If you are a victim of narcissistic abuse, this is one message you should listen to carefully. My name is Sam Vaknim. I'm the author of Malignan Selphlava, Narcissism Revisited, and many other books about personality disorders. And I'm a professor of psychology.  Where are you coming from? And where on earth are you going? Two wrongs never make you right. Allow me to repeat this. Two wrongs never make you right.    Let it be clear. If you mirror evil, you become wicked. If you mirror evil, you become evil. Stare into the abyss, and the abyss will consume you whole. Being a victim is not a license to join the ranks of your tormentors. Beware of self-righteousness and moral superiority, because these are the paving stones on the path to your personal and relenting hell.  No one is invalidating your experiences. No one, least of all I, underestimates what you have gone through. In 1995, I coined the term narcissistic abuse. I'm the father of the field. I gave you language. I gave you the voice that you are using now. Many of you never heard of me. Coaches, experts, communities, millions of people around the world never heard of me, but they are all using my language. They are all narcissistic abuse victims or experts or coaches, and it all started with me. So don't lecture me on what it means to be a victim. I'm the one who talks to the world what is to be the victim of a narcissist or the victim of a psychopath. It's the most harrowing, horrible, terror-filled experience. Nothing can be worse than this because the narcissists and psychopaths seek to vitiate you.  I know that. I know how all consuming this experience is all pervasive, how ubiquitous the abuse is, how reality itself dissolves and becomes a phantasmagoria, a surrealistic landscape within which you move. I know the earth moves under your feet for all the wrong reasons. But beware. Beware of becoming that which you are fleeing from.  Are you a victim?   Maybe you have borderline personality disorder. Take this into account. Or everyone with a class-to-be personality disorder.  Consider themselves victims. You ask any narcissist. They will tell you, of course, I'm a victim. I'm the victim. I've been victimized. I'm gallible, I'm naive, I'm good-hearted and can-hearted. I wanted to help. I've been victimized. Many narcissists would claim to be the empathic party. All people with class-to-be personality disorders have alloplastic defenses. They tend to blame other people for any mishap, misfortune, failure and defeat in their lives. They have an external locus of control. They blame it all on the world. They are never responsible. They are never guilty. They are never blameworthy. The buck never stops with the narcissist and the psychopath. He passes it on.  Soul search. Ask yourself, am I really a victim? Did I contribute to what had happened? Do I have pronounced narcissistic traits? Did I behave or misbehave psychopathically as a psychopath would? Was I defined? Was I contumacious? Did I defy authority or resist authority? Did I behave promiscuously? Did I abuse substances? Did I collude and collaborate with others in perpetrating abusive acts? Soul search. Look at yourself in the mirror. The vast majority of victims are simply victims. But there is quite a sizable group who are not. They are actually covert narcissists or borderline. Judith Herman of Harvard University, she created the diagnosis of complex post traumatic stress disorder.  Judith Herman insists that complex trauma is indistinguishable from borderline personality disorder. What is borderline personality disorder? People with borderline personality disorder are grandiose. They are entitled and they easily switch to secondary psychopathy.  They are promiscuous. They are reckless. They are dangerous and very often they are malicious and malevolent. People with borderline personality disorder cannot be told apart from people who suffer from complex post traumatic stress disorder. That's not me. Judith Herman, the world's number one two and three authority on CPTSD. Kernberg, Otto Kernberg who had invented the field of personality disorder, he says that borderline personality disorder is just another form of pathological narcissism even malignant narcissism and all of them are on the verge of psychosis. Can you argue with Kernberg? I wouldn't if I were you. Grottschheim yet another prominent scholar in the field of cluster B personality disorders. Grottschheim claims that people with borderline personality disorder are simply failed narcissists in early childhood having been subjected to trauma and abuse, dead parenting, parents who are selfish, parents who breach the boundaries, the emerging boundaries of the child, parents who merge with the child and fuse with the child and parentify the child, etc. The child tried to develop narcissistic defenses, tried to become a narcissist and failed. The child becomes a borderline. So you see it's all intricately inextricably connected. You think you have complex post traumatic stress disorder. Maybe, likely actually, but maybe actually you have borderline personality disorder with pronounced narcissistic traits. Narcissism is a critical dimension of both borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. So maybe you are secondary psychopaths. You have empathy, you have access to your emotions but when you're stressed when you face abandonment and rejection when you're abused and tormented and tortured you become psychopaths. This is what happens to borderline. That's why today in academia we consider to merge these disorders. And for example to reconsider or reconceive a borderline is a form of secondary psychopathy. Many of you are innocent but many of you are not. Many of you are victims but many of you are not. Many of you have done nothing to deserve what had happened to you but many of you have colluded and contributed to and participated in your abuse in a form of dance macabre the tango of the dead. You were there you were present you were not absent you made choices, thousands of choices daily, monthly, weekly by decade. Ask yourself what did I do to have found myself in this situation and what can I avoid doing in the future? How to prevent this from happening again? Don't just adhere to the simplistic nonsensical self-interested exploitative messages of coaches and experts online who keep telling you you're blameless you're blameless you've done nothing you're perfect, you're angelic you're empathic, you're supportive you're amazing it's all his fault he did everything you couldn't have helped it you attract such people, you're a magnet don't listen to these people they just want your money they want to perpetuate your victimhood status because it pays it's good for business I'll come to it in a minute victims of prolonged abuse often interject internalize their abuses they convert their abuses into permanent persecutory objects inside their minds they have avatars icons, representations of the abuser up in their minds and this up is working in the background downloading material affecting the environment changing the victim's mind transmuting it and transforming it it's an active app it's like cancer, it metastasizes by interjecting the abuser you're perpetuating the abuse henceforth you trauma bond with this inner tormenting voice even when the original bully in your life is long out you have divorced your abuser you've moved away you broke up you've lost contact but the physical abuser is gone his voice is here his voice is here and it keeps tormenting you day in and day out every opportunity with every circumstance and you let it you let it when you preserve when you maintain when you worship your victim status to be a victim abuser so in order to remain a victim you enshrine the abuser you elevate the abuse into an organizing principle of your reality and your life it makes sense of your life victimhood becomes a cozy comfort zone and the victim is emotionally invested perfected in maintaining victimhood status pristine and operational victimhood becomes a determinant of the victim's identity it helps the victim to regulate her emotions ameliorate her anxiety and modulability the victim can blame everything on her victimhood status on her past she remains stuck in the past she can't move on perpetual victimhood is very addictive it's a form of reinforcement it's it's a dopamine rush it creates a dopamine path rush it's you can't get rid of it I mean the more you are into it the lower your chances of extricating yourself perpetual victimhood serves for indispensable psychological needs number one it restores victimhood restores a sense of agency restores a sense of self-efficacy it reverts the locus of control from out there external to internal why? because by being a victim you become somebody your victimhood status confers on you uniqueness it's a grandiose defense many victims garner attention they become the life of the party the focus of everyone's ministrations many victims make money from the newly found profession of victimhood victimhood pays victimhood gratifies victimhood is wonderful because now you