is also part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It's quite popular at the moment, but it allows you to basically instrument your application in various ways. This is a very, very short example basically. It's architecture, it's monitoring architecture of Prometheus. It's kind of very, I find it very similar to SNMP actually, but just with current technologies, it runs that we currently understand that. So it uses TCP which is more reliable or has more guarantees than UDP. But it's still very much a poll based kind of the server goes around to all instances that it knows and it goes and does a request and gets all the metrics down. Despite it being HTTP, the actual wire format is quite special. It's either some text format or it's protocol buffers, I think. So it's easiest to just use a client. They have an official Python client which this is a very primitive example of. So it basically comes with various kind of instrumentation things. So you can have counts, you can have gauges. Again, if you've ever used SNMP, they're kind of various similar concepts. So, yeah, it's just a bunch of metrics and they can come around and scrape. In this example here, just using some counters, you define the counters on the fly which is very convenient. And then you have things like context managers or decorators, et cetera, to help you with various things. That's kind of everything about, yeah, there's a lot more, obviously, that you can do with that instrumentation. But that's kind of the sort of the next step, I guess. And that's just about time, I think. So thank you very much. I hope that was useful. And if you have any questions.


I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I've just discovered that you, yes, you watching this video, are related to Bill Gates. The bad news is that you probably aren't in the will. How can I be so sure that you're related to Bill Gates? Because you're related to everyone alive today. We're all cousins. I want to explain using clear language and scientific data why the concept of race is largely irrelevant. I've never been one for political correctness and I won't gloss over the ugly truths. I'm going to just address the biology of what some people call race and what scientists call lineage or population or haplogroup or ethnicity depending on the context. Here are a couple of facts. In fact, one, you have a lot of ancestors. I hope I'm not spoiling the surprise for anyone, but it takes a mommy and a daddy to make a baby. That means that unless you are a clone, you have two people who donated genetic material to make you. Each of those people had, likewise, two parents. So you had or have two parents and four grandparents. Then eight great grandparents and 16 great greats in your direct line. We could keep doubling the number of ancestors in every generation. Assuming that each generation is about 20 years, if we go back about 500 years, about the time of Columbus's voyage, you'd have one million ancestors. In fact, that's quite a bit inflated simply because some of your ancestors were related to each other. I'm not accusing you of being an inbred hillbilly, although there are some of those out there with family trees that don't fork much. What I'm saying is that one of your great times six grandfathers on your father's side was the brother of one of your great times six on your mother's side or something similar. I'll refer you to a great intro to the topic, The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. Nevertheless, you are related to an awful lot of people in the direct line of ancestry. When you then add in all the siblings and cousins and so forth, statistically, you're distantly related to any figure in history who left behind any kind of family. This leads me to fact two. You're related to everyone alive today.  The evidence suggests that if we go back somewhere between 2000 and 5000 years ago, we find a couple to which we all trace ancestry. That's during the time of the Roman Empire. Let me let that sink in a bit. Every human on earth shares an ancestor that lived in recorded history, probably between 100 and 200 generations ago. That's the blink of an eye in genetic lineage. Bacteria have that many generations on the dishes in your sink before you wash them. Think about what it means to be a white person. You had millions of ancestors. How many of them were European? How many were Asian? How many were African? Was it 100% in any of those categories? Probably not. Which leads me to fact three. We are all Africans. I don't think we know where our most recent universal common ancestor was. But we know that for thousands of years, all our ancestors lived in Africa, much longer than the time since they colonized outside of Africa. We can all lay claim to African ancestors if we go back far enough. Africa also contains the most genetic diversity, which is consistent with our long history as a species there. What most of us think of as African people are mostly people who had ancestors of the Bantu tribe, which developed a very successful livestock culture and conquered, colonized, or displaced other tribes. The Quesan, the pygmy, and some other tribal ancestries are still noticeable in modern Africans. Which leads me to fact four. Skin color is a very poor predictor of ancestry. It is sometimes beneficial for scientists to distinguish populations because their shared recent ancestry means a shared genetic risk factor. For example, Ashkenazi Jews are much more likely to possess the genetic variation for Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and many other genetic diseases. Certain Native American tribes have rates of type 2 diabetes that approach 100% in some areas. We can't ignore these useful genetic identities. Unfortunately, most people have no idea what their actual recent ancestry is. Someone who self-identifies as African American or Black may actually have multiple great-grandparents who were not Black. There are certain markers, usually called lineage-specific markers, that distinguish European, East African, and Asian ancestries. Most people are a mutt blend of these markers, regardless of what ethnicity they actually identify with. People always assume that the color of one's skin is an easy indicator of the color of all the parents and grandparents. But skin color is just a phenotype determined by a few different loci. Which leads me to fact five. Genes don't necessarily fall on race lines. When your two genetic parents got together, their chromosomes lined up next to each other, and a whole lot of swapping between them happened. This is called recombination, and it's why you aren't a perfect genetic copy of either parent. What it means for race is that your skin color is not necessarily co-inherited with any other genetically determined character. You can be white and have great rhythm. You can be Black and not have any athletic talent. You can be Asian and very bad at math. Stereotypes exist because of confirmation bias and social environment, not biology. Even things like the epicanthal fold that most of us associate with Asians is a pretty simple genetic trait unrelated to height or athletic ability. Yao Ming, for example, is a very tall Asian. His being tall or good at basketball is probably at least partly genetic. But those genes aren't denied to him because he has genes for Asian eye folds. Which leads me to fact six. Your DNA is not your identity. What makes you interesting or unique goes way beyond what genetic variations you have. I don't need to prejudge you because your ancestor was of the Bantu tribe. We are not limited by our genes for most things. That doesn't mean we should ignore the useful information we can gain about things that are determined by genes. Disease risks, tolerances, or resistance to son or alcohol or breast cancer. In these cases, race is just a very poor approximation of your likely genetics based on who your great-great-grandfather was related to. If you go to a doctor and complain of anemia, long-term bone and chest pain and fatigue, the doctor will assess your risk of sickle cell anemia based on your self-reported ancestry. If you're black, it's worth checking that first. If not, there are other conditions that are more likely. Which leads me to fact seven. Ethnicity or race is a societal construct. Someone like Tiger Woods is often described as black. In spite of a very recent mixture of ancestries. Examples like him show how arbitrary the divisions are between supposed races. Tiger's likely genetic makeup would probably put him in intermediate risk categories for Asians, Africans, and Europeans. But society gets to decide what label to stick him with. It doesn't tell me anything about his ancestry to call him black or Asian or white. There are some genetic markers that are close enough to gather on the chromosome that when mommy and daddy's chromosomes line up, they usually end up together. That means they travel together. We call these grouped markers haplotypes. And geneticists sometimes assign people to haplogroups, which is the closest thing in science to a race identifier. They represent markers for recent ancestry so we can distinguish what population of persons ancestors belong to genetically. This is much more accurate than skin color, not affected by societal definitions. Actually indicates something about the person's ancestors and genetic complement and can be useful in determining risk factors. You can go to one of several low-cost genetic testing services in the US or Europe and have your haplogroup determined. And it can tell you something about your ancestry that you may not have known, which leads me to fact eight. Humans are diverse and interesting. We shouldn't get hung up on skin color. What's great about lineage or ancestry or race is that it can give us a sense of community and uniqueness. We belong to an in-group with which we share many commonalities. We can have pride in others who are like us or celebrate in a group accomplishment. At its worst, race divides us, emphasizing only the differences, making people outsiders or out-groups and creating hostility and resentment. Can we have the good without the bad? I don't know. It would be nice if we could all bear in mind that we are all one big species, one very large family living together on a single planet. We are diverse, we are unique, but we are all cousins. Thanks for watching.


