Cymru. Aeloddiol. Mae'r dŵr yn Gwmwng, Margaret McCulloch, a dyna'r Cymru. Yr ystafell yma yw'r Pension Scheme o'r Regulau Sgoltenol 2014, SSI 2014 217. Mae'r ddweud o'r ddaf yn cyffinol ar gyfer y llyfr mewn plwyntau. Fy i'r gynhyrchu'r ddweud, mae'n ddweud o'r Regulau Sgoltenol sy'n ddweud o'r初 yng Nghymru, maen i ddweud o'r 7 yng Nghymru. Does the committee therefore agree to report the instrument under the reporting ground D, as there has been an unjustifiable delay in laying the instrument? Yes, I do agree to that convener, but I would like to just put on the record that I think there is some uncertainty in my mind, perhaps in others minds, about the effectiveness of the joint working between the Westminster Administration and the Administration in Scotland. Clearly, we seem to have the Minister for Parliamentary Business accepting some responsibility for what is going on. I would like to be clear where the shared responsibility for making these instruments, where there is a shared responsibility of work, stands and a shared commitment result at some point in the future to improving the process. I am not particularly interested in examining the detail of how the scheduling got where it is, but I am interested in seeing that someone at the Scotland office, the Minister for Parliamentary Business, will jointly say that they will work together to make this work better in the future. I share the views of Stuart Stevenson, but I would further add that it appears that this is the third time that this has happened and that there has been almost a breakdown of satisfactory communication links, certainly on three occasions between the two Administrations. We need to find a way of resolving this because I understand that there may be a great deal more of pension legislation about to come through. We want to get the system that exists between the two Administrations working in a way that is fit for purpose, because it is demonstrable, obviously, at the moment that it is not. While the delay does not affect the validity of the instrument, it also amounts to a failure to comply with the laying requirement of section 282 of the Interpretation and Legislative Reform Scotland Act 2010 that the instrument must be laid as soon as practicable after it is made. Does the committee therefore agree to report the instrument under reporting ground J as it breaches that laying requirement? Furthermore, the drafting of the instrument appears to be defective in that there are 10 errors, which the Scottish Government has acknowledged to be errors. The committee may consider that those errors may impede the intended operation of the instrument or fail to give effect to the policy intention. Does the committee therefore agree to report the instrument under reporting ground I as its drafting appears to be defective? I think that it is a little poorer than defective. I think that the drafting is barely workman-like. It is not remotely effect for purpose, as is acknowledged by the withdrawal of the instrument and a new instrument being laid in its place by the intended revocation of the instrument. I am extremely dismayed at the waste of our valued legal team's time in having to review the instrument nonetheless, even though it is not fit for purpose, and indeed the waste of our time being here when we are considering something that is immediately going to be revoked. I think that, for the sake of the record, probably is the opportunity for me just to observe, and I will do it on the record, that we have received from the Minister for Parliamentary Business a letter as of this morning, which confirms that it would be our intention to lay a new order by revoking the instrument and replacing it with the new and corrected version at the earliest possible convenience. The timing of the laying of the new order is not completely with the control of the Scottish ministers. The new version and the accompanying revocation order will require the consent of the Lord's commissioners of the Treasury. I have asked my officials to explore how quickly this can be progressed and to ensure that your officials are kept informed of the progress. I am grateful to the Minister for that comment. Nonetheless, it is worth observing that we do have to go through the process of actually considering and reporting on an instrument which, at this moment, is still laid and needs to be reported. Given that we have agreed that it is defective, there are two other provisions where the meaning could be clearer. The Scottish Government appears to accept that there is a lack of clarity in respect of at least one of those provisions and is undertaken to consider the drafting of the other. Does the committee therefore agree to report the instrument under reporting ground H, as there are two provisions where the meaning could be clearer? There are a further 17 errors, including patent and other drafting errors, which, on balance, do not appear to impede the delivery of the policy intention, but which the committee may wish to report under the general reporting ground. Are we agreed to do that, then, please? I think that that gives me the opportunity to concur with John Scott, that what we are looking at does appear to be in the whole not fit for purpose, and I suspect that the committee would want to concur with that view. The committee may also wish to note that the Scottish Government has expressed its gratitude to the committee for picking up all those numbers of errors, and I apologise for the error upon me that it has failed to do so. The committee may consider that, while it notes the explanation given in the Scottish Government's response, it is highly unsatisfactory for an instrument to be laid before the Parliament in its present form. The committee's role is not to substitute for internal checking by the relevant Scottish Government Department, and given that the instrument does not come into force until 1 December or, in some parts, 1 April next year, it appears that there has been no urgent need to lay the instrument in its present form. Rather, it appears that sufficient time would have been available for the instrument to undergo thorough checking and quality control processes before laying. I am sure that we all hope that the Government will ensure that that happens in the future. I have already noted that it is going to be withdrawn, so it looks as though at least the damage will be removed. Convener, I just noted your use of the word hope that things will improve. I think that it is almost the case that we should say to the Government that they are required to improve. Indeed. Are there any other further comments on that? Thank you for your time. I think that that brings us to the end of that item and, therefore, to the end of the meeting. Thank you very much.


Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Village Talks. It is now my pleasure to introduce to you the very first talk sponsored by the Packet Hacking Village. It is my honor, but I rather not actually speak about this gentleman. But it is absolutely, all I need to say is this. It is absolutely my pleasure to introduce to you D9. That's his handle. Who will be speaking on Ponying the Poners with MindWare. D9, it's all you. All right. Thanks for getting up early and showing up for the first talk. I'm going to probably start a little late. But this subject, anybody have any background on it? I mean, so, well, I'm hoping that you're here because you kind of looked at the abstract. But this subject is kind of interesting. And I'll get into it a little bit more. But the concept of MindWare is really an interesting thought. And the theory came out of someone that has no computer background at all. He's actually a psychologist. And what he's talking about is programming of the brain, particularly how that programming affects your ability to make decisions. I'm going to talk a little bit about leveraging that theory and how we can use it to help the defenders out of the house. Any defenders in the crowd? All right, defenders. Any attackers or op? Yeah, OK. So this talk is about you, man, and how the defenders are going to own you or own you. We'll see. We'll see if that actually happens. I would like some discussion at the very end of this talk. So I'm going to leave some time at the end because I'm looking for some feedback. This is early R&D. I'm talking about early R&D research that has not really been done yet, but conceptualized. It's going to take over four years to actually do the groundwork with the human subjects and the computer modeling to actually build the tool that I'm about to talk to you about. So that's kind of an introduction and background. Any questions or comments before I jump off into the presentation? And for those of you out there, this is not a hacking technical talk. It's actually more of a theoretical talk about how human beings act and how we can leverage those kinds of things. So I would say this is a pretty atypical talk for DEF CON and hats off to the packet-hackered village for being brave enough to put me on the stage to talk about something that's not really technical. All right, so I'm going to get going. So who am I? Well, for one, I am a bureaucrat. I am not a hacker. I spent 41 years in the government. Three operational deployments, one to Pakistan and Afghanistan at the end of my career, because I'm not retiring as a bureaucrat. I need to go out as a warfighter. So retired colonel, member of the senior executive service if anybody knows what that is. That's a general officer, a flag officer level rank. I was civilian in the Pentagon. This gentleman up here is a Fed too, so I might as well point him out. So if you're playing that game, there he is. I directed training and education for the Department of Defense. I led their force of the future working group. I led their cyber workforce development and recruitment workforce as well. I have a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Focus was on hackers. And it really was about the sociology and psychological aspects of what makes a hacker extraordinary. We can talk a little bit about that on the way too. And now I'm an independent AI and cyber researcher for a small R&D company. We're a 501C3. I'm not going to mention the name of the company, but that's what I do now for a living. So why do I think that this approach, and we'll talk about what this approach is, is viable. The interesting thing is the defensive community, how much emphasis do you guys place on really understanding the attacker? Yeah, right? So a lot of the solutions on the defensive side are focused on the technology aspects. But the weakest link in an attack is what? They're techniques? No, it's the person. It's the individual. It's the human.  Let's mess with the human attacker. How many people have heard of the term cyber psychology? One. Anybody else? Just because I read it on the slide. OK. It's a new, when I heard it, I mean, I heard it within the last year. My dissertation was in 2018. I did cyber psychology work, and I didn't know it. But it's a new term. And you can see what it's about. And I'll define it later in the presentation. So this, again, like I said, this presentation is academically grounded. It lays out a conceptual R&D design. And it leverages cyber psychology, AI, and game theory to build a defensive tool to attack the attacker. So there's some foundational research. One of them is called the Tulerosa study. Anybody familiar with this study? Oh, look at that. What do you think about it? What was that? Yeah, I can't hear you. So it's too loud in here. The Tulerosa study was done by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. It's the first study that looked at a very large group of proficient red team and tried to mess with their heads. There was 130 participants. It was mostly manual, so they would put them into part tasks, hacking kinds of tasks, and ask them to work through it. And then they would plant deception or not deception and tell them that maybe there was deception. So it caused a lot of confusion and frustration and friction on the part of the attackers, because sometimes they're like, is it real or not real? Am I being messed with or not messed with? And it really slowed them down when it came to their ability to achieve the objectives they were asked to achieve. So that's one study. The second one is, and there's at least two, but this is one that I highlight, is this decision-making biases in cyber attackers. So are there very specific sets of biases? And we'll talk a little bit about what those are. The Department of Defense conducted this research. It studied an initial list of biases that affect attackers. The outcome was a list of these kinds of biases. And we'll talk about those also. There's another study that developed a list of over 80 of such biases. And these are important because these are the things we're gonna go after when an attacker shows up in our network. We're gonna leverage these biases. So can we turn the prey into the predator? Defensive people, are you happy about that? Do you wanna be a wolf or a lamb? So this study really is about saying, guys, stop crouching in the corner, waiting for somebody to do something to you.  