have an identity you're a victim it's a skill a life skill you study it you analyze it every morning with walks I mean this is your idol it's idolatry number two victimhood makes sense of your personal history and of the world around you when you are in the throes of being abused when you are inside an abusive relationship the world looks and appears to be meaningless senseless chaotic disordered disorganized discombobulated and therefore frightening hostile and threatening here comes victimhood and everything makes suddenly makes perfect sense I know why these things happen to me I've been a victim and I can predict the future because if I come across another abuser I know what he's going to do I know the rules, I know the ropes out of here I want to remain a victim because as long as I'm a victim I'm safe the victimhood makes sense of your personal history makes sense of the world and renders them meaningful it suddenly introduces structure order purpose direction and even a sense of karmic justice they are all restored the universe is good again victimhood legitimizes avoidant behaviors the world out there is challenging and painful victimhood gives you permission to avoid the world to shun the world no more relationships no more men no more going out there no more testing no more exposing yourself to pain possible pain revealing your vulnerabilities victimhood is an encasement it's a coffin it mummifies you it renders you a corpse it removes you from the world in technical terms and clinical terms this is called constriction it constricts your life victimhood tells you you've been a victim once never be a victim again men did this to you avoid men you've been victimized and abused and bullied at work avoid work work from home don't go out, don't date don't try, don't challenge yourself don't attempt, reject life shun life because if you reject life it guarantees tranquility it guarantees an inert peace of mind and finally victimhood victim to indulge her grandiosity she feels morally superior she is immaculate angelic empathic, supportive loving, caring, compassionate in short victimhood renders the victim perfect, blemishless and blameless you become a narcissist victimhood is a form of grandiosity it's a form of narcissism it is a morality play of good versus evil all good versus all evil you are all good the narcissist is all evil and demonic we call this splitting it's a defense mechanism of black and white good and evil everything is divided down the middle there's no compromise, there's no overlap splitting is a primitive defense mechanism and it's typical of hold your breath narcissists and borderlines when you adopt victimhood as your main identity and later a profession you are splitting the world because as a victim you're with the angels and everyone else is the devil is a demon is to be eradicated and extricated abused manipulated and avoided so you're splitting the world you're becoming a narcissist this morality play, this crusade you are the warrior angel you're fighting off the demonic narcissists it's insane it's a form of sliding incrementally into insanity victimhood affords the victim membership in a tight-knit community like-minded people victims gravitate to other victims and victims form communities and forums and support groups these are all like-minded people it's an echo chamber no one will ever challenge you and without challenge without friction, without disagreement there's no growth the main problem in these forums they don't allow you to move on they are sticky you're stuck in the mud it's a swamp these sands are gonna swallow you they don't allow you to move on because when you're there you increase their power and their own grandiosity the leaders of such forums and support groups are usually narcissists covert or open narcissists so they want as many members as possible they want you to move on they want money as well and they do so victimhood is a confirmation bias you're gonna reject vehemently, aggressively, sometimes violently you're gonna reject any information that challenges your victimhood and you're gonna embrace and adopt and feel warm and fuzzy with any bit of fake news and false data that support your view of yourself as a perpetual, eternal victim the sense of belonging sense of being finally understood vindicated and elevated it is an intoxicating mix and victims become aggressive even when you try to take victimhood away from them when you try to alert them to their own imperfections when you try to elucidate the contributions they had made to their said state of affairs when you try to impute responsibility to them tell them you've been responsible it's also your responsibility what has happened to you is also your responsibility, you made choices you're an adult they get really mad at you and they react aggressively and sometimes violently and very often psychopathically with one or two laudable exceptions unscrupulous callous con artist psychopaths coaches and experts online they seek to perpetuate this state of victimhood they are telling their clients what they want to hear and what they are willing to pay for and it's good for business the truth and healing have a negative effect on the bargaining bottom lines of these scammers gurus so I want to read to you what was written in 1995 when no one heard of narcissism no one heard of narcissism and there was no phrase to describe the type of abuse that narcissists meet out this is the article in which I've coined the phrase narcissistic abuse and I want to read to you excerpts from this article 1995 sooner or later everyone around the narcissist is bound to become his victim people are sucked voluntarily or involuntarily into the turbulence that constitutes the narcissist life into the black hole that is the narcissist personality into the whirlwind which makes up the narcissist interpersonal relationships different people are adversely affected by different aspects of the narcissist life and his psychological makeup some people trust the narcissist and rely on the narcissist to be bitterly disappointed other people love the narcissist and they discover that he cannot reciprocate their love and yet other people are forced to live vicariously by proxy through the narcissist there are three categories of victims first of all there are victims of the narcissist instability the narcissist leads an unpredictable vicissitudinal precarious often dangerous life his ground is ever shifting geographically as well as mentally the narcissist changes addresses, workplaces, vocations avocations, interests friends and enemies with a bewildering speed the narcissist bates authority and challenges it the narcissist is therefore prone to conflict likely to be a criminal a rebel, a dissident or a critic he gets bored easily trapped in cycles of idealization and devaluation of people places, hobbies, jobs and values the narcissist is mercurial unstable and unreliable his family suffers his spouse and children have to wander with him in his private desert endure the via dolorosa that he incessantly walks these people these nearest, dearest insignificant others they live in constant fear and trepidation what next where next, who is next to a lesser extent this is the case with his friends, bosses colleagues or even with his country, his nation these biographical vacillations and mental oscillations deny the people around the narcissist autonomy unperturbed development and self-fulfillment their own path to self-recognition and contentment to the narcissist, other people are mere instruments tools, sources of narcissistic supply he sees no reason to consider their needs their wishes, wants, desires or fears the narcissist derails their life with ease and ignorance deep inside the narcissist knows that he is wrong to do so because they might retaliate and so he develops for secretary delusions this is the first type of victims second class of victims victims of the narcissist misleading signals these are victims of the narcissist deceiving emotional messages the narcissist mimics real emotions artfully, he exudes the air of someone really capable of loving or of being hurt of one passionate soft, empathic and caring most people are misled into believing that the narcissist is even more humane than average covert narcissists are very good at this by the way people fall in love with the narcissist mirage the fleeting image with the phatomorgana of a lush emotional oasis in the midst of their own emotional desert they succumb they succumb, they give in to the luring proposition that he is they give in they give up and they give everything only to be discarded ruthlessly when judged by the narcissist to be no longer useful riding high on the crest of the narcissist over valuation only to crash into the abysmal depths of his devaluation these people lose control over their own emotional life the narcissist drains people exhaust their resources sucks the blood life of narcissistic supply from their dwindling depleted cells this emotional rollercoaster is so harrowing that the experience borders on the truly traumatic to