Mmm, a little cheddar makes plain veggies taste better. But take the cheddar cheese away, and you can just say... No way! ...'cause cheddar cheese makes all the difference. Hooray! On all kinds of vegetables, cheese makes all the difference.


Good morning everybody. It's another day. It's another week. Today is Monday when I'm filming this. I've got to go grab a trailer and put another empty seacan on it, chain it down, and take it up to Thompson, Manitoba. We're just about eight hours north into the province from where I am. I live on the south, into the province of Southern, or I live like the weather stripping of America. I live just, just straight over the border from Minnesota. But I got to go further north into the province. It's going to be a lot of fun. Glad you're here. Let's go get our can. Let's get moving. Today's special shout out goes to our friends at Howe's products. You can find a link to their website down below, my video in the description, all the diesel treatment products you need. Best of the best. Go check them out. So we have, we have different brands with like fontanes, I believe, and then this one is a, because this trailer has a bit of a longer wheelbase. It's a little bit tougher to get into that tight spot up in Thompson, right? But we had no other shorter wheelbase trailers available. So we're going to have fun. Well, we'll make it work. We made it work last time. We'll make it work again. I'm facing east right now, coming from the West perimeter into the city, empty seacan, chain it down, tie it down, make sure it doesn't go anywhere, make sure it comes with us. Nice it is when people put nice big signs and arrows at shippers and receivers. You know where to go. Second loaded right away needs to do with that crate. I've got a park right where he's driving. What it says on the sign in front of me to call for assistance. But if the forklift guy's right there already, I'm thinking I could just wait here and he'll come say hi to me. And he obviously knows I'm here. But the sign says I should call. I'll see what he does. He's dropping that big cannon he was pulling out of here. If he doesn't come straight over here to talk to me, then I'll call that number. Maybe it's a different driver that loads me. And I got my my Sunday best on right now, even though it's Monday, but it's my birthday. So I figured I'd dress up for my birthday. He's coming here right now right on. Really nice guy.  That's what it is. Last time was a 40 footer. It was just 20 footer this time. So I'm watching him grab it there. Okay, so this one does have the the slots for the forks to go into over there. That's awesome. That'll be much easier to unload it. Last time we had to drag it off the back because there's no fork holes. Hopefully that'll work. We'll make it work. Truck drivers is what we do. We problem solve in all weather conditions and all climates in all locations, wherever you are, you come up to a problem, you have to solve it. We don't just hold a steering wheel. Some do. Some are just steering wheel holders. Those of us who actually want the title of truck driver also have to take on a whole lot more responsibility on top of that and not just the steering wheel holding. That's the easy part that that anyone can do. It's the rest of it. The all the responsibility that comes with problem solving, tying down freight, making sure you don't lose it, managing your weights, managing the safety, remaining safety compliant on your truck. There's a whole host of other things and you know how about we go down below to the comment section. Describe to me in the comment section what it means to be a truck driver to you and don't say steering wheel holder because I already covered that one. Okay, we all can hold a steering wheel. To you, what does it take to be considered a truck driver and what does it take to gain your respect? Let me know down below. I'm going to use this ladder so I can get up there. So when you're hooking up your chains, you want it to be like this. You want it to be like that so that the chain is resting in the hook. That way, while you're messing around with it down here, tightening it up, chaining on the bottom, that up there won't fall out of the hook because it is literally resting in it.  I've got the one chain tightened up already. We've got these snugged up real tight. You'll see that on these traps here. I've got the safeties on. You have to have those if you use this style. I prefer this style myself. A lot of people prefer the ratchet binders. I totally understand they're a lot easier to use but maybe I just like the element of danger a little bit. I don't know. These things could snap open and knock your teeth out if you're not careful. I don't know. I've just always used these and I just like to stick with what I know and also extremely expensive to replace and they're still working just fine. You've got to make sure you put safeties on here. I've got lots of these in my shop. Okay, so what I'll do now is I'll wrap this extra chain around that so that's not flailing around. Just make it look a little neater going down the road. I mean technically I guess I could leave it like that because it's not going to flow it into traffic but I mean look at this. It could actually fling out past my trailer. So I'll hop to clean that up and we do the same thing on the other end. So you go from the top here in an X. So what these chains are doing is it's holding the load down, right, and then I wrap it around here because the kick up here is stopping it from sliding forward but if this kick wasn't here you see I put the chain around a little further back so that actually sort of wraps it and prevents it from sliding forward even if this kick wasn't here. So it's holding it down and holding it back. The chains in the rear will do exactly the opposite and then the can is completely secured. Can't move side to side. These are holding it from moving side to side as well. Can't move up because it's holding it down and I can't move forward or back and you got all directions covered and you can officially give it the official pat and say that ain't going nowhere. You reserve that phrase though for when you're sure. Okay I'll go do the back and then we'll be on the road. All right we're done. I threw two straps over a two just in case you know. Honestly I don't need them. I don't need the straps on the chains are plenty enough but just in case you know me. Just in case. Gives me an extra sense of security.  Rusty. I closed my headache rack right? It's a double check. I have to be triple short before I leave. Yes it's all closed and locked up and my airlines are not touching my catwalk. Good you can't have your airlines touching your catwalk. That's because when you're going down the road they'll rub through and you'll have a hole. You don't want a hole. Not in this case anyway. I'm gonna go grab fuel with flying J and heading lane.  That'll be a perfect timing because then we can check on our chains and straps then to make sure everything's still secure and tight. Gonna grab fuel, grab a coffee, a little something to eat and we'll make our way north. But I'll take a 20. Doesn't matter to me. Same difference to me. A little easier I guess but the same amount of chains. One less strap. But the straps are mostly just for show and for my peace of mind. The chains are doing all the work. Change of plans. Surprise, surprise. We're not going to flying J and heading lane. Their fuel's too expensive. I double checked and fuel in heading lane, flying J right now for me. My price is $1.41 and 9. Fuel at Petropas, which is Petro-Canada. Petropas, Winnipeg West. So on Brookside, Boulevard or Oak Point Highway up there. A little bit out of the way but not too far. $1.279. A whole lot cheaper. I'm gonna save myself between 40 and 50 bucks at least. Just going maybe a few miles out of my way. Worth it to me. Sorry, flying J. Today you lose.  It can only be one winner. Today at Petropas, it takes the trophy cheapest juice. Try again tomorrow. Just here on the left. This is right around the neighborhood, just down the road from where Andy the Kenworth guy works. If we had a little bit more time and weren't in the big truck with the trailer, we could swing in there to say hi. But I've got to get going. I've got to be in Thompson tonight and it already looks like I'm going to get there around midnight-ish. Again, last time we were there sooner than we expected. Between, I don't know, around probably 11 o'clock. I don't want to be there much later than that. Oh, and that was a short green light if I ever seen one. Really? Really? That's all you give us? All right. All right then. A lot of trucks turning here and that's all they gave us. Got to get through here quick. It's going to be yellow right away. Hey, we've got an open pump right over here. Parking a lot of those just chaos, too. Let's hope that these pumps are working. That would be nice. Fueled up for 489 liters. Let's find out real quick how much I saved. So let's see. $1.41 subtracted $1.279. So I saved $0.14 a liter by fueling up here. Times it by 489.01 liters is how much I bought. So just by coming here, I saved myself $68.46 today. That always pays to check where the cheapest juice is. And it wasn't really that far out of my way at all. Like at all. It's just like a mile or two. Now lights are on. We're officially loaded up, fueled up, and on the way to Thompson. Just got to sneak out of these pumps here. I'm going to give this guy a bit of space. He's got a day cab. He can back in there. He can back in there. Now getting out of here is sometimes a little bit tricky sometimes because it's a very small lot, but it's very busy. So people like to block this exit as they have right now. Oh, no, no, the guy's leaving. Okay, good. Oh, okay, good. I thought he had parked there. You're not supposed to park here at all. Like even where this bobtail is, even when the bobtail is not really in the way, it's not a big deal. But sometimes these guys park their trucks right here and this is the exit, right?  