Don't wait for them to act, control the situation. Make them feel they're in control, but you're really doing it. You can see here that the other thing that's kind of interesting is defenders have home field advantage. You know your network. The attacker may or may not. Yet we don't recognize that as an advantage from a defensive perspective. And because you know your network, there's things you can do inside of it to affect the ability of that hacker to be successful. And then can we automate this approach and use game theory to double down on what we're doing to the attacker? I'm gonna use a very familiar framework, five phases of a hack. I'm not gonna go into them. I think almost everyone in this room understands what those are. Any questions so far? All right. So the building box concept. There's the definition of cyber psychology. It's a brand new field. I would say it's probably a couple years old, maybe two or three. But it's really about understanding the human behavior of attackers and how that human behavior can be used to manipulate the attacker or the defender for that matter. I mean, one could call it social engineering. I'm not sure it's, I wouldn't exactly categorize it as social engineering. I think it's more nuanced than that. Some of the components, this cognitive human bias. This is a subconscious process by which one makes a decision. Many times, and we'll talk about it, many times you don't know why you made that decision, you just make it. That reveals a vulnerability because those types of decisions, those kind of automatic lizard brain kinds of decisions, emotional based decisions are vulnerabilities. The other thing we need to talk about is this concept of biosensors and triggers. The biosensor is used to detect the cognitive vulnerability in the attacker and we'll talk about what those are and I'll take some suggestions from people here.  So I'm gonna hit a little theory. I hope I don't put any of you guys to sleep. Engels, but this is a really interesting theory and it breaks the way we make decisions up into three separate minds. The first one is the autonomous mind. That's an autopilot. You don't really think much about the decisions you make using that part of your brain because it's rote. I mean, this term, this is a really interesting term here, right? It comes from over-learning and practice. So when you go drive a car, do you think about actually moving the steering wheel and putting your foot on the brake or the gas? No, it's learned behavior. You do it automatically. And that's a physical example. But essentially what we're saying is the brain does the same thing. There's a lot of things and decisions it makes on autopilot. That's a vulnerability. This level right here is really about the critical and intelligence part of the way we make decisions. So the arrhythmic mind is what you measure when you measure IQ. It's your ability to do analytical and logical reasoning. But interestingly enough, on top of that is something called the reflective mind. This mind is about your beliefs. It's about your opinions. It's about what you've learned through culture or something called habitus, right? So it's learned behavior and it's reflective in nature, meaning that you think about and understand why you have the beliefs that you have. That is what is measured when you take a critical thinking test, right? So it's not the intelligence part. It's your ability to reason using that part of your brain. Those three things are important because of the way in which they affect us making decisions. Now, when you go look at this chart, this is interesting, right? So here, sometimes when you're faced with a situation you need to make a decision, you just make a response. You just respond and you use that automatic part of your brain. However, the arrhythmic mind has the ability to override, right? So how many times have you experienced an emotional event and instead of doing the emotional outburst, you decided not to do that? That is the algorithmic mind, overriding your emotions, right? That's an important capability, right? So sometimes we just let our emotions take over and we make this response, but sometimes we go, hey, wait a minute, maybe I should stop and think about what I'm about to say or do before I do it. That's this override function. The reflective mind also has an override capability because the problem with the algorithm mind is that sometimes it's lazy, right? So it'll do a little bit of logical reasoning and then go, okay, I got it, right? How many times have we done that? We'll talk about cognitive misers. So the reflective mind then allows your beliefs and some of your opinions to get inserted into the creation of alternate approaches to the way you make a decision and boom, out it goes, you have a response. So that is really important because I'm gonna leverage some of those vulnerabilities, particularly the ones that occur down here or that occur in this area or where we can contaminate your mindware up here in your opinions and beliefs. So let's talk about cognitive miser. How many of you people really enjoy doing really hard thinking? Anybody? Yeah, and by the way, that is a trait of a lot of people in this business. That kind of thinking is something they enjoy doing. But even in that process, do you want to work harder than you need to? That's the question. So this cognitive miser concept is really about like, do I really want to work that hard without with the gain that I'm looking to get?  Not full automatic shortcuts, but shortcuts. So sometimes the miser will fail to override the autonomous mind and you'll just make a decision. Sometimes it'll go into a more reflective mode or a more logical mode, but still having some kind of focus that maybe overrides other data points in the environment and you make another decision that again is maybe sub-optimized but allows you to not have to put too much effort forth. And then finally, we talked about this default to the autonomous mindware just takes over. Now this one, this one is really interesting because this is about the higher levels of thinking that I talked about. The algorithmic brain and the reflective mind. This is a big problem. Mindware contamination. The things that are happening in social media could be categorized by some as mindware contamination. They're going after your beliefs and understandings of things and they're contaminating your ability for your reflective mind to really use good data to make decisions. That's also a vulnerability and if you look at what's going on in social media, you can see there's a lot of people that understand that. The mindware gaps is where you don't really know things about your brain that maybe you should know. So again, you make decisions with gaps in your knowledge and your understanding of things. Any questions or comments there? All right, so that's enough theory. So how can I use this as a tool? How can I use the framework I just talked about as a tool, as a defender's tool? Well in the recon and scan phase, can I draw the attacker into the attack surface with, say, planning unknown vulnerabilities? So there's some honeypot kinds of things here, but could I go, hey, I'm gonna put a vulnerability out there for the bad guy to see, or gal, in hopes that they're gonna use one of these biases and go, yeah, I got them. I'm in control. So if you look here, I mean, there's a couple of great biases here, right? So this one here is about representativeness, is about using a model without understanding the probability of that model actually producing results. So you can go, I believe this is gonna be the answer, but the probability of that actually being true is one at 100 or 100,000. But it doesn't matter because you're like, well, I like that model. So that's a bias. So if I show you something that goes, hey, this Apache server is vulnerable, they haven't patched it, and you go, I got them. Do you? We'll see. Illusion of control, overestimating your abilities, believing that you are in control at all times. I was a fighter pilot. We suffered from something called the delusion of determinacy. What does that mean? It means that I went out and did something really, really dangerous, and I believed I could do that really dangerous thing because I could control the dangerous environment. Can I control the dangerous environment?  And you have to tell yourself that in combat because otherwise they will take over you. It's called the delusion of determinacy, and it is a delusion, but it's one that you need to cope with the environment you're finding yourself in. Confirmation bias, not recognizing the outlier data or other data that makes sense, and going, I got this, man. I mean, this is the way it always is, and I see it again, so it must be right. I can leverage that. Taking greater risk when you perceive increased risk or safety, that also is something I can manipulate, right? So I can go, oh yeah, it's okay, come on in. I got you, man, you're good. So you take more risk, and you probably shouldn't. The virgin abogate, that's something that came out of my research. It's definitely a core soft-skill trait of high-end hackers. There is a requirement for structure and understanding. But the other thing that's interesting that my research showed is that there's also a high level of risk-assessed acceptance, which you don't normally find in human beings. If you're someone that is very process-oriented, you're not likely to take high risks. But in your community, the opposite is true. You prior structure and process, you also are willing to take great risks, and have a tendency to be a bit of a rebel. So look around, how many rebels in the room? I'm one, for sure, okay? And then that sunk cost fallacy, I gotta double down on this, man, I got this. Even though it's costing me a lot of pain, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna keep going because I got this. Okay. The other thing that you have to understand to draw them in is you have to know a little something about the interest of the APT or attacker, and you have to understand their TTP. So what are their standard TTPs? How do they normally prosecute a target? Can I use that to my advantage by sucking them into an area, to an attack service that I want them to come after? And then, is there any prior profiling or footprinting of that particular attacker? All those things go into the calculus of how I draw them into my honey pie. Once you're in, once they come in, I've drawn them in now, using the kind of generalized things, I'm now gonna put them through an obstacle course. That obstacle course is designed to put them through part task exercises that allow me to suss out their cognitive vulnerability. So are they conducive to loss aversion? Are they conducive to representativeness bias? Are they conducive to this sunk cost or lost gain fallacy? Once I understand those things by putting them through this obstacle course, now I can manipulate the structure of the network to channel them to where I want them to go. I'm also, and I can use that to develop these things called cyber psychology informed defenses, which are a combinations of sensors and triggers that allow them, that I can put in like a routine to go after the attacker once they've gone through my obstacle course and I've identified what their vulnerabilities are. The other thing I'm using is hyper games. Anybody familiar with what a hyper game is? So a hyper game occurs when one player doesn't fully understand all the strategies of the game. So the logic of that is, as the defender, I understand the logic of the game. The attacker doesn't know that I'm ponying them. So that model is an outstanding game logic approach when one side doesn't know the rules as well as the other. So this is an example of how I would kind of, a system overview of how I would build this tool. The attacker comes in and does a recon and scan. They find a vulnerability that I planted in there intentionally. And again, it goes back to what are the generalized biases that I can take advantages? What are the enemy TTPs that I can take advantage of? What are the profiling? What are the cultural habituses of the profile of the person that I think is trying to attack me?  