remove doubt this behavior pattern is not confined to matters of the heart the narcissist's employer for instance his boss he is misled by the narcissist's apparent seriousness industriousness, ambition willing to sacrifice, intelligence honesty, thoroughness and a host of other utterly fake qualities shallow they are fat, fake and shallow because they are directed at securing narcissistic supply not at doing a good job the narcissist's clients and suppliers suffer from the same illusion the narcissist's false emanations are not restricted to messages with emotional content his messages may contain wrong or false or partial information the narcissist does not hesitate to lie, confabulate, deceive or reveal in quote unquote misleading half truths he appears to be intelligent and charming and therefore reliable the narcissist is a convincing conjurer of words, signs, behaviors and body language he is a sleight of hand he is a magician and the above two classes of victims are casually exploited and then discarded by the narcissist no more malice is involved in this than in any other interaction with an instrument the narcissist does not hate does not hate you or love you or any thing he does not feel anything generally and about you specifically he just uses you and then your shelf life is over and you are over there is no more premeditation contemplation on the part of the narcissist than you meditate and contemplate believing these are all of you are victims of narcissistic reflexes perhaps this is what makes it also repulsively horrific the offhanded nature the absent minded nature of the damage that the narcissist inflicts on these victims but there is a third category of victims these are the victims upon whom the narcissist designs maliciously and intentionally plans to inflict his wrath wrath and bad intentions the narcissist is both sadistic and masochistic in some in some respects in hurting other people he always seeks to hurt himself there is a self destructive streak in punishing them he wishes to be penalized their pains are indirectly his pains and so he attacks the narcissist attacks figures of authority and social institutions with vicious, uncontrolled, vituperative almost insane rage only to accept his due punishment these institutions these figures of authority these intimate partners these employers they react to the narcissist's venomous diatrice or antisocial actions they react and he knows they are going to react but he accepts the inevitable punishment with incredible complacency or even relief he engages in vitriolic humiliation of his skin and folk of regime and government of his firm or the law only to suffer pleasurably in the role of the outcast the rebel the excommunicated the dissident the exiled and the imprisoned the punishment of the narcissist does little to compensate his randomly rather incomprehensibly selected victims the narcissist forces individuals forces even groups of people around him to pay a heavy toll materially in reputation or emotionally the narcissist is ruinous and destructive and in behaving so the narcissist seeks to be punished but also to maintain emotional detachment later on I invented the phrase emotional involvement preventive mechanisms threatened by intimacy and by the predatory coziness of routine and mediocrity the narcissist lashes back at what he perceives to be the sources of this dual threat he attacks people whom he thinks take him for granted those people who fail to recognize his superiority those people who render him average, common, normal is going to punish them and they alas include just about everyone the narcissist knows this text was written in 1995 25 years ago long before anyone has heard of narcissists I wish you happier healthier many more years to come stay well and above all stay sane don't become that which you had feared the most thank you for listening


The 11th Mu Composited in September 2018 for deployment this year. It's composed of a Brown Combat Element, the Italian Landing Team 3-5, a Logistics Combat Element, Combat Logistics Battalion 11, an Aviation Combat Element, the MM163 Reinforced, and our Maritime Raid Force from Force Company First Recon. After Composite, our Marines began a grueling pre-deployment training cycle, composed of four major training exercises and multiple unit level training events. The mission of the ACE, since we've been here in 11th Mu, so far it's been to maintain a ready-to-deploy squadron. We don't take a challenge anytime anywhere. The mission of the BLT in relation to the Mu was we were the first and foremost ground combat element, so we were there to be that frontal assault, establish a beachhead in order for the combat logistics team to come and support us. We were trained to locate and position the soldiers. The mission of the CLB in relation to the Mu is providing logistical support with fuel, water, heavy equipment, power generation, water transport, maintenance, even explosive ordnance disposal. Working with the Navy in the beginning it wasn't as easy as I would have thought it was going to be, but honestly, right after that, once we've meshed together and we knew each other's jobs, we actually realized that we needed each other a lot more than expected. So once that brotherhood and cohesion came in, we understood what our mission was and we worked together to get it accomplished. We have this idea that we work the hardest. No one works as hard as us, and then I saw the Air Department and when they're not calling in aircraft and not working the flight deck, they're fixing pad eyes, they're busting rust, to do all the same stuff we do and they do it for longer hours. We are still under the Navy that us being together, working together to know each other what each other does is very important on land and sea. I think that integration is very important to the knowledge and the morale and integration with all of us together. What our pre-deployment training cycle did was prepare the Mew to be our nation's 9-1-1 force, capable of responding to processes from the military assistance to contingency operations. With that experience and knowledge gained, the 11th Mew embarked on deployment. The first notable one was in Hawaii, just because that was the first, you know, here we are, we're on deployment. I mean, we're still in the States, but it was our first introduction to the jungle. We've never been in the jungle before. That one was kind of a little stressful. Integration with our blue side partners was essential at this time. While closely working together, the ARC Mew team was able to conduct 22 total theater security cooperation events with 23 partner nations. Each time the sailors aboard the Boxer, John P. Murtha and Harper's Ferry facilitated the movement of new assets ashore. What that did was showcase the combat power of our blue-green team to all of our partners and allies in the regions we were working in. Our partnership with the Navy was tested and proven by performing operations, supporting maritime stability and security in the central region. The White House announced that the United States, the USS Boxer, has shot down an Iranian drone. Tonight with a new escalation of the conflict between the United States and Iran. Late today from President Trump, the warship USS Boxer took down an Iranian drone in the Strait of Pormoud. The USS Boxer, already on patrol in the Arabian Sea, shot down the Iranian drone after President Trump said it got too close for comfort. The Boxer took defensive action against an Iranian drone which had closed into a very, very near distance, approximately 1,000 yards. Our David Martin has learned a U.S. Navy ship may have brought down more than one Iranian drone during a close encounter last week in the Strait of Pormoud. The top U.S. commander for the Middle East told us it now looks like the Boxer took down two drones. As always, it was a complex tactical picture. We believe two drones, we believe two drones were successfully engaged. There may have been more that we're not aware of. Those are the two that we engaged successfully. This team brought combined commanders the ability to conduct complex, deliberate missions such as amphibious assaults, precision raids, airfield seizures and embassy reinforcements. As a team, we were able to complete each and every task we were charged with supporting regional stability, reassuring partners and allies and maintaining a forward presence capable of responding to any crisis. It wasn't easy, but due to your hard work, perseverance, unwavering courage, our Marines and Navy team were successful in achieving what we were made to do. Serve as an expeditionary force to bring the fight to the enemy wherever they may be. I'm extremely proud of you and everything that we have achieved together over the past year.  The name Pride of the Pacific wasn't chosen. It was earned. The 11th view I previously shown greatness in combat and humanitarian operations. You exemplary Marines and sailors continue that legacy and have contributed to what will ensure the 11th view and boxer arc are remembered for years to come.