Even this guy could move up.  You see us squeaking by back here? He could move up, but oh, he's got an engine on the back here. One of those straps are attached to the rubrails. All right, all right. Oh, now he's moving up. There you go. There you go. Look at that. I didn't say anything. I didn't say it. All I'm saying is I would do it a little different, but that's okay. So now he's trying to get into the lot or like, what's going on here? We have to wait for the traffic lights. That's what this guy's waiting for. It's just chaos every time.  This is why I specifically don't come here. This is just chaos all the time. But when you got cheap juice at 14 cents cheaper per liter, saving me almost 70 bucks, yeah, I'll come here. Fine. I'll deal with this mess. Right? Right. Money talks. Talks very loudly. All right, bud. Come on, give her.  There we go. All right, you got this. All right, we're not getting paid by the hour, but okay. So wait, my turn. Wonderful. Wonderful. Get out of there. I have a feeling I'm going to want to be in front of this guy. He seemed a little unsure of himself, and that's okay. Maybe he's new. It's okay. But I'd rather be in front of a guy who's unsure of himself than behind him. Sneak right in here in front of that guy. There you go. We're going to go right to the perimeter. Oh, hush, hush, hush. We're going to go right to the perimeter, turn west, and go to highway six. And highway six is the road. That is the road that takes us up into northern Manitoba. Remember, there's only one. And once you get past Grand Rapids, you better make sure you're buckled in, like double, almost need a five-point harness, just to make sure you don't go flying out the window so bumpy. Keep your windows closed, keep your seatbelt on. Those bumps will throw you right out. I'm exaggerating. It's just, it's really rough. Oh, that's why you're unsure of yourself, but you like your phone in your hand. I see. I see. I too would be unsure of myself in that situation, driving through town. And I see, I see. Hey, no judgment once again. No judgment once again. There's a time and a place when you're driving through the city is not exactly the place, but hey, that's my opinion, right? What do I know? What do I know? He's from Calgary. Maybe they do a different Calgary. Beautiful day out. By next weekend, it's supposed to be plus 16. Hmm. Of course, that would be plus 16 Celsius. What is plus 16 Celsius in Fahrenheit? According to QMAT, answer, 16 degrees Celsius is equal to 60.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That's the temperature next weekend, not right now. Right now, the temperature is six degrees Celsius. What is six degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit? Six degrees Celsius is equal to 42.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a nice day. What's a little garbage in the, in the ditch here? Look at that.  That's terrible. That's disgusting. Why is there so much garbage in that ditch? Wow. Take the entrance to the right on highway 101 west. That is great. All along here. Terrible. Like, right in the letter into the city, like, what's up with this day? I've never seen it in that pad. Someone's got to do something about that. I am for some reason. You know, some days, like the same amount of time, but sometimes it just feels so much longer than other times. Strange, right? I'm getting here a little late. So hopefully, hopefully, I'll have somewhere to park here. That's the same spot. Off to the side. Snowbank on that side. We'll be on this side. Let's go check our load and then we'll shut her down. News. It's good news. We didn't lose it. It seems so weird that it's so short though. Just a little 20 footer. My taillights are still visible. That's good. That's where I'm going to sleep tonight. Gives myself distance from that truck who's idling there and all the other trucks and no one is able to drag their trailer over my truck over here. Whereas if I park on the side here on the corner, anybody coming around the side there or coming around back here, if they're not paying attention, could potentially drag their trailer over my truck. And I prefer not to lose my hood and kind of attach to it. I like it. That's it for today though. We made it safely. Another day behind us. Get this secant off the trailer. See what's from there. Maybe we'll head to Kanor. Do you want to peg me? We'll just go home. Who's to say? Tune in tomorrow. Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already. Best thing you can do for the channel is to hit that like button and leave me a comment down below. And subscribe. Those are the three things. The trifecta of what you can do to support me for free. If you want to go one step further, you can join and become a member. Click the join now button below my video there. Premium members always get early access to my videos. If not, remember the trifecta. Subscribe. Hit the like button. Greatly helped me with the algorithm and I really do appreciate that. More people get to see my videos that way. See you tomorrow. Take care and drive safe.


Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. Today, well, as the creator and host of And Bitenostic Radio, Miguel Conner truly is the ultimate veteran of a thousand existential deep dives. Through his interviews with nearly all of the notable esoteric thinkers of our time, Miguel has become recognized as a leading voice of not just Gnosticism, which has always been his foot in the door of your mind calling card, but the leader of, I think, an undeniable alternative spirituality zeitgeist that we're all in the middle of. So it's great to talk to Miguel. I gained so much from him and he is like one of my go-to mystics. So it's just great to have you back. Miguel, thanks for joining me. Always a pleasure to be here, my friend. We always have a lot of fun and as always, two old guys from Chicago are going to try to figure out reality. That's right.  That's what it is. Well, not these days. We can't go to the pub. We'll get arrested. That's true. The guards will prevent us from getting in. So I twisted Miguel's arm to come on and help me with this project that I'm working on that listeners have kind of had to endure in my kind of stumbling through the evil question. So we're definitely going to want to talk about that. But Miguel also has some interesting things going on over at Anbite, always does, including possibly a new podcast. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about esoteric health and addiction. Or how would you put that, Miguel, what you're thinking about doing? Well, it's been something at the back of my mind, how there's not that much media out there to deal specifically with addiction and mental issues from alternative science. I mean, there's a lot about health, podcasters and shows do it, but there's really not much out there. And it's something I can address from a my experience in the esoterica and B is somebody who is a recovering drug addict, somebody who is, I guess, was told once upon a time by traditional medicine that I'm bipolar. And it seems like it seems the time is right, especially as well. We knew that the collective consciousness of humanity was breaking down. In 2020, it's going to crumble and people, I think we are in a time where people are slowly going to turn away from the traditional because the traditional keeps screwing us and finding alternative methods. Get away from the pharmaceutical industrial complex, get away from psychiatry, get away from the usual stuff and find alternatives that have worked. And you know, the data tells us like you always say, follow the data. And the data says alternative medicine, vitamins and other, you know, forgotten methods do work or can work or should be an option at the very least. You know, absolutely. I mean, I think maybe we will have a chance to talk more about that because I think it's extremely timely. And as you said, it's just in keeping with where everything's going. Especially, you know, like you said to old guys, I get that all the younger people totally get this. It's all about biohacking. It's about, you know, ice baths, which I do, but it's about breathing. It's about, you know, yoga and it's about, you know, like you said, alternative medicine in the form of supplements and that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think there's a ton there. And I think the intersection between that and kind of this extended consciousness science that continues to kind of get all this traction that you talk about and I talk about. So I think it's a great, great idea. And I think it can really be in service to a lot of people. So we're going to talk about that. Why don't we back up. I think everybody knows you, but invariably, I'm just going to jump in and talk about a lot of inside baseball. So before I do that, tell people a little bit about your background and and bite and kind of who you are, run down kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, there's, I don't know how much there is to say once upon a time, as many of your listeners as you was a seeker sought for many years fell into many traps discovered many doorways that somehow ended up hit for me hitting walls and I really about 13 years ago discovered Gnosticism and I can't say I discovered this as a religion, but more as a philosophy and aesthetic and attitude and my interest immediately was not just to learn about it, but share with the world almost in real time. What I was discovering and I was very fortunate to the for the Golden Age of podcasting do a little podcast and was able to score a lot of great guests, the translators of the Nagamari Library, the Gnostic Gospels individuals like Bart Ehrman and a whole slew of different characters to share Gnosticism, ancient and modern from the philosophical to the religious and the podcast grew and it's sort of been my child for the last 13 years and honestly I've only really taken it seriously in the last couple of years where I think in 2018 I finally went full time with it and it's it's done very well I can't complain. Well, it's been a constant source of really inspiration is kind of an overused term but it but it has and just millions and millions of downloads and I just know from the community and the waters we swim in.  