Once they get in, I'm just going to use this decoy Apache server. And the mission here is an APT has been asked to go after sensitive data about a stealth fighter on a contractor's site. So they're coming after me. I don't have to draw them in too badly. So I know they're coming. So it's not so hard for me to go. I kind of know who the APTs are that might want to do that. And so how do I put something out there that's discoverable in their reconnaissance and scanning that draws them into a point of attack that I'd like to see them attack? Once they're in, I would use some type of intrusion token. So I'm not going to rely on the IDS. I'm going to use some type of intrusion token that trips to tells me they're in the network. And once I know they're in the network, then I channel them off into my obstacle course. And I put them through a series of exercises to suss out those cognitive biases that we just talked about. And once I know what those cognitive biases are, customized to that particular attacker, I can now chart to channel them into the things that I want them to go after. The thing that's really important in here, and you can see here there's a game controller and reasoner, there's a set of cognitive models and there's a set of these psychologically informed defenses that all feed my game reasoner and provide feedback into my cognitive models that I've developed. And it's going to take about three years of human research to develop both this data bank and that one. That's what we're looking at right now. But once I have that developed, then my game controller and reasoner controls and reostats how I apply those psychological defenses based upon the feedback that I'm getting as they proceed through the phases of recondis or phases of a hack and also what I've learned about them as individuals. Now, the interesting thing is sometimes people come inscripted, right? So I have to break that script. I have to get a human intervention to occur so that I can go after that vulnerability. So that's gonna be a hard point. I'll take some feedback on how I might do that. The second thing is a lot of times, a lower-ended APT might be the human on the keyboard. And when they run into something tough, they're gonna bring in someone that's more experienced. So the game controller and reasoner and my obstacle course have to be able to understand that the APT just up their level of competence and that the vulnerabilities that I thought about exploiting no longer exist for that individual because it's a different person. So that needs to be built into the capability as well. In this particular scenario, there's also a defensive display that tells defenders what's going on and this is all automated. So you just follow it. As a defender, you're following what it is doing. You can intervene if you want to, but for the most part, this thing is using AI and this game engine to control what's happening to the attacker. As they move laterally in the system and achieve their action on objectives, there's a couple of things we could do. One of them is we can poison the data so they can get some that looks realistic and but for the most part, it's poisoned but at their level, they won't be able to determine that. So that requires them to exfiltrate bad data, take them a couple of weeks to analyze and go, we got screwed and start all over again because the objective here is not to stop the attack. It's deny or degrade it to put a cyber penalty on their ability to operate in your network while the defender remains in control of what they're doing. Another thing we've talked about is there's a way in which you can actually show them the real data but when they go to actually save it and exfiltrate it, it goes to a garbage file and they exfiltrate garbage. Again, those things will not be determined until after they've had a chance to analyze what they took from your network. So that's basically how this system is conceptualized from an operational view. Now let's go to some questions and comments. So I'll open it up to you. If you could come up to the mic, I think that mic's hot. Come up to the mic and ask your question and then let's talk about it. So the first question I have here for you, do you think this has implications for future cyber defense? Is this an approach that makes sense to you? Anybody? I'm getting head nods. You got a question? Cool. What do you got? Sure, I'll ask a question. So for certain types of organizations like if you're a Lockheed or somebody like that and you have a really detailed knowledge of what an attacker might be going for, that's a, most organizations are not in that position. Most organizations are, like attackers don't attack organizations, they attack vulnerabilities and then they just figure out, well, who is attached to this vulnerability and how can I exploit them? Right? So that's slightly different if you have like, you know, you're a stealth fighter or something that's at stake, but for a lot of organizations in medium to small businesses, they don't have that. Are there tools or ideas in here that are helpful to someone who is going to be attacked by the mob, not by, you know, James Bond? Yeah. So that's a good question. And I will tell you the customer in this particular case was definitely focused on APTs, definitely focused on the kinds of things that APTs are interested in. And it wasn't generally thinking about, well, if I'm just coming in here, you know, if I'm a script kitty, and you know, am I just coming in here and just trying everything that I can to mess with it and steal something? I mean, that's not exactly the threat they were talking about. I do think there are some things you can do. A script kitty is kind of hard because they're not really doing much thinking, are they? They're just following a script.  They're just following the script and seeing what happens. I guess, but if those script kitties are like, for example, Russian malware operators or, you know, people, typically what you'll see is like an attack starts with like a script kitty, that's your initial access person, but they're going to broker that access off to someone else who maybe does have very clear motivations, but you don't necessarily know like what they're after or why. If it's ransomware, that's pretty obvious. And some of those ransomware operators are very, very advanced, but their motivation is known, but it's hard to, you know, the psychology of that organization is different from the psychology of the person who infiltrated you. I would agree with that. So I think there's a couple of things. One, that's why the obstacle course is there because it's an opportunity for you to observe the attacker. What is the attacker doing? What things are they looking at? The cognitive model part of this, the cognitive model part of this. So if you're a ransomware person, that behavior is modeled in here. So if it sees that profile, if it sees what would be the typical kind of TTP, tactic techniques and procedures of someone doing ransomware, then that cognitive model talks to the game controller and puts those and pulls those defenses from the logic bank. This is really the, you know, this is part of the secret sauce. I mean, building those cyber cognitive computational models is not easy. There are some databases that you can use. I think the public faces ones aren't very good, but there's obviously some others that could be leveraged that would be used to inform this cognitive model. So here's the typical behavior of somebody doing ransomware. All right, likely a ransomware. Let's try something. And then this game controller and reasoner says, well, how did that work? Did I do good? Did I do bad? Are they taking my bait or not taking my bait?  There's a few. There's also some that just because it's there, they want to attack your system. That's a little harder person to deal with because they're just trying to say, well, can I mess with these people? Good questions. Thank you. So we talked a little bit about the viability approach. Anybody else, any what I call bovine bandera? Does anyone want to raise the bovine bandera flag and go, ah, no way, man, you're out to lunch. This isn't going to work. Anybody in the crowd think that? Did I make sense? I mean, what I think about this process is like a lot of times people do social engineering based on intuition, right? Based on like it's like taking a professional football scout and using that person's intuition about talent or taking the moneyball route that says, hey, man, I can put some logic and reasoning and some algorithms to who I choose. I think this is the same thing rather than just leaving it to a random social engineering intuition kind of thing. I can put some science behind it. And I think that science is pretty powerful and that's kind of the punchline of what my talk is like, guys, we can put some science against this. If you understand how humans think, you have a good model of that. And then how do you identify vulnerabilities and then leverage those vulnerabilities? That's kind of where, that's the hypothesis here. I think we have a couple of years to go before we prove that this can really work or not work. And there's a lot of human experimentation that needs to take place to prove that this really works. Like I said, there's early work that says there's merit, but not enough data, in my opinion, to really build a tool like this. And I wanted to bring this to this audience to kind of see what you guys think about it. So any other comments or questions? I mean, the last one, it's going to be countered. So if you know I'm messing with you, what would be your, as an attacker, what would be your strategy to counter what I'm doing? Ignore it, right? Ignore it. But you ignore it at your own risk, right? Sir? So from a community standpoint, an open source standpoint, a... Can you put the mic a little closer? Yeah, this is a life problem, man. So from a community standpoint or an open source standpoint, a defender versus attacker, gamifying it globally, could we as a community do this? Could we as a community make a product or a project that would have value for everybody and still be effective against attackers who are aware of it? So if I think, if what I heard you say is that as a community, if you put this in play, is it something that you think that has traction, right? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, basically, if somebody knows they're being gamed and there's a product that they can look under the hood, is it still effective? It's a good question, which is why I put in here, we have... I think once we this gets to put in play, we are going to have to up our sophistication, right? The simple biases that I talked about, I mean, particularly as you go through the optical course, you go, why the hell... What is this? Why am I having to go through these hoops to get to my objective? So I look at it from a psychological standpoint, right?  You're inherently more trusting, more open, more accepting. However, once you have knowledge that a particular game is being played, your biases change and your ability to be manipulated has changed. So I guess that's kind of why I'm asking. Yeah, so in some ways, what we saw in the Tularosa study is that the attacker didn't know when they were being messed with, which created doubt, self-doubt about what they were doing. And even if it's like saying, you can play the game the other way too, like, yeah, I got a deception tactic in here and not have one. You still cause the same friction, because now the person... Particularly like we talked about, this illusion of control bias that is pretty common in this community, right? And now all of a sudden that control is being questioned. It puts friction into the system. And that's really what this is designed to do.  I mean, in my dissertation, I interviewed someone that when an attacker would do an initial scan, and they would see it was a Microsoft system, the next time she saw that attacker in the network, she would purposely send them a Linux prompt. Their freaking heads would explode.  What's wrong with my tools? Look, I just did this. It's a Microsoft system. Why the hell am I getting a Linux prompt? Right? So she would mess with them. This was 2017, 2018, but she was already doing that. She was, as a defender, she was already taking an offensive stance to mess with the attacker in a really interesting way. All right, I'm getting the hook. You've been a great audience. I'm really happy with the feedback of God, and thanks very much. Take care.