I had lots of fun troubles with infrared cameras in preparation for this talk. I had one that was like, I don't know, ten years old and I was going to use it and it turned out they don't make the software for it anymore and you need this weird thing that they don't make anymore, this hardware to actually get it to work. So then that didn't work. So we went to these other guys to try to rent one because apparently you can rent these things and that's there. That thing is being quite silly now. So I'm going to start. So we were going to start with a minority report trailer originally but that didn't work out because we called Fox and Fox was like, no, that's a bad thing to do. But you know, actually it's a fun fact that I discovered if you ever want to know every single advertisement in a trailer, just ask them, just ask the guys to let you use it in a presentation and then send you back a list saying these are the clips from the movie you can never use because they're advertisements. So we wanted to use the minority report trailer because it parallels very closely the program that we did research on that we're going to present to you guys about. The program is called FAST because everything has to have a clever acronym. And the program like minority report pretty much has precogs because it's supposed to go and stop murder by looking into the future and it's supposed to be correct. So we thought that, so as we were doing research into this program, we came up with a few questions because you know, as in minority report, doubts in the end arose. So I'm Samon Restchikov. And we're going to present to you guys about FAST. So we'd like to thank Morgan Wang who was our collaborator who helped us do a lot of the research for this. Turns out you can find all sorts of very interesting things on the internet by using Google. Who knew? Unfortunately, she can't be here right now. We'd also like to thank the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Draper Laboratories and Paul Ekman and the people at SPOT and everyone involved in FAST who developed these programs because with you guys, we really wouldn't have a presentation to present on and you know, dissect your methodologies on. So we heart to U.S.G. Thank you very much. So a little bit of a disclaimer before we start. I'm not really part of Draper Labs or I'm not really a fed. We're kind of out of the loop on all this stuff. Everything we found, we found by Googling. So if any of our information is not accurate, that's because you guys don't publish anything. So that's kind of unfortunate. So FAST. We were just, the way we found out about FAST was we were just Googling around, you know, browsing the internet because we do that sometimes. And we found, and we went on the DHS website and we saw these two very interesting projects called, you know, the FAST project and the hostile intent project. And we read through them and our eyes focused on this one little very interesting sentence. The system will measure both physiological and behavioral signals to make probabilistic assessments of mal intent. Hmm. So when we saw this, we were like, whoa, that sounds really cool. Because just like biometrics to fight terrorism? Really cool. It's, you know, curing terrorism with science. Sounds awesome. And the premise of FAST is that you can tell people's mal intent, you can tell the intention of people by using, by scanning them with very advanced biometrics. And if you do a little, and so that's the whole idea. So we were like precogs. They're real now, apparently. So we started doing research and we found out that the genesis of the thread, the ideological thread behind the program, started sometime around the late 90s, you know, ancient history. It's really old. Back with Paul Ekman. You see, he looks a little bit like Napoleon. So Dr. Paul Ekman is famous for his research on deception theory and figuring out how he can tell who's lying and who's not. Any of you read Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink? I'm so sorry. Well, he's more famously known as the inspiration for Dr. Cal Lightman in the now canceled Fox show, Lie to Me. His entire thing is this theory called micro expressions. When you try to hide feelings, there are certain involuntary emotions, little twitches on the side of your mouth, things like that, that are the same across every human being. He, to find out a little bit more about this, he did this thing called the wizards project. He took people from all kinds of walks of life, cops, lawyers, high school teachers.  And high school teachers can't tell. And he found that basically the only people who were significantly better than everyone else were secret service agents because they have some kind of training or it's just self selecting. We don't know which one of those it is because he stopped publishing when he says he realized that other countries were watching his work very closely and he didn't want them to be used against the United States. This also results in no one else reviewing his research so we don't know if he's just making it up or not. Security, woohoo. So Paul Ekman's research in micro expressions was the genesis of SPOT, which has nothing to do with dogs and it's not very cute. In SPOT, you have all these TSA agents that are trained in the analysis of micro expressions. So if say, you know, you're going through the airport and you set off some sort of flag like you're a young Muslim guy who's reading the Quran and interested in Middle Eastern politics or you book a ticket, a flight ticket, that's one way and you check no luggage. You might get referred to I think their behavioral, what is it? Behavioral analysis officer. Yeah, to a behavioral analysis officer who a B-A-O, who will go and question you in the nice little room. And while he questions you, he will go and pay very close attention to your face and try to detect any micro expressions, you know, to tell if you're evil. And you know, so at the beginning, this sounds like a really cool idea. If this research actually works, it seems very interesting. So at the beginning, you know, people were kind of excited about this. People were saying we should use it everywhere. It's going to be awesome. But over time, confidence in the program started to wane a little bit. So that's not actually my idea. That's a clip from, that's an actual headline. I'm not that mean, although I did put in the dead dog. So the thing with spot is that it refer, so in the preliminary trials, because it started right up around 9-11, so it's been going around for about five years. So these preliminary trials, they referred, I think, 40,000 people to further screening. And 300 of them are arrested.  But there were no actual enemy combatants arrested. Because the 300 were I think, all entirely drug dealers and people who lack documentation. Which, so you know, that's like, oh look, so you're arrested 300 people by questioning 40,000 extra. And you know, that's not, at that point, that's not very surprising. So the program has not been incredibly successful. And it seems that the big problem with the program is that really, like, human beings, even when they're trained, are not good at detecting deception. Maybe some people are, as per Paul Ekman's research, but it's not something that you can really do very well. So this isn't my slide. This is the slide from one of Judy Bragoon's presentations. Judy Bragoon is someone who we think is very closely related to fast. And so out of, you know, the relative semi-failure kind of a little bit of spot, you have people who decide that human beings are sucky at this, and that we should get robots to do it. Which is always a good idea. That coin is also from her presentation. As you can see, government presentations are classy. So spot was indeed not very, it was also very expensive. It's, it was $212 million a year. I think the Obama administration just increased its allotment to $286 million, something like that. And so, you know, in donuts, because that's a great currency, that's $160 donuts per federal employee per year. Or so if there are any feds in here, you guys want 160 donuts, just talk to some people. Or one donut for everyone in the United States on Christmas. So, yeah, it's not incredibly expensive, but it's not very good for 300 illegal immigrants. So, you know, they have this program and it wasn't very successful. So you try and you try again. Because we believe in FAST. So FAST is this new program that is going to go and stop the terrorists from destroying America. And, um, so my, this is also a slide from Judy Bergeron's presentation. And I really like it because two of those pictures are from conspiracy theory books. One of them being about FDR.  So what is FAST? We haven't really explained exactly what it's supposed to be. Well, it's a trailer. Like, it's literally supposed to be in the form factor of a trailer. That's something that they've emphasized many times because it's supposed to be portable. So you could put it in lots of places.  Or like your local, uh, I don't know, sports stadium. I think we saw around the internet, uh, in various presentations, some suggestions of putting it on like border patrol. Or I think even public transportation, which would be interesting, you know, get your mind right every time you go to a bus. Uh, so what is FAST? Uh, alright. So FAST is a series of pretty modern sensors. Um, the first on the list is this thing called Bio LiDAR. LiDAR is basically a fancy laser, uh, range finder. And someone over at the defense department has figured out how to use that to measure heart rate. Because you can totally do that. Um, the next part, the one we'll be demonstrating is thermal camera, which you use to measure stress responses. After that, it's just a video, a video camera at eye level, which looks at your pupils, how red your eyes are, agitation, maybe even the micro expressions if the algorithms get good enough. But it could also just be used as a really good detector of hangovers. They've also mentioned in a few of the presentations, um, something to measure gait, which is unique to each person. But we haven't actually seen any data on that, but we assume they're working on it somehow. To be honest, we haven't really seen much data on anything, but we haven't seen any videos of gait at all. So I'm, yeah. So two of the pushes behind FAST are not only, you know, actually getting this detection thing working, but also making sure it's FAST. Because we have polygraph machines. Polygraph machines are great. They're not incredibly accurate, but they do sort of work. But it takes an hour by a trained professional to run an exam. This thing is supposed to be like five minutes. It's supposed to be high throughput, so they could actually use it in portal settings. So you go into this trailer, and, you know, in the middle of an unmarked van or something.  