The academic circles, which I think is truly amazing and you look at like you were invited down to Rice University with a very excellent Dr. Jeffrey Kreipel hats off for him for realizing that this kind of avant guard journalism thing that you are doing is really where the action is and it's not in these stodgy conferences that no one goes to and I think that's. I think that's excellent and I think it's also going to be a trend I think more and more people are going to realize if you just sit back and listen to a on bite. You're getting the kind of education that you can't get at a university or at a conference or anything like that it's just amazing. Well, thanks Alex. Yeah, I think as I've said on my show, I do believe these are Gnostic times. This is certainly a Philip K Dick world.  So I think this information is more important than ever. If anything, as Gary Lachman and others have said the Gnostics are the perennial outsiders of history. They're the guys outside looking in the punks and the rebels and the nerds. That's how it's been with history. And we live in a time where that's the type of attitude we need to penetrate the amazing machinery that has been created over society. Maybe maybe it's a choice. Skeptico Skeptico coming at you thing. I tell you what I want to do. I again, I don't it's not always a love fest here in Skeptico. It's just half love fest and half hater. I know the drill. I know that's why I listen to your show religiously. I know the drill. There's no if it didn't happen, I would be like I really failed.  Anyways, excellent video I want to share with people. So you kind of said how you're, you know, stepping into the next level. You did. You did a video a little while back, which is next level in terms of production quality, but I think will give people a sense for kind of where your head is at in a lot of times. And it's also a great jumping off point. I think for this dialogue, I want to drag you into about evil. So let me play this. This is you can find this on YouTube. I do not know whether the gods are faces that we give to that which is faceless in order to comprehend it and be close to it as human beings. If they are manifestations of distinct powers arising from an unknowable immensity or supreme reality or a oneness. If they are mediators or messengers between us and the God who is beyond comprehension. If they are aspects of nature and the world personified. If they are archetypes or forces of consciousness both within and without man. Or if they are at the highest human expression of being beyond mortality. Perhaps they are a combination of all of the above. What I do know is that the gods are mysteries and that we as human beings are ultimately drawn to them. And I know that they respond if one calls out to them. And I might pause it right there because I love that line as a jumping off point for this nature of evil thing. What I do know is that the gods, and I think when you say gods, we could also substitute kind of the dark side there and all the light dark are mysteries that we as humans are ultimately drawn to. Tell me about that and tell me if that does relate also to maybe some of the what I'm calling evil. We're going to have to define that maybe you wanted to find that it's all wrapped into a lot of things you're saying there so jump off. Well, I mean it's no secret that our minds are wired to have mystic experience and to want to know God. It's that's pretty much a science has proven that and it's interesting how even chimpanzees will build temples. So there is something with us that is want to, as you say, go into the extended consciousness into the metaphysical. Of course, we both know our mutual friend Gordon White spoke starships that society started with man looking at the stars. And you might say the stars do represent the gods or maybe the gods came from the stars as you've had many shows and I've had many shows. So I think we are wired to try to find out what is the mystery beyond us. And again, quoting Gordon, he did. He does say that 98% of myths across the world have evil spirits or an evil character in it. I guess we live in a society where perennialism has sort of taken over. You know that idea that there's one ancient wisdom and a golden age and evil is the privatio bono of Augustine. It's a lack of God and that is sort of taking even new age and esoteric spirituality, even the pagan dispensation that's taken it over. I remember you talked about the Gnostic conference that I went to with Jeff Kreipel, but Eric Davis, the author who obviously the one of the editors of Philip K. Dix, the exegesis and he just came out with his great book, High Weirness. Various stutely said that the difference between Gnosticism and perennialism, basically talking about all occultism, are the archons. That's what separates the Gnostics from everything else because the Gnostics saw an opposition, a darkness, what not to be these negative agents who are very real. And again like most of the myths of the ancients that in line with these ancient myths and these ancient people. So where does that place us in your, and you know, I'm hoping in a lot of ways here I can kind of scratch beyond.  It's like, no, somebody trying to reach into the extended realm to do something especially, especially wicked in this realm is seems to be of a different ilk. Yeah, I would certainly say so. And the worst is when people go in some sort of state of denial, well, there's some greater purpose for it. And to arguments in Gnostic groups, there's some greater purpose and I'd have what I call the my kitty porn rule. I said, there is no greater purpose. There's nothing that's ever going to match the immense pain and damage that you have done to a child. Maybe a few children could do well, but most is just broken soul broken psyches. It's, it's, it's evil. You can't call it anything else. So I understand that. But again, a lot of our society, we've, we've just gotten used to turning a blind eye and it can go in many dimensions. I know from a monastic perspective, at least classical evil is basically anything that ignorance is the greater evil when we do not see who we are. We don't see the universe as it is that then ignorance come in, comes in. And that's when we do, well, we can do a lot of evil things. Great wars, how easily cultures are manipulated, damage that we do to others are, you know, spouses are children that somehow we rationalize. So ignorance, at least from the Gnostic viewpoint is a huge one. Like what does Jesus say on the cross, father forgive them. They do not know what they do. And that great story, obviously they are slaughtering one of the wisest men or the son of God or, you know, the great rep, the hero of the tale itself. So ignorance is one way, but at the same time it has to, sometimes it has to stop short that there is something out there that simply wishes destruction, that is pure darkness. And going back to perennialism and the Gospel of John, the Gospel of John starts with that beautiful, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. But towards the end, what does it say? And the darkness knows it not. The darkness did not know the logos. So even the Gospel of John presupposes an incredible darkness that does not like this logos coming into the world or creating what is good. I'm wondering from a personal level, how does that shadow work for you with your practice in Gnosticism? And more broadly, because I think of you, you know, we always talk about Gnosticism because that's your brand and stuff like that. But when I hear you talk, I hear a broader kind of Gnosticism that I love because, as I said in the intro, I so respect that you have had all these battles. And I know what it's like to prepare for those battles every week. And whether they're battles, friendly battles or not, they're intellectual exercises and you go to so many different places. So how is that fitting in your understanding of this, of that darkness, your own personal shadow and projected out? Well, yeah, I mean, that's a good point about the shadow. What did the Jungians say? A shadow is everything I do not wish to be. But what I do not wish to be means it's inside me. I mean, all of us have a dark, we are both a mixture of darkness of light and we have the ability to commit great atrocities. I mean, history shows it over and over Germans who turn their faces away from the Jews and so many other places. So we do have a shadow and if we don't watch that shadow, if we don't entertain the darkness inside of us or at least understand it, it will project itself in terrible ways.   