we're talking, is somebody recording? Beth, are you? Not yet, but I will be as soon as we're ready. Okay, are we ready to begin? Right? Yes? No? Eddie, I'm going to start recording now. So, Sandy, you can do the intro, okay? Yeah, yes. Hi, Jared. How are you? Okay. Good to see everybody. Who is that? That's, that's Joanne. Joanne and Tim. Yeah. Okay. So, why don't you start, Beth? Okay. Go ahead and do the intro. We're recording. So, we're here tonight with Jared Carter, professor from the Vermont Law School who'll talk to us tonight about the Electoral College, a very important institution in our history, but also in our present. Since the president of the United States, the president elected the United States, Joe Biden has not been confirmed yet because that election that was held a month ago or so now can only be confirmed or denied by the Electoral College. And so Jared is here to talk about the Electoral College, how it works into our elections and into our lives, and talking about the historical, why it was constructed the way it was, and also how it was going to work out in the present election. So, we're going to have Jared and remember Jared, leave a lot of time for questions because it's a very confusing topic. Okay, so Jared, take it away. Yeah, thanks. Great to be back. Good to see lots of familiar faces as always. So, as Sandy said, I'm going to talk a bit about the Electoral College and I know I think there was a Vicki talk on the Electoral College a while ago. So, I'm sort of breaking this up into thirds. The first third is focused on what the Electoral College process is, because I think there's a lot of confusion around that. I don't think I don't know if there's anybody that knows exactly how it works, because there haven't been opportunities for courts to get involved in many instances. So, I'll talk about sort of how it procedurally works in summary and we can get into some of the details maybe if we if there's questions or we want to go there and I can do my best to answer them. Then I want to talk about, so what is it? Where did it come from? I think there's some sort of popular myths about where the Electoral College comes from and why we have it. I want to talk a little bit about that and my views on where it actually comes from and this is why the title was the original sin. So, you might start to guess as to where I think it comes from, why we have it or why we initially created it and then I do want to just chat a little bit about, okay, so where do we go from here? Sort of where where what are the options moving forward if we like or don't like the Electoral College? And yeah, I'll try to be fairly brief and then we can sort of chat and talk about it both from a contemporary perspective and historically or sort of pro prospectively as well. So, the Electoral College itself comes from the essentially from the Constitution and the process by which the executive is elected as we know. There are, I believe, 538 total possible electoral votes and as we know, sort of popularly speaking, we vote on Election Day. Those votes are tabulated at the state level and then what happens from there and this is sort of the process we're in now, at least for another week or so, is that those vote counts at the state level, our personal votes, are tabulated and certified in many states at the county level. So, that's why you see sort of debates over, you know, Dane County or Detroit specific counties because each county and its election officials will certify at the county level and then that goes to the state and the state has to essentially go through and once again certify that those votes were accurate and that has to happen. The exact language is on the and this is sort of bizarre but it's the first, excuse me, it's the, that's for the actual vote itself. But the electors meet at the state capitol on the first Monday after the second Wednesday and that's why I had to read it because it's hard to remember. The electors in all the states have to meet in their respective state capitals on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December. So, if you do the math, I believe that means December 13th, give or take a day or two, my math, my dates might not be exact. The electors across the entire country will meet in their state capitals and essentially vote their electoral votes, right? One of those 270 that you need to become president of the total of 538. So, here's where it sort of gets complicated in many respects. In 48 of 50 states, the electors are allocated in full, right? Whoever wins a plurality of the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes, right? That happens on December 13th. Maine and Nebraska are the only two states that split their electoral votes. So, that's why you saw, I think in Maine, which I believe has four electoral votes, three for Biden is what they project, one for Trump. I'm not sure where Nebraska felt, whether that was split or not. I don't think it was. But 48 of 50 states in the District of Columbia award all of their votes to the plurality. Then what happens is that consistent with state law in each of the 50 states, those votes are sent to Congress. And so, I think there's some questions out there as to whether or not the electors have to vote with the popular majority in each state. So, in other words, do all the, in Pennsylvania, do all of the electors, if Biden is certified to have won the popular vote, do they all have to go with the popular vote? And in 38 states, the answer is yes. In 38 states, the electors by state law have to vote consistent, I believe it's 38, vote consistent with the popular vote. So, that means in 12 states, they do not. In some of those 38, there's actually a penalty in which what they call a faithless elector, in other words an elector who was legally required to vote a certain way but doesn't, and it does happen from time to time, there were some in 2016, can be penalized in some way. And in fact, just last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the state's ability to penalize folks in some way, financially or otherwise, for not complying with a state requirement that they vote in a particular way based on the popular vote. And so, in most states, that's the way that it has to work. But the either way, the legislature or in some states, the governor certifies the electoral count to Congress. We still don't have a president even at that point. We still don't have an actual elected president consistent with the process. Congress receives all of those, and then after, I believe it's January 6th is when it happens, after the next Congress is seated, which is on January 3rd, the new Congress meets the House and votes essentially to elect the president based on those electoral votes to certify those electoral votes. Is somebody that's not muted? Randy, I think. Randy. Anyway, I just could hear some people. So anyway, so the Congress meets to certify essentially elect the president based on those electoral votes, and it's a majority, a majority wins. So for instance, the votes from Vermont would go to Peter Welch. In other words, he would he would get to vote our electoral votes. No, no, no. We send, so Vermont will send the tabulation of our electorate. I'm not sure who our electors are in Vermont. No, you never know. Yeah, I'm not sure who they are. So that's a fair question. But whoever they are, they will vote. And Vermont is one of the 38 states, I believe, that requires the electors to vote by state law consistent with the majority or the plurality winner in the popular vote. But in any event, when that gets to Congress, then Congress votes and it's a simple majority in order to win. If there is no majority, and this is set forth in law and in federal law, not in the Constitution, so if there is no majority, then Congress essentially calls a special election and the members of Congress vote to elect the president. And that is done by state. So each state gets one vote. It's not by, you know, the houses is allocated, you know, right now the house is controlled overall by the Democrats. But in fact, more states have Republican Congress people than Democrats. And so what could, in theory, happen is those elect those Congress people would vote their state as directed by their state house and you could end up in a situation where Congress could go the opposite direction if it's so desired from even what the electoral college selected. The Senate is responsible for voting the vice president. Obviously, none of this has ever happened. There's a couple instances in history where elections were disputed in some manner, the most recent being obviously the hanging chads of 2000. And the Supreme Court decided, in that case, to stop the vote count, the recount counting. And if you recall, Al Gore then said, I'm not going to push this any farther. He could have, in theory, continued to try to get the state legislatures to do, you know, essentially his bidding and say, you know, switch the electors, or they could have put, he could have petitioned the Congress people to vote differently. But if you recall, he said, I'm not going to push it any further. In other words, he stopped. Right. But that was like a month later too, wasn't it? Yeah, I think it was maybe 21 days or 30 days. I forget the exact 30. I actually thought 37. Yeah, I thought, yeah. So that's how it could play out. And during that, during the, by the way, during the, oops, sorry, during the the discussion over actually essentially certifying the electoral votes in Congress, any Congress person can sort of stand up and object. So it could be a very, normally it's sort of a rubber stamp process, as we know. But there are multiple mechanisms and opportunities for Congress people to get up and object. And I read an article today where an Alabama Congress person, I forget his name, has promised to do that on behalf of Donald Trump, no matter what, whether he actually does it or not, you know, remains to be seen. And that person can't ultimately change the outcome per se, but they can certainly make it, it's essentially the equivalent of a filibuster, but not with the exact same teeth. So I do think that we're going to probably continue to see sort of a bumpy process, to say the least. And that's why that in constant, in connection with the underpinnings of why we have this process, that's why I think it's a terrible process to continue going through for our country, not just because of the all of the legal machinations that any candidate could conceivably try to use to change the outcome, but also I think the basic principles of one person, one vote. And when you look at the historical rationale, which I think is not the one that most people consider, it becomes even more troubling. So that in a nutshell is sort of how the process works, we can certainly go back and visit that again. Now, where did it come from? Why do we have? I wanted to interrupt a bit. Does anybody have any questions about that? Any questions? Okay, so in other words, what you're also arguing, it's not over either. No, absolutely not. I mean, I think, I mean, I have my personal views, I don't, I think in the end politically, that