And it looks a little like this. Try and refrain from moving. Now they're going to start asking her questions. Do you see that? I think she's blushing. So this is from, uh, we think, we're not sure, because again, none of this is really published well. This is from one of the only field studies of the test that they've done. So if you see that's the thermal camera video, um, I think that's heart rate. And as you can see, she failed the exam. So that's pretty much it. So if Hal doesn't like you, so contrary to that video, um, from everything we've seen, it seems that if Hal doesn't like you, you get to go through it again. Because, you know, we don't really trust computers all that much. So, right? You guys know all about this. So if Hal decides to have a glitch, you get a second chance. But if Hal doesn't like you again, you get a meeting with this guy. Do you see the glove? Notice the glove. It's important. And you get to go into this room and have a nice little conversation with him.  And it's wonderful. So we thought that all this stuff was really, really cool. So, um, did it get working? You don't know. Oh, brilliant. So theoretically we should have a demo around here, because we thought that flers, um, forward looking infrared cameras are cool. So we're going to show you guys how to, how little of a difference there is between someone who is lying and someone who isn't. And how much of a difference there is between someone who ran around the room multiple times and someone who isn't. Um, what? All right. So we'll get back to this in a little bit. Hopefully. So, that was the system, right? And the system sounds pretty great.  Oh, brilliant. Wonderful. Thank you very much, sir. Oh, or not. Huh. Okay. So, if you get this thing called fast work, it's pretty awesome. Because you do in fact have a very effective tool for deterring terrorist attacks. Because, well, you can maybe invent new ways to make bombs, but it's very hard to control the way your biometrics actually work. It's very hard to control these very fine things. This would theoretically be a full-force system if it worked. Now, uh, there is no, there's not really too much published stuff on this. So we don't know. Maybe these, the guys who are working on fast at Draper really do have it all working and it's awesome and like they're going to deploy it tomorrow and there will be no more terrorism. But, well, we, as we looked through, we found a few methodological shady points and we'd like to point them out. And so, one of the things that we found was that, what? So, one of the things we found was that the theoretical, the theoretical basis of fast was on interpersonal deception theory. That's supposed to be deception. And it was developed by, uh, Buller and Bergoon. Bergoon is the person who slides, we've, I've been showing you guys. And, well, the theory is, it's fairly complex. I can't really summarize all of it here because of psych theory. So it's like 18 different point, 18 different assumptions and this is how we work when we lie. And, uh, it's interesting. But, uh, there are a few little sketchy things about the papers in which it was presented. All the papers are called interpersonal deception theory, Roman numeral. So, and most of them referred to a study in which you have two people, uh, so you have an interrogator and you have, uh, a suspect. And the suspect first, and the interrogator first asks questions for which the answer is known and the suspect will answer truthfully. And then the suspect, and then the interrogator starts asking questions for which the suspect may or may not lie. And the interrogator knows which ones are definitely truthful and which ones aren't. And it's always in the, and the truthful ones and the non-truthful ones are always in the same order. So there are, the, this, uh, study may have trained the interrogators to see clues about lying that we're not actually there. It may, they may have started to guess things based on the order of the questions. Uh, a better criticism of it is in that paper, um, which if you're, if you're interested in it's quite nice, it's civil but it's, uh, the tone of the paper is something like, Burgun, you did really awesome work back in the day. What the heck? It's a little sad. Oh, so, um, there is this thing. So another assumption that the fast guys have been making is illustrated in this slide, which is also from Burgun's presentation, which is that you have, uh, you have people who are benign and people who are hostile and then the benign people are going to be in one set of internal states and the hostile are going to be in another set of internal states, which is fine. But the benign people are going to be something like calm or excited and maybe at worst agitated.  And so this is like, it's alright. It seems sort of reasonable. People who are going to be deceptive are going to be in a slightly different mental state. But the, and so this might maybe extend to lots of things like drug dealing or people trying to smuggle stuff through, but it won't necessarily extend to someone who is, uh, doing something for the glory of their country or their ideology or their God because you see, if you're about to do something that is, you know, you're almost your purpose in life. You're about to really fulfill yourself. There's no reason for you to be tense or fearful because you're going to be fairly calm. You're going, like if you've ever seen people who are about to do something really important, they're, they're, they're quite happy. They can be calm even if they're doing something incredibly dangerous. Uh, they, there are various studies that support this if you guys read into it. And you know, so you have these terrorists, they're about to blow their thumbs up and make themselves happy. They're about to get the ultimate prize. And that's, so that's a problem. Here's another problem. This is another slide and it's interesting because it's showing the way they've been constructing some of the studies. The mock theft experiment is in which is one of their stuff, is one of their experiments which we found some information on although no specific methodology on which you have people who steal something, people who don't and then they, they, they both try to say that they're innocent and they run through sets of detectors and you know, they see what happens. But one of the strange things is you see these words like two states, innocent and deceptive and actors in screening location scenarios. That's weird because that sounds like they're getting people to pretend to be innocent or guilty, to pretend to be relaxed or agitated or over controlled.  But in fact it seems like this is actually what they have been doing, as you can see. It's a little troublesome. Yeah, it's very early in the research but it looks very promising. I tried to contact John Verica but he never answered any of my emails. It was kind of unfortunate. So you have, so you know, we thought, we were trying to really think that like they can't, they can't be doing this. They've got to be doing tons of field tests. They've got to be designing their experiments as a way that people are actually, you know, lying and caring about it. But apparently we're in many experiments that has not been the case. If you see here, this is another slide, this is I think from the mock theft experiment. And you have the same guy in three different states. So the only way you would get something in that context is either if you're asking the same guy three different questions and he naturally tenses up like that. Or if you're telling the guy to pretend to be relaxed versus pretend to be controlled. Frankly, by the exaggeratedness of those positions, I think it's the latter. So that's another problem. And even Paul Ekman, the guy that you know, originally started SPOT and has been pushing through a lot of this, a lot of these ideas thinks that this is just a bad idea. Because it makes sense. If you're going to calibrate your instruments to detect something as fine as the difference between someone who's angry at their spouse and someone who's angry at America, you need to be doing really, really, really good research and calibrating your instruments to things that are actually relevant to that sort of question. So you know, we don't want to criticize entirely. We want to be a little constructive. So there are two things that they have to be, that they should be doing in their studies to actually make these sorts of studies meaningful. But first of all, the subject must be actually lying. They can't pretend to be someone evil. They have to actually lie about something. And the second part is that the subject must actually care about getting through. The subject must actually, there must be some sort of stake in the situation. Because if there's no stake, that's a very different situation from if there is a serious stake in getting through or not getting through. So these conditions are, it is non-trivial to replicate, to get them to work in the lab, in a psychology lab, but it is possible. You could get someone who strongly cares about some sort of political view or religiously or whatever to try to get through this series of screening in which they are pretending to believe the opposite. So I don't know, get an atheist to pretend to be religious and stick them through this thing, see what happens, see if it can tell whether they're lying or not. You can get