So at the same time, this is acceptance, which is an amazing thing of the darkness within me, the heaven and hell.  There is probably an ontological evil outside even beyond.  I think as even Jung himself admitted there is probably a dark archetype. He called it the devil.  And Jung was like, it is, I call it the devil, but we can call it the dark archetype. It's a principle of destruction and it just exists to cause pain across the universe and an incredible amount of destruction. I wouldn't even say like, I don't know how Hinduism works with Kali and Shiva. Is it a quick, but this is kind of torturous, artistic pain upon others. And as you're talking about these satanic groups, you wonder, is this because of the dark archetype? Or I think Jason Louve, somebody who's been on your show and you two had a wonderful conversation about the environment. But he on Twitter, something, he brought something out from his divine self. He said, the great choice in this century is going to be between entertainment and ecstasy. And it's become sort of a tagline because I look at these elite who they get addicted to a little bit of that entertainment. There's that money. There's that women. There's that property. And that's not enough. You want more of that rush. You want more of that intensity that makes you feel godlike and superior. And before you know it, you're taking that entertainment into very addictive, very intense areas and you're doing atrocities. You couldn't believe you were doing beyond the whole blackmail of the elite and maybe deals and dark magic that you eventually get to do. But I think these days that's kind of where I am with the whole evil shadow thing. It's the shadow and the archetypal evil. So it's just got more complicated and harder, but I love it. You actually said something kind of interesting in terms of the agency of a benevolent force in the extended consciousness realm. That's a very controversial topic in in the communities that we're in, you know, is this all just a manifestation of our shadow or is there the connection with something we can't say real all the words fail us here. So you kind of come down on the side of there are entities that are looking to co-mingle with us in a benevolent way. Yes, and that's we're talking about alternative science. I recently had Jerry Marcinski and he and Jerry Sweeney have written this great book about again the failure of traditional medicine has been schizophrenia a complete failure for 100 years.  And of course, that aligns well with certain thinkers like David I John lamb lash Lawrence Galleon and so forth that about that. And when you treat these and young even said the same when you treat them as their evil entities, you might not have a proof, but the proof will will be that your patient will heal 10 times 100 times faster than with traditional medicine or believing that there is no evil, or believing that some God is it's there's a purpose and he's going to take care of you if you have faith. So yeah, that's it. That's the picture right there. So that kind of attitude again as we're shifting towards evil that has done more good for the schizo for the people suffering from schizophrenia than the pharmaceutical industrial complex has done for certain. And I think, again, that's one way it's interesting. And again, it's almost like a shift in your thinking. I mean, it was strange because I don't know if you've heard of Lon Milo Duquette. He's a great guy. He's really one of the leading occultists in the last 30 years. He knew Israel regarding and I had him on the show a month ago and asking about evil. And he did not. This guy has done ceremony after ceremony from the OTO to the Hermetic Golden Dawn. I mean, he has been out there with the spirits and he's not going to accept that there is evil. He wouldn't accept it. Of course, I completely disagree with him. And when the shift in thinking is what one blogger said very well, in our culture, you always ask, how did evil come into the world? In Gnosticism, you start with, how did good come into the world?   And as we've seen by humanity in the world, at least from my perspective, this is their turf and they've been kicking our asses for thousands of years. Look at civilization. Although in that same interview that you're talking about with Jerry Marzinski and Sherry Sweeney, there's the clip and you just actually said the clip that I was going to play or the quote I was going to give you. What matters are that these predators are real or should be treated as real. And it was just classic Gnostic, Miguel, Connor, moment for me where the universe cracks open. It's like, no, Miguel, that is the entire world of, you know, they're real or they should be treated as real. That is to me the essential question. And it's one that we keep pounding on. And you did a great job of saying that from a healing modality standpoint, you have to treat them as real. There's another level of just kind of a consciousness from a scientific kind of materialism idealism kind of thing. None of this stuff is real from a simulation theory, none of this stuff is real. We're somewhere always in this middle ground of what is real and what are we treating as real. And it seems to be, again, I've returned to the question of, does evil give us a different vantage point to examine that question. Yeah, and I mean, and of course, then you have suffering is suffering suffering as part of the universe. But is that really evil? That's where it gets complicated. There's the parable, the Buddhist parable that I think of where you've got the the tadpole is born and daddy frog is talking to him and the tadpole is like, Dad, what's the land going to be like and the daddy frog is like you're you're immersed in water. I can give you metaphors and analogies but until you get there. You won't know and that's I think evil is real. I think Sherry Sweeney who was schizophrenic and found these man parasites. I think they're real. But until she was able to get out of that water. How was she going to be able to describe it and we do the best we can. Again, I, I think they're real but sometimes it's almost I think you was doing it too. It's like, well, try this way. Let's try an alternative way instead of the drugs that are killing you and robbing you of your agency and numbing your soul and all that. So I know there's a bit of a fast, I don't know, switch and bait. We treat them like real but I think if we can help some schizophrenics or alcoholics or addicts who I mean, as I've had a guest like Susan Martinez who wrote the the field guide to spirits. She talked about how when you look at alcoholics or serial killers and then you compare them to possessed people in Europe and Africa, they're exactly the same behavior, exactly the voices in the head, the dysfunctional relationships. It's right there. So you start to see this really is about spirit and demon possession and how are you going to treat it. But everybody is so trained with the science, scientism and the scientific method. They're not, it's hard to get people to try something. I didn't want to try something different 20 years ago when I was on meds. Even though I was praying and going to Buddhist, I still thought the meds were the ultimate cure because this is Darwin's world. Yeah, that's really interesting. What is the fear of going the alternative route in particular going the alternative spiritual route for people who are in those kind of desperate throws because it almost you know logically would seem to be the opposite would seem to be well I'll try everything but that isn't really how it feels is it. No, no. And the worst part where the big joke is is that these meds and these treatments block your chakras and your channel so you can start meditating or doing yoga or what did Sherri Sweeney do. She was doing rikey and they will block your channels of communication with the higher forms of consciousness or even to expand your consciousness and it. It's hard. I mean I've I remember doing like some rituals with ayahuasca on meds and now I realize I really robbed myself about 90% of that mystical experience that other people were having around me that helped them. So that's the the destructive and even the meds are our belief systems are so hard that can block us out too. So it's it's unfortunate. I mean, yeah, it's it's iconic what they've done. I want to play another clip, one from an interview kind of a person person interview you did which you haven't done too many of those, but it was with the very excellent Richard Smalley, you know, Oxford train bestselling authors written all these fantastic books, a Christian, but a Christian critic as well. I want to talk about Christian bashing cults and conspiracy and because I think they play into part in another part of this evil is the deception and you know that's right out of kind of the Christian motif. Yeah, it's great to see you're a Satan. Hey, that is so we're going to talk about that because I mean, look for for the mystic and for the Gnostic conspiracies like what do you mean I mean it's all conspiracy. It goes with your tea in the morning. Exactly your daily routine. And you would think it would for the Christian as well because, you know, any just honest read of their narrative it's all about conspiracy right and, but it is today Alex I mean have you talked to Q and on people I mean this is the their Christianity is completely embedded with conspiracy I mean the the child thing and Satan and aliens I mean on so many my wife is she's well no she's becoming Greek Orthodox and she's embedded in Q and on so it's the full Gnostic package. Hopping over to another thing you were my entry drug for Joe Atwell. I think it's fantastic and I've had him on the show a bunch of times including some kind of debates with religious scholars, people who don't know. Joe at well wrote a very influential book called Caesar's Messiah that met this wild conspiratorial claim that the Bible is pro Roman.  