we're not going to see Trump is going to lose the election, and Joe Biden's going to get inaugurated on January 20th, consistent with the Constitution. But I do think that President Trump will continue to try these different levers that are out there that exist as a result of the Electoral College, you know, I have personally serious questions as to whether he legitimately believes these are are going to be successful, or if it's more about creating an atmosphere we can, where he can raise another 170 million dollars to use for his pack. Yeah, I mean, I get solicitations every day still, multiple solicitations from him. Okay, Sally has a question, but I think Jared was just going to go into that anyway. But Joanne, which is where, why was it established in the first place? I think that's the second part, but I think that Jared will talk about that in a minute. Where, somebody else had a question. Joanne? No, I was just saying that I think he was, he's only trying to get enough money either. I mean, that's why it's continuing. Right, I don't raise a hundred and thirty million dollars. I think he's going to try every legal shenanigans, every legal. I'm not going to call it a shenanigan because it is the process. He has a right to do it. People who's kind of getting him to concede are crazy. He's not going to concede. He's going to do every legal angle, and he has the right to do it. But anyway, so Sally had the question, Jared. Go ahead. I think Robin has one too, maybe. Robin, Robin. Yeah, I was just wondering, does anyone know who our three electors are and why kept so obscure? Why don't we know? I think because they don't want you to know. Simple, they don't want you to know. Isn't it publicly announced somewhere? I'm sure we could find it out. I mean, I'd be, if somebody wants to google it while we're, while we're chatting. I can't google it. I did, I did at one point, and this is what I learned. Yeah. I learned that they are appointed by the legislative body, and that usually is quite partisan. For instance, there's three Republican electors and three Democrats, and then the, whichever way the state goes, those three are the ones. And they would cast their votes. That's normally how it works. Right. Yeah, that is, yeah. But the Supreme Court has said, actually they said in sort of superfluous language, but they said it nonetheless in the Bush v. Gore case, they intimated that states could actually change midstream. So in other words, if Vermont wanted to change its rules right now and say, actually the electors have to vote for the loser, even after the fact, the Vermont, the U.S. Supreme Court intimated that they could probably do that, or they could potentially do that. Let's put it that way, maybe probably is too strong. In other words, the legislatures, the states retain ultimate authority for determining how their electors are assigned and how those electors should vote. And that's part of this history that I'll talk about in a moment. But is there reality? Yeah. Can I interrupt for one moment? Yeah, of course. I think the Constitution or the Supreme Court has established that the state's legislature are in charge of the process that you, but not that they can switch at the last minute. There was some case I read about, some I don't know how long ago, in which it becomes a legal issue and a governor could then veto what the legislature does. The legislative act, it's not extraneous from the normal process of passing laws. So a governor could veto a change in the slate of the electorate. That's why I'm... I think there's, I think, so obviously none of this has ever happened. And so I think, you know, we don't, I think you're right in the sense that we don't know what the outcome of that would be. But there were serious concerns that that could happen, that the legislature would send its slate, the governor would send its slate, and then Congress still has that ultimate authority to decide which slate do we take. But yes. And I think there's another question that's sort of tangential or somewhat connected to what you're getting at, Tim. But if the legislature, let's say the legislature decided that we're no longer gonna, we're no longer gonna follow a process whereby electors are required to vote with the popular vote in the state. If they were gonna change that rule, would that require the governor's signature the way a normal law does? And if so, then could the governor veto it? And we'd be even in more limbo. What about the 17 states that have signed on to committing their electors to a popular vote? There are 17 states. Yes, yes, yes, 196 electoral votes in total that have signed on to that. That passed, right? Well, so you gotta get to 200. So what, yeah, so I was gonna talk about that. At the end, we talk about the future, but I mean, it's perfectly fine to chat now. So yeah, so there's, it's the national popular vote compact. And it essentially, as you said, says that since states retain the authority to decide how their electors are ultimately required to vote, states could pass a law at the state level to say our electors must vote consistent with the national popular vote, not with our state vote, but with the national popular vote. And what that would do is it once they, once the equivalent of 270 electoral votes, states have joined that, that equal the number of 270 or more, that would essentially mean that the popular vote would always win. And you'd never end up in a situation where the popular vote lost, but the electoral college went for the other person. That's kind of an end run around the constitution about constitutional amendment. Absolutely. And I think there's definitely questions. I mean, again, hasn't been tested. There is a, there's both the constitution and there's also something called the, well, it actually comes from the constitution, but the state compact law that Congress passed that says when states enter into compacts, normally they have to get congressional sort of blessing to enter into a compact that's enforceable. Now, again, there's sort of a question here because the constitution explicitly provides that the states retain the authority over their electoral process. And so there's a big question, I think whether that Congress, that compact law actually applies because the constitution says the states are the ones that get to decide this and the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore and elsewhere has affirmed that. So I think there's certainly, I mean, if I had to read the tea leaves, I would say that the national popular vote compact would be constitutional and legal if it were to be adopted by the 270, by the 270 electors or more. But it's an open question that I'm sure would end up at the US Supreme Court if and when another couple of states sign on to it. Okay, well, why don't we go into Sally's question about why, why this, and why we called this title of this talk also, the original saying institutional racism. Okay. Yeah, so I mean, look, there's competing views over this, over the origins of the electoral college. And there's certainly evidence that folks can pull to support different views. I think the one that we're sort of popularly taught about the electoral college and why it exists, at least what I was taught sort of in grade school and high school, maybe even in college civics classes, do they do still teach civics in high school? No. In grade school, I don't know. But they, but the idea was that the electoral college would prevent big populist states from sort of dominating the election of the president because votes would be distributed and the president candidates would have to have geographically diverse constituencies in order to get to the 270 electoral votes. That was sort of the idea that was sort of popularly taught. And I suppose there is some validity to that. On the other hand, if that was the goal, where do the presidential candidates go now? Michigan, Wisconsin, maybe they spend some time in Ohio still, Florida, I mean, the swing states are still the states where they focus. So it hasn't really in any material respect changed the fact that most of the energy is focused on a small number of states. But if you look at the congressional, the convention and some of the Federalist papers that the founders wrote under fake names, of course, but that they wrote, I think what becomes clear is that the electoral college actually comes from our original sin and that slavery and the power play dynamics between the North and the South at the time. Here's why. So I'm sure probably many of you have heard of the three-fifths clause that was in the original Constitution until we fought a civil war and got the 14th, 15th Amendment, 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. And that three-fifths clause was essentially this compromise that says we are going to count, they didn't say slaves, but I think they said other people or all those other people not accounted for as three-fifths a person. The South wanted that because obviously when you're allocating congressional seats based on population, the South wants to get more seats, but they don't want to let at the time African slaves vote. So they came up with this compromise that says for the purposes of counting congressional seats, enslaved Africans will be three-fifths of a person. And that had the impact of increasing the number of congressional seats that the South got. And that was this compromise to allow the Constitution to move forward because you needed to get Southern states to sign on. And without that, they weren't going to do it. And so that was this great compromise, this three-fifths clause. On its face, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Electoral College except that it essentially becomes part of the Electoral College like this. And Madison acknowledged this, if you look back at Federalist 68, the Federalist paper number 68, and the Constitutional Convention, the same dispute arose with respect to how do we elect the president. And at the time, and this is what Madison points out at the Constitutional Convention, at the time voting laws were much more diffuse and liberal in the North. In other words, there were a lot more voters in the North, not just because of enslaved Africans who obviously couldn't vote at the time, but the voting laws in the North were much more liberal and so many more people could vote. And so the South was very concerned that if we have a popular vote, the North will be able to elect their president every single time. And that's going to threaten our peculiar institution of slavery. And so Madison points this out, and the compromise became, in many respects, the Electoral College because what that did is the same way the three-fifths clause allocated how many seats one state gets in Congress, it also allocated how many electoral votes a state got, right? Because obviously the South didn't want to allow Black people to vote in a presidential election, but they wanted them to count for the purposes of their Electoral College votes. And so they followed that same three-fifths model in allocating Electoral College votes in the South and the North. And that