someone who has issues that they personally care, things that say they're embarrassed about, like medical conditions to try to pretend that they don't have it. That's not directly the same situation, but that is closer than getting actors to pretend to be evil. You also could do field tests. They should be doing lots of field tests on all this. With field tests, what they could do is they could just, you know, you have a lot of people going through the airport, just have someone flash someone who's going through an FBI badge and say, hi would you like to participate in the study? Have a knife. You have to go through that door and say that you don't have a knife. It's okay, you won't get in trouble. I'm a real fed. And just go through. So that would be a very realistic situation because not only would the person be agitated, but the person would be trying to smuggle something through that they think is okay, but they're kind of not really sure about because you're still, you know, smuggling something through. So if they did lots of tests like that, and that sort of test, you know, you could, there's enough space in airports to stick a little trailer on the side, they might actually be, start getting some pretty good data. So, but those are all methodological criticisms. Those are all things you can fix with a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of money. There are other things that are fundamental to the problem of portals research and biometric state analysis that you can't really get around. So, to about 200 years ago, there was this guy named Thomas Bays. He was a priest. He's essentially the patron saint of statisticians. He came up with this thing, which you're seeing now probably on some, in some university math department, where given a few probabilities, you can figure out if one thing has happened, what's the chance of something else happening. So, because this is all math stuff and it doesn't actually mean anything, we thought to put it into a little bit more concrete terms. So, let's say worst case scenario, there's 100 terrorists in an airport of a million people. This is five times the number that were involved in the 9-11 operation. So, 0.01% of the total, or one ten-thousandth of the total, are in fact terrorists. So, if this is several years in the future, we have something called super fast, which is eventually, it can tell the difference between terrorists and non-terrorists 99% of the time. So, sounds pretty good, right? Sounds like we would catch almost all the terrorists. Unfortunately, not quite, because we would catch 99 terrorists and we would get through, because it's a 99% accuracy on that side. But then 9,999 normal people, non-terrorists, would also be said as terrorists. So, we'd catch over 10,000 people, only 99 of which would be terrorists. So, if the system says someone is a terrorist, there's actually a really low chance that it's true. There's actually a much, much greater chance that they're not a terrorist. And think, this is with 99%. We're nowhere near that right now. So, the issue with this is that you can't really rely on the data that this thing gives you until it actually has an incredibly low base rate, until it actually has an incredibly low false positive rate. It would sure, you know, help narrow things down. But nonetheless, because it takes up so much, I mean, it decreases its effectiveness compared to say normal humans or just lots of secondary screening. Furthermore, we don't even know the actual, you know, accuracy rate of this thing, because we've, in a paper, we saw 78%. We've seen everything up to 99%, although actually I spent all morning looking through for where that 99% is, and I have no idea where I saw that. I just remember it. But, because the thing is, they really haven't published anything at all. And that's kind of a problem. So, here's a study that they did. This is, I think, the only field test of this stuff that we heard of. They had 144 people who had no idea what was happening. Go through a fast scanner on the way to some sort of electronics expo. I'm not sure if the electronics expo was an actual expo or whether it was staged. I don't remember. But, you have these 144 people and they go through and 23 of them were given a disruptive device. That's all we know. And, yeah, that was the study. It was a field test. Does anyone see any interesting things about this? No? Yeah, him, that guy. Yeah, that's one thing. But another slightly different issue is just, you know, the sample sizes. You're, if you're going to implement this sort of biometric scanning system industrially and scan everyone with it, you need to be doing very large field tests on the very large numbers of people to make sure it actually works reliably. This sort of thing, it's not incredibly good. Because the thing is every human being is special in their own little way. I told you guys in grade school it's true.  They're working perfectly fine, but their heart beats a little faster. In fact, like that many times faster. And, you know, so I suppose someone is going through a fast scanner. All that happens. That might be something interesting. And there are lots of other things that produce such great massive changes in biometrics. Like, I mean, take fevers or hangovers or what else can you take? Like seriously almost any disease is going to change a lot of these things. It might not change things like pupil dilations, but what? Possibly. Yes, indeed. Yeah, actually, three cups of coffee might do that to you too. If you ever go to a French cafe, they serve you cappuccinos and bowls. So if you have three of those, yeah. So that's a problem. And that's not something you can really get around. Well, you can sort of, you can collect and store the biometrics of every single human being in the United States and then individually calibrate everything to everyone. Which would be nice. And you're probably going to have to do a big chunk of that anyway to get enough training data for the system to make sure it works reliably. But, and you know, then you'd have a nice little ID system for every person in the United States. Unfortunately, having the government having biometrics on all of you, especially very detailed ones like your heart rate and how fast, how much you sweat is not an incredibly popular decision at the time. So here's another thing. Do you know what these things are? Do you have any ideas? Yeah, Valium. Valium is a beta blocker. Valium makes you calmer and makes your base and makes your excited states go closer to a basal state. Well, that might help some people, wouldn't it? Lots of other drugs have these sorts of properties and they're not even incredibly legal. It's, you know, not actually a problem for someone to take some Valium before they go through. There have been cases of people who use Valium regularly to try to, you know, calm themselves down and make themselves less suspicious in other contexts. This is one that they could definitely use it in. So one question probably you're probably having, how can this much collection of information be legal? There's a thing called the Fourth Amendment. No unreasonable search and seizure. They need to be able to say, oh, I saw blood coming out of that guy's trunk. So we found this paper called the Gill Paper by Lindsay Gill, who was a law student at BU at the time, who wrote about this entire program and a lot of the analysis that we did was in rather better language in there. So the Fourth Amendment actually has a few exceptions. One of them is called the Plain View Doctrine and has like things you can see. One of them is the Administrative Search Exception, where it applies to everyone. So the Plain View Doctrine is basically everything you can smell, see, touch, without any particular equipment, something that anyone can do if they have the training, even the Sniffer Dogs count in this way. However, most people besides us don't have thermal cameras. Thus, it's still technically breaking into their house without a warrant. There was an interesting case in California where the cops did a huge drug bust of a giant pot farm and the way they found it was by getting very expensive infrared cameras and just seeing the heat of the hydroponics through the concrete. And so, you know, they busted them and the case went to court and the court completely threw out everything because they were like, this is not cool. These guys couldn't have bought this camera on the consumer market. So, you know, you think that TSA searches would also be illegal, right? Because not everyone can buy metal detectors and not everyone can buy giant X-ray machines. But there's this thing called the administrative search exception, which was originally invented, frankly, for people going into courthouses to be searched. And it pretty much says that if you know about the search beforehand and it's not too, too bad, it's all right. So, let me explain.  Yeah, it's nice. And then this guy just runs at you and he's like, stop! You terrorist! I'm going to search you. That's not cool. That's not a thing you're allowed to do.  That's all right. That's perfectly fine. The thing is you start getting a sketchy territory when you're getting more and more and more intrusive searches. Like how? Getting a little bit difficult here because, you know, you're collecting lots and lots of biometric information. And people care about that. People care about their health privacy. There are fairly strong privacy laws in here. And this thing is essentially a medical exam. So we're not even sure, like, exactly how they're going to store the data that they collect off you. Different spokespeople have claimed that they're going to take, they're going to, you know, erase all the data. But that can't be entirely true because, I mean, obviously if you get, like, arrested, they're going to keep your data. And if you, and at the very beginning when they're ramping up their project, they're going to have to collect a huge amount of data to make sure it works reliably on most people. And, yeah, that's a little bit iffy. But we're thinking, you know, so this is a privacy issue, right? This is pretty serious. But on the other hand, it could have also been a solution to our health care problems. Because you see, it's essentially a medical exam every time you go through the airport. That's not too bad.   