And remember that these are the Gospels before Constantine before it becomes the state religion why are the original Gospels. According to you know Wikipedia or ultimate source on everything pro Roman well, again I'm talking inside baseball here folks but if you go listen to Miguel's interviews with Joe at well or my interviews with Joe at well or. Greg Carlaw just had a nice interview series with Joe at well it just. There's some historical aspects to it that are just kind of undeniable that the Romans had a hand in influencing the Gospels that is conspiratorial but then. So you want to jump to the Q and on thing where I was going to go is. You know if you just take the straight narrative right out of the Bible. It's it's a conspiracy at every level from you know God conspiring you know against him for man or man conspiring or just it's just a story of one conspiracy after another. So it's always remarkable to me when you know with the fact that conspiracy seems to be a problem for the non Q and on Christians you know you're kind of mainstream Christians it's like oh no. And I think especially for those who are more in the Greek Orthodox like was it a neon he's the big Q and on he's Greek Orthodox.  But if you read the work of let's say Greek Orthodox scholar who excellent scholar David Bentley Hart. Yeah and he basically says everybody misunderstands Paul here's how you understand Paul the Jesus and Paul is a Jesus that comes to defeat the Arkans who have taken over the world. So right there you've got the seeds of conspiracy of the matrix in Paul's letters. And of course the Gnostics ran with that story 2000 years ago but even the Greek Orthodox Church a morning it makes sense. I mean what does Jesus say or what does Satan say in the Gospel of Mark all the kingdoms are mine. He owns the world and Jesus is there the little guy trying to fight Satan in the desert and trying to get away. So you're right it is the seeds are there because that was probably the original thing. You know the original story until like you said which I agree for Rome because the powers that be always weaponize anything they can get their hands on. It's just the way it is nothing is going to change. You know again switching gears like I love to do but I just had an interview with the very excellent. Riz Verk who is this kind of all the top genius computer gamer kind of guy started the MIT game lab really successful as an entrepreneur and as wrote a book on the simulation hypothesis. Yeah that interview great interview. Oh good I'm glad you glad you appreciated that I appreciate a lot of things he had to say one of the things that stuck with me is the if they can they will kind of thing. So you know he said at the core of the simulation hypothesis that a lot of people are talking about is you say OK we all get technologies advancing even if you don't buy into the singularity thing you say gee in my lifetime you know. Peter's gone from a huge room down to a little phone it's going to continue it's going to advance. And then the real kind of Gnostic Harkon thing if they can they will. And if we think about that from our own life experience you know whether it's human cloning and the guy in China just got you know put in jail for human cloning right. We're not going to do any human cloning if you could work on of course we're going to do human course of course I mean it's already been done. We know that but if you can do it you do it and that really kind of hit me square in the head like that applies everywhere.  Yeah it's entertaining. I think that's it. Remember ecstasy or entertainment ecstasy is leaving your body and expanding your consciousness being flooded with incredible joy that gets you but entertainment is just well you can just look at society. That's what the whole world is about. Let me entertain you. Here we are entertainers Netflix experiments and the lead take it way up and of course scientists want to take it one step. You know there's another side to the entertainment thing also remember always remember a quote from the Shirley McClain who I think will go down as an underappreciated kind of mystic who was out there with astral travel and all that stuff and imagine. Talk about being on the frontier and all the he's a pioneer huge pioneer in the 70s when nobody I mean it was all sort of psychedelic drugs and all that stuff. I'm glad she took it really to the holistic Blavatsky original intentions of the movement. I heard an interview with her and the guy was getting on her pretty good and she goes look. We're all ultimately here to entertain each other and I think that takes maybe what Jason's saying in a different direction. Why do we why do we denigrate entertainment. Maybe that is our ultimate purpose at some level if we think multiple unlimited lives and karma get out to the nth degree. But I think that's a problem because remember in the Shirley McClain model there is no room for evil because it's just a learning experience and we're all reflections of each other. And that's very dangerous in my view because again you're turning your back on that ontological evil those evil spirit dark archetype and the horrible thing. And then of course with these groups and you end up with this horror. This is what Mitch Horowitz said the problem with New Age is a whole victim shaming.  I guess it's your karma.   Instead of just calling that what it is evil and we need to stop it. Well that's incredibly interesting you know and we certainly need to go there a little bit. So take Rich Martini wrote a book and did a movie called flip side and Rich Martini is kind of this Hollywood producer type really cool guy. He got interested in the lives between lives work of Michael Newton and then he particularly got interested in the work of these folks who do between lives. So you know people cannot like that research but at some point when you get in there there's some really solid parts to it. I mean Michael Newton was an LA hypnotherapist who physicians would send patients to who they believe just had psychosomatic illnesses. So a guy his original regression was a guy who had a shoulder injury and he keeps going to the doctor's my shoulder my shoulder and finally doctor's done. You know refer him over to Michael Newton because he doesn't have any real shoulder problem. And so Michael Newton can get rid of your Michael Newton is past but he can get rid of and I'm telling the story for the benefit of list terms that maybe haven't heard it. I think you probably know it but he's helping people get over fear of spiders fear of water all the typical things back in the 70s. I think this is maybe 60s where Michael Newton is practicing in Los Angeles and he's stubbornly can't fix this guy's shoulder. He goes no I want you to go back further further further to this shoulder injury. The guy goes I'm on a battlefield. We're in this trench. Oh no I've been stabbed in the shoulder and so you get the thing and Michael Newton is somewhat of a history buff. So he gathers he even kind of breaks protocol and gathers a lot of information from this guy. It turns out the guy he's able to trace down the guy's life in in in World War One and verify some of the stuff. Long story for us. Fast forward ahead to rich martini flip side. He starts going to these conventions between lives. He's witnessing a regression. So here's the punchline. Miguel had to take a long time to get there. And then as regressed. She says oh I'm in the Holocaust. I'm walking into the gas chamber.  Now I'm past. I'm dead. And now I look down and I see my perpetrator. I see the Nazi guy who dropped the gas into my tank. And I realize the burden that he carries is far greater than what I'm carrying. And I love that story and I hate that story. I hate that story for all the reasons that you're saying the oversimplified karmic you're here for reasons kind of stuff. But there's something about that story that seems inescapably true in a way. Yeah I mean it's obviously the power of forgiveness of letting go which is letting go of your karmic. Of course the power of understanding.   Was he just somebody who was taught like the Japanese kill you know bayoneting Chinese babies when they invaded that he was just thought that duty was the ultimate form of duty. Divinity and whatever was below it was not evil as long as you were following the divine emperor of your country. Well let's lead it back to I want to do some Christian bashing because I'm always accused of Christian bashing. You're late. Yeah. Can't imagine. I had a guest on and I really appreciate having this guest and I liked him and respect him. His name is Russ Dizdar and he's an evangelical minister but also has done some real boots on the ground investigation and helping people recovering from satanic ritual abuse. Which is a real ringer because if you're involved in that no one wants to hear anything beyond satanic panic and it's like no that's it's real. More real than that. Yeah yeah whether we can pack it back into the biblical Satan is a whole other question. And I don't think we can but that's the jumping off point and that's where it starts getting interesting and you can never get there right because you have one side that's like not happening couldn't happen can't possibly happen. Because there is no evil. There is no Satan. You know we're biological robots in meaningless universe. That is the kind of standard kind of view. And then the Christian on the other side view is oh no I'll tell you exactly how it happened when we just pull the gospel up and this is the limited way that we can understand it. And then you look at their thing and they say well they kind of have a point. I mean you did put Satan in there as part of the ritual abuse thing so that's right there you know. Yeah it makes no sense though because you're still having in the Christian dispensation unless again it was evangelicals that I've met maybe this guy you talked to. They're the honest ones because they do say if we read the Bible literally Satan is in charge of the kingdoms of the world. And if we read Paul the way Paul should be read the archons of powers and principalities are in charge of this world. Good has to come into this world in the form of Jesus. So but most say well God is still in charge and somehow he gives Satan this sort of sadist this resentful angel.   