was what allowed them to move forward with the parts of the Constitution that dealt with the executive and how the executive would be elected. It was a compromise to appease Southern slaveholders and Madison and others talk about this explicitly in those terms. And I think, yeah. It seems to me though that within that Constitutional Convention there were two positions put forward to establish the population of the United States at the time in the census. The North argued only count free people, correct? Only count in the census free people. Yeah, I'm not sure about the census. Free people. That was for the census. It wasn't for who gets to vote. It was for the census, okay? So the North said count every person who is free, which might have even included some free Blacks, because there were free Blacks in the North. In the North. In the North. And the South argued count every person, correct? I'm not sure about for the census purpose. I'm not sure. Well, because the census determines the population which determines the number of people in Congress. Right. Correct? Correct. No, and I'll tell you, I'll say why it does not include Native Americans. But anyway, so there was an argument the three-fifths compromise came out of that because the South said if you don't go our way we're going to secede. Right. Or not join. We're not going to join. We won't join because the Constitution was a compact. So they said if you don't go our way we're out of here. The North said we can't have that because then we'll be taken over again by England. We had to keep the South. And so that was the three-fifths rule. But the South still got to control Congress in the three-fifths rule because it still gave them more population which gave them still more control over the Electoral College. And Grant asked an interesting question. Would they have counted Native Americans? No, because Native Americans were not in the jurisdiction of the United States. The Native Americans always argued that they had their separate nations. Well, in fact, I'll get the exact language with the Constitution until the 14th Amendment explicitly excluded Native Americans not taxed, I believe was the language it used. Right. I could get you the exact language but it excluded them from that process. They didn't want to be included anyway because they thought of themselves as did the United States at the time as having their separate nations. They were not included in the nation that was being born of the United States. Yeah. And there's still, I mean, the reservations are still quasi-sovereign in some respects. Yeah, but they're not. They're not. I mean, they are citizens of the United States now. Yeah, and the 14th Amendment, that was all part of that as well. And they got rid of all of that language in the initial Constitution through the 14th Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause. But so, yeah, absolutely, Sandy, that's exactly right. So the three-fifths clause not only set, well, set the census and thereby set the number that each state would have in Congress, how many reps at the initial phase and thereby set the number of electoral votes at each state. Right. So it really, it really runs through all of these things. Ask Sally. Does that clear that up, Sally? Sally? I can't, we can't, I can't hear you. Anyway, okay, go ahead, Jared. Yes. Yeah. Are there other questions about that? There's a brilliant book on this whole subject and it's rather short. It's called The Negro President by the historian Gary Wills. And he explains how slavery worked itself into the initial Constitution and into the Electoral College in a really short, really brilliant way. And it was really, they called the Negro President, the Federalist, called Thomas Jefferson was the first Negro President because he was elected in the Electoral College based on the three-fifths rule. And it's interesting because they also said things like he had fathered so many slaves that he was really the president that had created so much population in the South by himself, but that's how he won. Yeah. Well, and it had an immediate effect because I think it was the election of 1800. If only three people had been counted, John Adams would have defeated Thomas Jefferson. But obviously he didn't and it was as a result of the additional votes that the South got through that three-fifths provision. I have another question, Jared. In 1800, I don't believe there was even a popular vote at all. I mean, when was there anything other than the Electoral College? When did it was instituted a popular vote at all? Well, the Electoral College is from, I mean, that's from the founding. I'm not certain it was ever based on the vote of the general population at all. Yeah. When did we get a general election? Yeah, a good question. I'm not sure when we, I mean, initially there was concerns too with respect to why they wanted to adopt the Electoral College because we have this vast country. How are we going to be able to communicate the results across all of this space? And so if we have electors, it'll avoid that problem. But I do think from the founding, I believe that every state had a pot. You got to vote for the president, even if that wasn't, yeah, I'm pretty sure. I just don't know. I'd like to know that. And but there's another reason for the Electoral College, and it was because the founders, there are a lot of reasons, but the other reason I believe was that they didn't trust the mob. The founding fathers never trusted democracy in the first place or never trusted one man, one vote. So that was the third, I think, reason. But the main reason I think was about slavery. Yeah, because you wanted to vote. Yeah, I think that was a big part of it. But I think, you know, so yeah, there's definitely language that gets to your point. I think I was just looking at an article that ostensibly quotes George Mason. And his quote is, it would be unnatural to refer the choice of the proper candidate for the chief magistrate to the people, as it would be to refer a trial of colors to a blind man. So certainly there was the idea that you can't trust the people in a certain way. And certainly, I think, I see people nodding and smiling. And I mean, I think it, there's only been a few instances where there's been a split. But obviously we've had quite, and I don't know if this is a representation of the division in our country, but it always strikes me as odd that we've had two of those instances in the past, you know, 15, 16 years. In other words, the popular vote going one way and the electoral college going the other way. When I think there was only one other instance, standing with more than one, where in our history, where that's happened otherwise. Most important one, though, was 1876. Yeah. Do you know about that? Was the election between Rutherford v. Hayes, who was a Republican and Samuel Tilden, who was a Democrat. And at that time, of course, 1876 was the end of Reconstruction. And this is why this is the most, again, tied to race and racism, because there was a tie vote, pretty much, in Florida. And so there was a special commission selected to decide who had won. And there was a deal made between Rutherford v. Hayes won that vote and the compromise. And in a way, good because he was a Republican and of course the Republicans were the anti-slave party. But the deal was that if he was given the vote, then he would withdraw union troops out of the South and let the South go its own way. Its own way became Jim Crow. Essentially ending Reconstruction. And ended Reconstruction, so led to Jim Crow apartheid. And how many years until the Civil Rights Movement in the... Overnor called it Redemption. Well, yes, it was called the Redemption. As opposed to Reconstruction. Correct. And so they could be enslaved. Right. Right. It was Redemption. Right. For the whites. Yeah. Of course. And it was the birth too of the KKK. That's why the South lost the war but won the peace. They did for a while. For a while. No, no, that's what I'll do. Yeah. Well, slavery no longer have slavery. That's for sure. Yeah, good. I mean, and yet we still have... I mean, I think I keep coming back to this idea that if you look at all sort of these major turning points so many times in our history, like the central driving force has been based on some sort of racial issue. And that seems to continue and continue. And we never seem to be able to... And maybe it's because it's poisoned at the start. I don't know. But we never seem to be able to deal with that in a way that puts it to rest. Why do we call it the original sin? I mean, that is really the original... I don't know how you... Well, I do think there's been progress made, frankly. Yeah. But it sticks with us. You're right. Right. Right.  That whole thing turned on race. The founding, certainly. I mean, there were other issues, perhaps, but I think a big part of adopting the electoral college, the census, all of these things that were at our very core of how we go about choosing leaders in this country there was a racial compromise there. Oh, right. And maybe that's it. Maybe there's some element of this. We continue to compromise something that really is uncompromisable. And so we never really deal with it. I don't know. That was one time we didn't compromise. That was called the Civil War, right? Yeah. There was no compromise about that. Lincoln made that clear. I mean, that's true, but there were compromises around the 14th Amendment. Right. And should it apply only to the governments or should it apply to private actors as well? Yeah, right. You know, so I don't know. It's a good question. So yeah, I mean, that's essentially the extent of my prepared, prepared comments, you know, as disjointed as maybe they were. So I'm happy to sort of continue the conversation either about the future. I mean, so if the other option, somebody brought up the national popular vote compact, which if constitutional would be fairly simple, the other option and the reason folks have pursued the popular vote compact, the other option is to amend the constitution to eliminate the electoral college and make it a popular vote. But that, as you probably recall, requires a two thirds vote in Congress and then three quarters of the states have to ratify it before it goes into effect. And we've only done that 27 times in 250 years. It has happened. And certainly it does. Why is it, why has not that happened? Why have people, mainly our leaders, hung on, both parties, have hung on to the electoral college? Why? I read something Sandy about George W. When he was president, he came close to saying, yes, let's have a popular vote. Which one? W. W. That's okay. Well, because of Bush v. Gore, that was a very hotly contested situation also. And maybe he had the, I don't know, I don't know why he would have, because of course he won through the electoral college. That's what gives him the credibility to do it. Maybe, but he didn't do it. He didn't do it. Yeah, I mean, I think, to my mind, I always feel like there's a, because you'd think, I mean you, and there is some, there has been different efforts over the years and they've sort of waxed and waned. I