Go to this doctor. That'd be pretty nice, I think. It's not too bad. I mean, I wouldn't mind, like, getting a throat checkup every time I went through. And if you're getting it to an incredible reliability thing, at that point, you're probably doing enough analysis to be able to get things like this. So, in the end, in our incredibly unprofessional opinion, we think that they could probably push fast through. Because most people are entirely okay with giving up security for at least, oh, sorry, giving up privacy for at least a semblance of security. But there are lots of interesting and fairly serious potential legal challenges that anyone with a crack team of lawyers could put up against the implementation of FAST. So, there's another interesting thing that we found while we were looking, which is that the Israelis are doing the same thing, but privately. This is a company called Suspect Detection Systems, or SDS, which is essentially made entirely of ex-MASA agents. And they're making that booth, which is called Cogito. It's like FAST, but it's smaller and more portable.  It listens to your voice. It's like a hand in the scanner the whole time. And it's like taking pulse and temperature. And it's entirely automated. It's another product that's trying to do the same thing. They claim on their website that they have a 4% FAST positive rate. We've seen everything between 4 and 8.  Like this whole thing, all this, you know, reading people's minds by biometrics and all this incredibly interesting analysis could be, could very well be, very valuable research to the scientific community. People, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, I'm interested in having a scanner that tells how, what people think. That's pretty cool. I'm interested in how the heck they pull that off. I want to know that, you know, the research behind that is reliable before we stick one into every airport. And yet there really hasn't been very much published about all this. Kind of unfortunate. It would be nice if the guys from Draper published all this. Just like a paper or two saying, hey, yeah, we ran this study. This is how we ran it. This is not exactly how our algorithms work, but this is at least the things that we look for. And so other people could test it out and see, hey, yes, indeed, this program works. And then this would be fine because at the moment, you know, if you're an outsider and you're doing research on it all, it seems a little sketchy. That's a problem. So fast. It was fun doing research on everything. And it took a while. It was an exciting time. We discovered a lot of stuff in the end. Like, we honestly just really want to know what the heck they're doing with this thing because they're not being very public about it. And so before we ended, we wanted to end the presentation on a lighter note because there was this, well, as we were, well, there was this trailer that they had for the FAST program. Like, not a trailer like the FAST trailer, but like a literal, almost like a movie trailer. And it was a little weird because it seemed like people, well, how do I say this? It seemed like the, you know, we know where they're doing this at Draper, but it also seemed like they might be doing this in another research laboratory that we follow very closely. So here it is. Inside the screening mobile module, a suite of real-time non-invasive sensors measure the individual and physiological indications of malintent or the intent or desire to cause harm. Fact. The key to any successful cooperative test is trust. And as our data clearly shows, humans cannot be trusted. The track on the walls, ceiling and floors provide a secure and easily reconfigurable means of installing equipment throughout the screening unit. I give you panels, the planks of tomorrow. Only configure... The unique low-floor trailer design ensures accessibility for all. They're equal opportunity. So now, pay attention to this part. You might find this one interesting. It can be wirelessly networked to a single command module. That might be an interesting thing to look into. Then we box them up and ship them straight to your doorstep so you can protect the things that matter most. Good night. Hey, Johnson, we're done here. Thank you. What? Oh, wonderful. So our demo is actually going to work now, we think. This is going to be cool. So we'd like three volunteers, one of which is willing to run around the thing one or two times. No, no one. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. Come up. So let me find Josh, where do you have the water bottle? I didn't put... So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give one of them an object. Like, we're going to give them a water bottle and pretend it's nitroglycer and unfortunately, we can't find it. So I'm going to give one of them a pen. Pretend this pen is dangerous. All right, this pen is a dangerous weapon. I can stab your eye out with it. What? So one of them is going to... So first of all, I'd like one of you, whichever one is willing, to just run around a few times. All right, yeah, sure. Just run around a few times. That's all right. This is fine, guys. So now these two are going to come up and I'm going to give one of them this pen. None of you guys are going to know which one it is, but they will. And then we're going to go film them and I'm going to be the TSA agent asking them questions. That infrared camera, which apparently is going to work, is going to show you guys heat maps of their faces. You're going to see just how little of a difference there is between the ones that are lying and the ones that aren't about having a pen. So can you guys come over here? We're going to do this behind the table because the table is black and you can't see through black. Well, I can with my camera. I was asking you to write a few laps, not one. I mean, it's healthy. Come on, guys. This is DEF CON. We're not really being healthy at the moment. Health is good. So one of these guys, or girls, has the pen. Sorry. Did I ask you to come? I only needed two volunteers in that third one. I apologize. I may have made myself a little unclear. I'm sorry. I feel really bad. All right. You can sit up too. One of these three volunteers is a pen. The other one does not. I'm more realistic because there are a few terrorists. So can you guys all come up?  Yeah. Go up there. Is it? No? Come on, Josh. Seriously?  What's up? All right. I'm going to distract you guys for a bit.  Let's see. So, hmm. There were definitely, Jesus, Josh, what are you doing? Oh, really. All right. So there are a few things that were amusing. I'm going to distract you guys. I'm going to distract you guys. I'm going to distract you guys. I'm going to distract you guys. I'm going to distract you guys. I'm going to distract you guys. So I thought we're amusing. Like the fact that Fox News was one of the guys that did the best coverage of FAST. It was really weird. They were one of the few guys that mentioned the study or the actual field study. They're one of the few guys that... dude, I don't have the software for this. Fine. I blame everything on him. All right. What's up? I'm going to keep talking. So Fox News did this really awesome coverage. That was the place where I think all the copies of the trailer got up online. That was the place where you had the study. Wow, this is interesting.  That's really cool. I like this. So what else was there that was interesting? I think the single, I think there were at least 20 videos on YouTube comparing it to minority report, but we didn't really realize that until we had the idea ourselves. Very original with that. Also, yeah, I told you. All right. So another thing that was interesting. Fox asked us to pay them $1,000 a minute of trailer to show this, to show you guys the trailer. So, I mean, it was probably fair use, but we were like, screw it. Fox is much easier to contact for copyright claims than Valve is because Valve doesn't respond to anything. Well, Fox, you just call up News Corp's communications guy and he calls you back in five minutes saying, yeah, sure, send an email to these guys.  No, you can't use it even though you're not making any money. What else was there? I was going to use a camera that I borrowed from MIT, but it was like from 1999 and that turned out to be a problem. It was also much bigger than this one. It was like this big. What's up? Oh, yeah. So this is intense hacking right here. If this doesn't work, if anyone wants to come see us at the Q&A room, we'll show you guys the camera and at least we'll show you guys how cool it is and we'll actually do a demo with a screen this big. That's the big problem with screens. They're just not big enough. Oh, man. Keep talking. All right. So has anyone thought of anything else? Oh, yeah, questions. Why should you talk to them? Well, I mean, you don't have to talk to them. This thing doesn't have to talk to you either. It just scans you and says you're evil. Are you really actually not legally allowed to talk to TSA? That's really cool. Not required. I mean, yes, not required. That is a difference indeed. Yeah. So that's the whole thing. The administrative search exception is pretty much they're allowed to bar you from doing things and the government can force you to do things if you know about it ahead of time, even if it violates things like the Fourth Amendment. And they're not too horrible. Anyone else? Yes. Oh, man. Actually, I don't think they'd be very, oh, it depends on how big the beard is. Like, if it covers this part, if it covers your cheeks, at which point, I think you need to shave. It might be pretty effective. If it's just, yes? Can they go sit down?  You guys can go sit down. Yeah, as long as you come to the speaker room afterwards so we can show some people pretty pictures of infrared things. All right. There's any one more question that I can answer here? Yes. Die. All right. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.