This doesn't look good for me. So whatever the book of Revelation tells me I'm going to do exactly the opposite. Well he has no choice. Well that goes right back to God right. So Satan has no free will. He's just a puppet like all of us of some divine plan. I mean now you've got like let's listen to rush in the song free will. And let's take it on. Let's take it in another direction. Yeah I'm going to play this clip in a second from Richard Smolley and I really appreciate his book. I think it's how God became God. I'm missing that. Is that exactly okay. And so you just go back back in history and it looks really tough. I mean Satan just slips right through your fingers right.  And then the Zoroastres come in and the Egyptians and some other stuff comes into the culture and all of a sudden same story. Now there's a Satan. Well that's that folks is is like how we do literary analysis slash archaeology slash and that's you can't get around that. Put the Humpty Dumpty back on the wall on that. So you've interviewed Smolley. We're going to talk about him. I'm going to play this clip in a minute. But what about that? What about the historical Satan just. No I think you hit it on the head. I mean if you if you read the book of Job and all that Satan or even the stories of David Satan is just God's prosecutor. He's sort of God's tester of humans sometimes as executioner. He's one of the angels. In early Christian texts he's even called the first born. He's really the God's right hand enforcer and then you have of course mixing in with Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster is one of the most you know spiritual geniuses in all of history because he came up with the idea that this there is a force of good and evil who are basically evenly matched. You've got Armand the Lord of Darkness and Ahura Mazda the Lord of Light and they're in this fight. Of course now we know that Mithras is sort of the God in between working with it. And this and of course the idea of an apocalypse the idea of a higher self or guardian angels. I mean he came up with Zoroaster came up with so much a genius and he definitely affected when the Jews were in Babylon and then the Persians came and liberated Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism came into their matrix the Jewish matrix and Satan basically got rebooted and to a new figure. He became the bad guy. He became Dr. Evil or your your Bond villain and but again Christians can't make up their mind at least in Zoroastrianism. There is sort of they're evenly matched and we'll see who's the smartest one at the end of the day. We assume good will be but in Christianity.  So it's again we get a lot of into a lot of theological acrobatics that haven't helped the sanity of Christianity for the last 2000 years. Let's close the loop on the satanic ritual abuse thing because there's few people I can kind of get to this level with and talk about like you're saying yeah it's it's very real. And so we take the realness of it which means there are people who are actively engaged with trying to connect with this spiritual force. That they feel is is bringing something into their their name for gain right for whether it's some kind of sadistic pleasure or whatever. But they what do we think what do we what do we imagine is going on there in these two realms in between our realm and that realm and then you know in kind of a total co-creation of reality way. If we think that Satan slips through our fingers historically but they are going with some kind of biblical definition of that entity. What is that telling us about that ultimate reality. I know you get what I'm saying and they're naming it Satan but I don't think they're even getting to the biblical Satan. Let me make sure we understand what I'm showing I'm saying like you go talk to Russ Dizdar right. And Russ good guy law enforcement guy worked in law enforcement was a chaplain but also taught at you know law enforcement police academy kind of stuff and still teaches courses on satanic ritual abuse. And he's like Alex this is not in a lot of these guys matrix their worldview and that's why I have to go teach it. They get to the scene and they don't know an inverted kind of Graham from a Wicca symbol and all the rest of this he goes where I live. He was a good guy I liked him he's like you know there's a we have gangs here in Ohio gangs have different signs. If you don't understand the gang signs the gang graffiti the dress you're going to be kind of on the outside in Chicago. Yeah same old Chicago Chicago's next level baby. But his point is what is well taken he says there is a there is a reality to this that's kind of inescapable and part of that reality is that they claim to be connecting with Satan and they'll you know in the Latin they'll be saying Satan. Yeah rituals and we do so what do we think is going on there I mean is it a talk bug co creation like if you want to if you want to manifest Satan you can get you can get. Yeah that's another wrinkle to it the whole idea of egregors or told us that if we believe something our psychic energy will create this entity in this being to do our will. So that's definitely another wrinkle to it and if you have a lot of jerks doing it and they will create everything like one of the biggest religions right now in North America is Santa Muerte the goddess of death is rising very popular. Could we consider her evil. Who's the interview you did an interview with the woman who is that. Oh my God I forgot her name I have her book too. Yes I have to look. But yes she wrote a great book on Santa Muerte and there's other scholars that are coming with great work because this is a deity or an entity that's becoming very popular so and it could be like the Neil Gaiman concept you have these weak entities but the more we believe in them more power we give them we surround it with surround them with our psychic power with our belief with everything else. I think I had James true recently and he made a good argument that whether it's the lead or the spirits they they they feed on our belief our very Prana when we believe in something we're giving them our Prana and we're giving them power. Interesting. So kind of winding it back to the Christian thing and the Christian bashing. We've already done some Christian bashing without even realizing it see we think we're just talking about history here and we're actually bashing bashing bashing. Kind of standing up for Satan in the Bible which is but whatever. Let me play this. Because. What are we supposed to believe.  He got so mad at the human race that he condemned everybody to eternal damnation. Except he kind of felt bad about this afternoon. So he said a part of himself down to have it tortured to death would somehow made it all all right. Except not really because if you don't buy this story you're still going to fry forever. Does that make any sense in any kind of course it doesn't.  So tell us about this interview and just as much as you like to tell us about him. Yeah it was a great interview I went down to the Theosophical Society down in Wheaton over here. And Richard works there and we grabbed one of the rooms and we did a one on one interview on his new book on the theology of love which is based on a course with miracles and of course at the time Mary Ann Williamson was a candidate she was very popular a lot of interest. So his book basically talks about the start of it is how Christianity has failed traditional Christianity has failed. You and I have already made some points in this interview and how a more different type you could even say psychological or cerebral form of Christianity like a course in miracles is more suited for the modern times. And of course he talks we're talking about evil he's talking about the book of Genesis. God gets mad at a couple of people dams him for life and then he has to basically turn himself into a human and commit suicide to release us from a prison that he himself cast into us and it's a great lesson of how gullible human beings are. I mean if people bought that and I think at one point I'm sure you and I bought it I know I did when I was a kid. Millions of billions of people buy it if we can buy such a story with so many holes theological holes people will believe anything. I mean they'll believe something that's even maybe even dumber or a little bit smarter but again this idea of how we're all doomed as really failed. And one of the reasons Christianity is going the traditional Christianity is going the way of the dodo with you right up until the end they're going the way of the dodo. I'm not sure because what I thought was so fantastic about that is a