mean, after Bush v. Gore, there was outrage about the electoral college. After 2016, I don't, that wasn't the narrative, even though it was essentially the same thing that happened in terms of Bush v. Gore, with the popular vote going one way and the electoral vote going the other way. And so I always sort of fall back on, I kind of feel like that both parties are scarder of the unknown. Like the known bad is better than the unknown possible good. There's a phrase that's something like that. I'm totally getting it wrong, but you know that phrase. We're like, you don't, the unknown is worse. And so we know what happens the way it's set up now, even if we don't necessarily like it. And we don't know what happens. We don't know what's going to happen within the next month. Well, no, I'm saying the parties, they understand it. They understand it. And there's a fear of what, how does the power balance shift if we had a popular vote? Well, I think in the current situation right now, Republicans know that they would be defeated regularly. And so they are, of course, adamant against any kind of amendment doing electoral college. The Democrats aren't going to amend it either. When they've had the power, they haven't done it either. Right. You had, you had how, I guess you had Reagan and Bush won, but Bush won was the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote. And I don't remember what Bush, that was the Ross Perot days, maybe, or I don't know, when did Bush won win? He beat who? Michael DeCoccas. Bush won? Yes, he beat Michael DeCoccas. Michael DeCoccas. Yeah, Michael DeCoccas. DeCoccas, yeah, right, Deca. But he lost based on race, too. Well, and you, and so you've got, either way, you've got, you've got to get, even if you get Congress to go for it, you've got, you've got to get three quarters of the states. Right. So that's why I think you're seeing this, I mean, my, I would predict that I would be surprised if we don't at some point end up with 270 votes on that compact. We got 196. Then it's going to go to the Supreme Court. And if they were, again, sort of reading tea leaves, but if they're going to follow their dicta in Bush v. Gore, that states retain the authority to determine how they award their electors, then they, I think they'd have to say it's constitutional for them to do it based on the national popular vote. That would be the argument I'd make if I was the lawyer on, you know, on behalf of states that want this, you know, but that remains to be seen. Any other questions or thoughts about this great institution? But you'll notice, you know, with all the talks about institutional racism that are going on right now, including in our own city, there are very few discussions about the electoral college because honestly, because people do not understand it. They don't understand where it came from or how it operates. I mean, how many of us knew it, you know? Did anybody know how it had happened in the first place? Or I think, I know people generally have an idea, but I think sometimes how the different levers can be pulled and how that can muck the whole thing up. I mean, this is the first time we're seeing that in, you know, our lifetimes happening where, you know, what the president's doing is legal, but very problematic from the perspective of history. And so I think, you know, this is our first sort of experience with what that can look like. Well, we saw it in Bush v. Gore. We saw it in Bush v. Gore too, but nobody kind of figured it out because Gore conceded. Right. I mean, that's the only reason we didn't see it play out totally is because he conceded. So we can thank Trump for a history lesson in a... Yeah, thank you very much. I have a question. I just wondered, Jared, could you go over the end run way that you could get at rather than having to make this change through the legislature and all of the states? How could the individual states do the end run? Yeah. To basically get rid of the electoral... Yeah. So the U.S. Constitution says you've got to get a majority of the electoral votes to be the president. Right. So that's right now 270. You've got to get it. The states can't change that because the Constitution says that's what you've got to get. But the Constitution also says the states can decide how they award their electors. So if 270 electoral votes worth of states decide we're going to award our electors based on the national popular vote, then you'd still have the electoral college, but it would essentially become meaningless because whoever won the national popular vote would get automatically those 270 votes required to win. So how many now? I think it's 196, I think. No, but I think the most question is how many states are linked to the popular vote? 17, I think. He said, I thought Jared said 38. And then 17 or not. 38 was the... In 38 states, the electors right now are legally obligated to vote consistent with the state popular vote. Yeah, so how many are not? 17, right? 12. I guess 12 or not. But that's different than the popular vote compact. Did you say, Brett? Okay, Google it. I don't know how many. Tim, I think you said 13. You said, or 16? I thought you said 17, which sounds like me. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh wait a minute. Okay, so Jared, what Grant is saying is this correct? That... Go ahead. Yeah, okay, which is... Okay, I can tell you exactly how many here in just a minute, how many have signed on to it. Ha, doesn't say. There are... These states represent... As it would have been done. 15 states and the District of Columbia have signed on that totals. 196 electoral votes. It's 73% of the 270 it would need to have legal force. Wow. So that's okay. So it's still possible. I mean, I know in the Bush v. Court case, for instance, the Florida legislature was going to make a decision before there was a thorough recount. They said if you guys... They stopped the recount. And so basically they said, we have the power to stop the recount and go the way we want to go, right? Yeah, yes, under the federal constitution, they stopped the recount. But they still said, and I'm going to get the dictative wrong, but they essentially said that the state legislatures have the authority, and I could find the exact language, but they implied that state legislatures retain so much authority that they could actually change the way that they're awarded midstream or after the popular vote, which would obviously create all sorts of political havoc and therefore is unlikely, I think, to happen. But the Supreme Court implied that it's at least possible. And I think that's why eventually that Biden will be inaugurated because I don't think that even the Supreme Court wants the total chaos that would happen if all of a sudden Trump is selected by the Electoral College. I mean, can you imagine? We said the war. Yeah, I don't think there's any... I don't think so either. There were big hearings in Nevada today. Did anybody watch it? Were those official hearings? Yeah, they were in the court. They were in a court, yes. Because Giuliani has been establishing these kind of circuses where there are supposed testimony taken, but it's all... They were taking testimony today. I watched them. They were taking testimony today in the Nevada court that was presided over by a judge. Okay, yeah, we... Okay, so we have another couple weeks to, I guess, hear about all this stuff and be hanging on our fingernails to see what happens, right? So, Jared, what's your take on it? What do you think's gonna happen? Oh, I mean, my personal... Back in 2016, maybe folks remember that the Donald came to Burlington and spoke at the Flynn, right?  In fact, they probably still have some here. Hold on a minute.  This is make Burlington great again.  I did, too. I did, too. And they say you could sign up and get tickets. And then, of course, none of the tickets really existed and it was classic Trump. None of the tickets really existed. There was only really like 100 tickets and he gave out 20,000 or something. Anyway, as a result of that sort of humorous, let's go see what this is about. I'm on his mailing list. So, I get daily emails from Eric, Donald Jr., Ivanka, Laura. I mean, I'm like pals with them. And sometimes I reply to them and they never email me back. I don't know why. They keep calling me friend. A friend. We have an important election fundraising deadline. I'm like, an election happened a month ago. What deadline are you possibly raising money for? Electoral college is what they're talking about. Here's my theory on it. I think Trump knows he's done. He's not gonna get, no court has found any fraud. Bill Barr said there wasn't any widespread fraud yesterday or today. I think Trump is a lot of things.  I think he knows he's lost the election. He's not gonna be the next president. I think what he's doing, and it's based on the fact that I get emails asking him for money, seven of them a day from his entire family. He knows if he can continue to make it seem like there's something going on, and they've got all these lawsuits going, people will keep giving him money. And they've in fact raised $170 million since election day. What is she? And we can use that because it's a pack. He can use that money on basically, I mean, he can pay for his plane rides around the country, meals, staff, whatever he really wants. So it's kind of a slush fund. I mean, these packs are slush funds. I have a different theory. I have a different theory, which is that he's gonna announce his candidacy for 2024. Oh yeah. No, but I'm saying, I think you're probably right. I think you're probably right, but he'll use this $170 million to go all around the country campaigning and doing whatever he's gonna do for the next year. And he's following his first rally in Georgia on Saturday. Right, yeah. There was talk about him holding his declaration for 2024 on inauguration. Yes. Hey, by the way, it's legal, you guys. What's legal? So don't get all in a... What do you do? You're all about it. I don't want to snip about it being unethical, whether it's illegal or not. Not unethical to announce that you're running for president. I could do it too. Is that unethical? What's unethical about it? As the sitting president, I think... No, no, he'll do it on inauguration day. How about tacky? What? Tacky, yeah, tacky. Very interesting. Thank you, Jared. Yeah, good to see you. Thanks for all the great conversation and questions. This is our last session for this season, but we're beginning again in January. And we have already two scheduled events, which are not basically tied to the law so much, but one, Professor Andrew Buchanan, who's a historian at UBM, will be here to talk about China today, tomorrow, the world, I guess. And then the second one that we've booked already is Jane Nodell, who will be here to talk about whether or not the United States can continue to print money and what that means. So we'll be announcing the sessions soon. Okay, thank you all for being here tonight. Thank you. Hey, everybody be well. I hope to see you guys in person at some point. Good to see you. Okay, bye. Bye. See you, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye, everybody.