religious scholar of his repute just being so direct because we just can't get people just to talk directly so many times you certainly do. You certainly do but this is an insane cosmology. This doesn't make any sense and it's ingrained into the fabric of our culture. You cannot get elected to any office unless you agree with this. You read the quotes of the last four person go read the Obama quote on his belief in Jesus. You think you're at a big tent revival. It's incredibly over the top Jesus save your son of all the stuff. Oh but you want to hear something shocking. You know that Republican Congressman I think Dan Crenshaw he's got the iPad she lost it in the Afghanistan war of all and I don't like him. I don't like neocons very much but he was in an interview and ask him what do you think of Jesus. He said well he's an archetypal hero. He's the image of a force. I was like it's the first time I've seen a politician go Joseph Campbell Gnostic young to the mainstream media. It's like that gives a little hope doesn't it Alex. He'll never be elected. He's in Congress. He's in Congress. He'll never be president. Never be president right. It's like you know whether. But we haven't each president. I mean we've got somebody who was a church of Norman Vincent Peel Donald Trump. I mean the Trump is not a Christian. He's a new age. Well not according to what he not what he speaks now. Right. I mean he kind of sings a different tune now which is you know I mean I don't want to go too far in the presidential thing because I guess the little hair splitting that I do with you on that is. I think we have to be honest about cults and how Christianity is a cult. I mean there's just no no two ways about it. How do you define cult. That's often that's what everyone throws up you know what's called you know what's called how do you define it. It's like I think a certain collection of evidential points kind of pile up to the point where you see.  Does that suggest that at some institutional level it's completely different than what it appears to be. Is this starting to sound like a cult. You know is there people who have been entrained over a period of time to kind of respond a certain way. You know is this starting to sound like a cult. So when when people get kind of triggered with the term cult I don't like the cult definition that I get from an academic religious studies group that doesn't even acknowledge that consciousness exists. I mean there's like that doesn't even fly. So that's the conclusion I come from from Richard Smollett. That sounds cultish when you have a cosmology that is that absurdly insane and it's completely absorbed into the system. There are cultish elements at play there in my opinion but you might disagree. Tell me how you disagree. No I mean it's again it's interpretation. Not everybody in ancient Christianity really saw it that way. The Gnostics didn't even see that way. They had different variations of the book of Genesis. This is something that was even later on in early Christianity the way it said. I mean even if you look at the text the serpent there's nothing in there that says that the serpent is Satan. That's like a later addition. The serpent was just some sort of trickster spirit or animal that was in there. So and Christians had debates of what it meant and what it did. It's again those who were able to weaponize Christianity. It's almost like if they come up with the most insane or ludicrous idea and they can get people to believe it that shows how powerful they are. But it also shows it really makes them I think it makes them giggle that they're able to get away with such not and it brings cognitive dissonance to people down the road because all of us who've gotten out of religion or these oppressive religions or traditional religions. We were also almost in pain and we question and it would hurt our heads and our psyches like what's the flood and killing babies and I don't you know and it causes damage to our psyche and maybe we're just easily controlled by the more ludicrous ideas. That's kind of an interesting idea. Here's a quote that is right out of a on bite. It's our friend. Hitting the bottom isn't a weekend retreat. It's not a goddamn seminar. Stop trying to control everything and just let go. Tell us about that quote and yeah. And then let's talk my club the great Gnostic saga and that's it's what else does Tyler Durden say it's only after you've lost everything that you can do anything. And of course this you find the saying in Buddhism and so many traditions that the only way to see heaven in a wildflower infinity and a grain of sand is just to let go of all the conditioning the material the lights of this world and just see the universe. And of course for many of us it's the old does the caterpillar looks like it dies which is rock bottom but what it is is simply the the ultimate collapse of the ego and the rise of the spirit. So I think that's what to me Tyler Durden is say just let go of the wheel wheel of karma. So where I want to poke is I want to explore the possibility that the occult maybe even some of the Gnostic spin on this and especially the magic as it's been popularized and as you know coming out so strong right now is a giant in this step. In the same way that you kind of jumped to both sides of that Tyler Durden quote. The quote is great. The movie takes us in a different direction. We don't have to take it that way. So from a yogic from a non dual standpoint, I am the creator of this illusion that's going on in my consciousness. But the liberation of that isn't to do sketchy stuff. It's just to truly let it go and not participate in it to not try and gain more power but to let go in a way that seems markedly different from the way I see the occult being offered as the occult weekend retreat the magic weekend retreat. Yeah, the narrator who is later obviously find out to be Tyler Durden is a struggle with him and his higher self is trying to get away from the consumer society and all that and that scene that the quote is from is when they're driving and they decide to put on their seat belts and Tyler says I'm not going to drive and wherever the car takes us it will take us. It crashes their survives and Tyler says we just had a near life experience saying that sometimes the rush of letting go in the danger of letting go but itself as a metaphor I think it's an incredible movie. Well I think it's an incredible movie. What I'm reaching for is something a little bit different. I'm a big Michael Singer untethered soul fan. I like the way he kind of talks about this yogic non dual transformation in that that letting go in that sense isn't a rush isn't a fantastic experience. It's an uncomfortable experience because what you're letting go of is the pattern that you've held on to to either hold on to something good or to push away something bad and the process of letting go is a difficult one in a different way than I think I hear from the occultist generally and especially the magic people who are doing this backdoor materialism thing. It's like you are going to do magic so that you can gain more power.  I don't want more power. What I want is, you know, the Michael Singer story is this.    Well, the thing is, it wasn't really your girlfriend ever. You just thought it looked like her. And then the blue Corvette got in there and you don't know how that got in there.  And then when I hear not when I hear the occult and the magic, it's just adding on to that. It's like, Okay, we know we can get you out of that. We just need more power and more this instead of saying, No, what we need to do is undo that by realizing that there might be that divine spark that you talk about so often on your on your show, which is always there. And there's there's no need to do anything. It's addition by subtraction of taking away what we've become, you know, what we think we've become by thinking. No, I think that's well said, Alex. It's again, whether it's the magician, most people don't want transformation, they don't want to chemical, they just want to add a little bit more or make life a little bit more bearable, take away a little bit of the pain so I can make it through the day. So Miguel, it's been absolutely terrific having you on and I appreciate you spending so much time with us. Tell folks anything that might be going on and invite that they should look out for and anything else in your life. No, I think I am. The show is really growing an incredible guest this year on topics which I hope to be addiction mental disease with the usual Gnostic tinge and great show. I again will be doing a lot of YouTube lives increasing the podcast and making myself more available in online communities as we try to get through this crazy year so It's been growing like Richard Smolley show, which I did live other things videos that I did who are the gods I'm sort of I'm I'm grabbing these as they come and just going for it taking more risks. So look for more risks for a young bite this year, including hopefully this other podcast which I would like to call it finding Hermes because and going right back to Richard Smolley. He's the one who said, look, Hermes is both the God of the mind and the God of the tricks. The Greeks did this on purpose because the greatest trickster is is the mind greater than any Satan or any Demiurge or tricks and you and I have talked about in the show people who have completely diluted themselves, countries, nations, religions will just blink and end up in ignorance and self delusion. So finding Hermes is I think something our society should do a little bit more find out the the trick in the mind itself.