In the previous video, we talked about how to do long division with polynomials. In this video, we're going to talk about how to do synthetic division with polynomials instead. So synthetic division is nice because it is a little bit shorter version of long division, but it only works if you're dividing by x minus k, or x plus k. The key is that there can't be a coefficient in front of the x other than one, and it can't be x to any higher power at all. So this example here will work. We're dividing 3x to the fourth plus 2x cubed minus x minus one by x plus four, and this actually is the same problem that we did at the end of the video of the previous video. So when you're dividing using synthetic division, I always make a little box here. So there's a few different ways to do it, but this is just how I usually set it up. And in this box goes your k value. So k is whatever we're subtracting from x. In this case, x plus four, you could think of that as x minus a negative four. So in the box, we'll put a negative four. And then next to that box in a row, we're going to put all of the coefficients of these terms here. So starting with 3x to the fourth, we'll start just listening to three, and then we'll go down to the x cubes. We have 2x cubes, and then this is where you have to be careful. We don't have any x squared, so we have to put a zero there. You need a column for each degree. So this is like our x to the fourth column. This is our x cubed. These are our x squareds. Then we go to our x's. We have a negative 1x, and then the constant, which is again a negative one. So you list those coefficients in order, making sure not to skip any. Okay, then leave a little space, and what we'll do is to complete the synthetic division. First, always bring your leading term down. That will always stay the same as a three in this case. Once you have a term down here, you'll multiply it by the term in the box. So 3 multiplied by negative 4 is a negative 12, and we write that in the space that we've left. And this is where it's different from the long division. We are going to add every time. So 2 plus a negative 12 is a negative 10, and then we multiply again by the number in the box. 40. And we add. 0 plus 40 is 40. 40 multiplied by a negative 4 is a negative 160. And again, we add going down. It's negative 161. And then we multiply by the number in the box. Negative 161 multiplied by 4, or by a negative 4, is 644. And then we add a negative 1 to that, and we get 643. Now, if you are noticing this, it's pretty similar numbers, actually all similar numbers to what we had before. So we've essentially just done the long division, but just without all of the writing out of each term. So what happens here is this number at the end, this is always the remainder. And then if you work backwards from there, that is going to be your quotient right here. So each of these terms, they're just dropping one degree as you go. So this was an x. This is now going to be your constant. This will now be an x, then an x squared, and then an x cubed as we go back. So the constant is negative 161, then we add in 1x as we work backwards. So that 40 goes with an x, the negative 10 will go with an x squared, and then the 3 will go with an x cubed. So each time your answer should have a degree that is one less than the degree that you started with, which in this case was x to the fourth. So this is the quotient, that's the remainder, 643, if we wanted to write it all together, we could write our final answer as this. Okay, let's look at one more example of synthetic division because it will help us save some time as we're doing this division when we're factoring. Okay, in this case we're going to make our box to start. Notice it works because we are only dividing by x minus 3, and then in the box we will put a 3. Then following the box we'll put just the coefficients, and here if you look it doesn't skip a degree at all. So we can just go 1, 3, negative 2, 6, negative 1. Leave some space, your leading coefficient will always stay the same. Then multiply by the number in the box, 1 multiplied by 3 is 3, and each time we're adding here. 3 plus 3 is 6, 6 multiplied by 3 is 18, we add, get 16, 3 multiplied by 16 is 48, we add and multiply. 54 multiplied by 3 is 162, and when we add here we get 161. So this last number that we get is again our remainder, the 161. And then as we go backwards we're going to add in an x each time. So 54 will be the constant, the 16 will go with an x, 6 will go with an x squared, and then 1 will go with an x cubed. This here is the quotient, the 161 is the remainder, and we can write our final answer like that. Now one special property, it's called the remainder theorem that works well in order to check kind of the remainders and check your work in these cases. It says that if we are dividing by x minus k, we can plug that k value into this equation and that can give us the remainder. So in this case, let's call this function f of x. If we were to plug a 3, since we're dividing by x minus 3 into that equation, we should get 161. So what I'm going to do is I'll plug into my calculator 3 to the fourth plus 3 times 3 cubed minus 2 times 3 squared plus 6 times 3 minus 1. And when I do that I get 161. And that notice is what we had for the remainder. So anytime you divide by x minus a number, or x plus a number, you can plug that number in to your equation that you're dividing in order to find the remainder. And I find that that's a great property to use just to check your work as you're working through some of these difficult problems. But there is just a quick explanation of how to use synthetic division with polynomials.


8 traveling power couples teaching English abroad you should follow right now. The following 8 couples have traveled the world together, and either started out as ESL teachers or supported their travels teaching English in different parts of the world. Some of them are still teaching, others have started their own businesses. Either way, these 8 traveling power couples are an absolute inspiration for ESL teachers, and you should follow them right now. Katie and Jake from Untold Wanderlust Katie and Jake are two budget world wanderers and ESL teachers. They both share a passion for exploring new and exciting destinations across the world. Follow their blog Untold Wanderlust to see their very long round-the-world adventure whilst teaching. Rosie and Dave from Ravenous Travelers Rosie and Dave are two high school sweethearts who have been teaching and traveling since 2015. They spent two years teaching English in South Korea, an awesome experience that enabled them to travel to many countries in Asia during their vacations. Recently they've spent six months exploring India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and are looking forward to returning to Korea to teach English again soon. Katie and Ben from Two Wandering Souls Katie and Ben have been traveling around the world for the past 4.5 years. Whether they're trekking in the Himalayas, road-tripping in the USA in a campervan, or exploring off the beaten-path destinations, they are passionate about traveling responsibly. They've been able to sustain their life on the road by teaching English and blogging. Their award-winning blog, Two Wandering Souls, is where they document their down-to-earth travel stories, and educate readers about practical ways we can travel in a way that's better for the earth. Ron and Jess from Unearth the Voyage Ron and Jess started their careers as teachers when they decided to move to South Korea. Seeking adventure and change, South Korea seemed like the perfect place to go. The couple accepted a job at an after-school company teaching English to children grades K9th. Neither had ever taught children before but they quickly adapted to their new lives as teachers. After a year of learning growing and enjoying new experiences, Jess and Ron took off on a six-month backpacking adventure around Southeast Asia. Ron and Jess now reside in St. Louis, where they are growing their own digital marketing agency, and hope to volunteer abroad as teachers someday soon. Nick and Durris from Goats on the Road Nick and Durris are the couple behind Goats on the road a top travel website. They show others how to make money from anywhere in the world and travel full-time. When they started traveling full-time in 2008, they found that teaching English abroad was a great way to make money and stay on the road. After they volunteered teaching in a village in Myanmar for a week, they started to think that they would be great English teachers. Later they also taught in an English school in Yangzhou, China. Sarah and Nathan from Exploring Kiwis With a love of adventure Sarah and Nathan scour the globe on the hunt for memorable experiences. They have been living and teaching in Abu Dhabi over the last few years, documenting many of their experiences on their wonderful blog. Claire and Terry from Past the Potholes Claire and Terry are elementary teachers who have lived and taught in Mexico and Trinidad. They are now on a leave of absence traveling full-time all around the world. Scott and Megan from Bobo and Shishi After Scott moved to Korea to teach English, he quickly convinced Megan to leave her 50-plus hour a week job behind and join him. A 24-hour work week gave them tons of time to practice hobbies and travel, so they started a blog and worked on their hobbies, travel, writing, photography and video. During two years in Korea they saved $75,000 and have traveled and kept up those hobbies ever since. Now they are full-time travel bloggers.  As you can see from these eight power couples, teaching English abroad can lead you to amazing places and exciting career paths. If you'd like to follow in their footsteps, the first step of your adventure abroad is taking your TEFL course. Thanks so much for watching. We are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TESOL training courses. If you like this video, please subscribe by clicking that button down here and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.