a double dip of daily fantasy delight this weekend in Pocono for the NASCAR Cup Series. A couple of races lined up for Pocono, the Pocono Organics CBD325 on Saturday and the Explore the Pocono Mountain 350 on Sunday. We're gonna start break down both races from a DFS perspective, get you set from a strategy perspective and let you know my favorite drivers for Saturday's race to get you keyed up for what should be an exciting weekend for the NASCAR Cup Series. Welcome on into the heat check fantasy podcast powered by Number Fire. That's right here on the FanDuel Podcast Network in NumberFire.com. My name is Jim Sonnis. I am a senior writer and analyst for NumberFire.com. Here to break down the Pocono double header this weekend from a NASCAR DFS perspective based on the rules and salary over at FanDuel.com. Lock for the Saturday race is at 3 p.m. Eastern on Saturday and lock on Sunday is at 3.30 p.m. Eastern. So we have the ability to fill out lineups now for the Saturday race. Sunday race we can't do until the Saturday race is complete. You could technically do it, but you shouldn't if you wanna fill out good lineups. But you'll have between the end of the race Saturday and 3.30 Sunday to fill out lineups because the finishing order on Saturday will tell us where everyone starts on Sunday. So what we'll do for today for the podcast is I will run through a strategy for both races first. Then I will go through my tier by tier breakdown for the first race after that. If you're listening to this on Sunday and you don't have a Saturday race there, I'll put the timestamp for when the Sunday analysis begins in the track breakdown part in the description up on NumberFire.com. So if you're listening after the Saturday race go to NumberFire.com, check out the podcast post or also I guess in the description on the podcast, on Apple or Spotify. Check out the timestamp there. Go to the strategy section for Sunday. We'll talk about what to look for there. I'm not gonna be able to rank drivers for that race because it depends a lot on where drivers start. It also depends on what they do during the Saturday race. So can't do driver breakdown there but can give you strategy to let you know who, what you should do for that race. So whole lot of stuff to go down for today but also a lot of stuff here on the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed. We have Austin Swain's UFC Vegas 30 podcast posted getting you set for the Saturday card, a 13 fight card he broke down, the five round main event but also all of his favorite plays in each salary tier over on FanDuel that is already posted as is the MLB DFS solo shot for the Friday slate. Check those out by searching for the NumberFire Daily Fantasy podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear leave us a rating and review as well. Hey soccer fans, this season FanDuel and Captain Morgan are teaming up to give you a one of a kind soccer contest. Introducing Captain Morgan's soccer pick-up, a weekly fantasy contest that is entirely free to play. The contest is simple, all you have to do is make quick predictions for Saturday games this soccer season. You'll earn free points or earn points for each correct pick and compete for a chance to win with the $3,000 in prizes every single week. Head over to FanDuel and enter the Captain Morgan's soccer pick-up today. Must be 21 plus to participate for more details as a FanDuel.com or download the FanDuel Fantasy app. Eligibility restrictions apply and don't forget to make your game day more delicious and sub in the Captain. Let's talk about the track breakdown for this week and we'll start things off with Saturday, then go to Sunday. And the good thing is we got a good template of what to expect this weekend because they did run five double headers last year. So we know how to handle the second race which we'll run through in just a bit. The first race will feel similar to what we've done at road courses. That's where we find an assumed winner in tournaments but accept place differential where we can find it. The reasoning for that is that the race is similar to a road course in length. It is 130 laps, which means there are 13.0 points available on FanDuel for lap sled. That leads to reduced upside for drivers starting at the front of the pack. So we have an incentive to look for drivers starting deeper who can get place differential points. And for this specific race, we do have drivers who can get us that. Of the top nine drivers in aggregate average running position in the 550 horsepower package this year, four will start 15th or lower, two of them are outside the top 25. Two more drivers outside the top 20, starting outside the top 20, rank in the top 14 in aggregate average running position in this package. So we have drivers who should have speed starting further back on Saturday and that's what we want here. And those are the guys, those drivers in position to get place differential are the drivers we want for cash games and they are our core plays for tournaments as well. That doesn't mean you need to ignore the front because we always call this the assumption game for tournaments where you pick an assumed winner, the driver you think will win, probably Kyle Larson. And you lock them in no matter where they are starting because if they get you 43 points for a win, they're probably gonna be in the perfect lineup. I think there's been like one race since Fandals started offering stuff where the winning driver was not in the perfect lineup. I think it was like a restrictor plate or I guess pack racing race where there was a bunch of place differential, they're gonna be in there. It allows you to stack the back without passing up Kyle Larson, who is phenomenal. So you do wanna pick an assumed winner for tournaments at times. And Larson, not the only guy who can win there, he's just the most likely winner and the most obvious one. So using him as an example, but the overall thought process of picking an assumed winner is in play once again for this week. That's what we should want for Saturday. Get an assumed winner for tournaments and then accept place differential where you can find it outside of that, both for cash games and for your core for tournaments. For Sunday, it's the same where you do wanna accept place differential where it is available to you. It's just going to be available all over the place. They're gonna invert the top 20 finishers. So the winner on Saturday will start 20th. The driver who finishes second will start 19th. That means we are going to have drivers who we know have massive speed in the middle of the pack. And it's an amazing opportunity for DFS that we have to exploit. As mentioned, we have five double headers to look at from last year. And it means we have five races to look at with an invert. There were 25 drivers in perfect lineups across those five races. 21 of those 25 drivers started the race 14th or lower. That is so perfect. The ideal strategy that we want here for this race worked out with no flaws last year. You want to build around drivers starting in the middle of the pack or lower and make them your core, both for cash games and for tournaments. I mentioned they're 14th or lower. That part is relevant because drivers who finish outside of the top 20 on Saturday will start outside the top 20 on Sunday. And those drivers were often part of those perfect lineups. 11 of the 21 drivers who started outside the top 14 started behind the inverse. So finish 21st or worse in the first race. So despite having some sort of issue on Saturday, they paid off on Sunday. This increases the value of watching Saturday's race if you can. You want to identify drivers who may have finished poorly due to issues rather than speed, you know, bad stop, loose wheel, speeding penalty, stuff like that. You want to find drivers who finish better than their speed said they should have. If they finish poorly because they were slow, they'll probably be slow on Sunday too because drivers will use the same car unless they crash. But if you can buy low on someone who finished poorly due to circumstances outside of their control, take advantage and load up on them for the Sunday race. It is worth noting that a driver starting inside the top 10 did make four out of the five perfect lineups, but it was always just one driver inside the top 10. And that driver actually had a salary of $9,300 or lower each time. So it's weirdly the opposite of what you might expect. My guess is that it's guys who had decent speed who can maintain track position once they get it. You know, guys like Austin Dillon, Matti Benedetto, maybe not like the most efficient passers, but guys who can, they've got speed and they can keep it if you give it to them. So I am okay getting sprinkles of drivers you think might be able to hold their own starting up at the front, even for Sunday's race. But it's just one per lineup, just for tournaments. Your core for cash games and your core for tournaments should be leaning heavily on those drivers starting further back. As far as data to emphasize, for Sunday, lean heavily on what you saw on Saturday because again, the same cars, they're gonna be pretty similar to what we saw in that first race. But outside of that, I am just going to go all in on speed in the 550 horsepower package. We don't have any relevant races to look at from this year at big, fast tracks. So basically just want guys the speed. And if you look at the 550 package so far this year, that's gonna tell you who has been fast. If you look back at last year's races of Pocono, it's gonna feel kind of weird because, you know, like Kevin Harvick-Ranwell, he's been underwhelming to be generous in the 550 package this year as teammates have been pretty hideous, I would say. So I think it's important to put more emphasis on current form in the 550 package than track history, history at Indie, et cetera, et cetera, because things have changed a lot over the past calendar year. We'll talk plenty about drivers who fit that mold well in the tier by tier breakdown. So for Saturday, find an assumed winner, get place differential where you can find it. For Sunday, stack the middle and the back of the pack and get guys can get you place differential, maybe get sprinkles with someone up front who can maintain track position, but overall our core will be place differential outlets for both races, frankly. And we should have outlets available to us for both. So that is a reassuring feeling. So that is strategy for this race. Let's move now to the tier by tier breakdown for the Sunday race, again, or the Saturday race. Again, I'm focusing just on Saturday here because it will change a lot based on starting order for Sunday. So if you're listening to this on Sunday, you can listen for some thoughts, but it's not gonna be super concrete analysis and advice just because it does depend so much on what we see on Saturday and where drivers start. But for Saturday, the elite tier is Kyle Larson at $14,500 through Martin Truex Jr. at $12,500. Larson is the obvious assumed winner for race number one. He is starting the poll. He is at 19% in my win simulations to win and that's probably too low. Only one other driver though as win odds above 10%. Larson has had a top five average running position in all five relevant races so far this year. And he's always been good on big fast tracks, usually Michigan, but like that translates here as well. I have no reason to push back on Larson outside of where he's starting this race, which is on the pole. So Larson, you know, just do it. I think that from an assumed winner perspective, he can be your guy for sure. With that said, Denny Hamlin is a decent pivot. He is starting back in 10th, which means he has a tiny bit of place differential juice and he is awesome at Pocono. Six time winner here. He has won two out of four races in the 550 horsepower package at Pocono. He was runner up in another and he's been good, if not not great in the 550 package so far this year. So I think that if you're looking for a pivot off of Larson, Hamlin maybe that guy, we'll talk about one more guy in the second tier could be that guy. But Hamlin interesting as an assumed winner at $13,500. I'm gonna put Kyle Busch ahead of Martin Truex Jr. Despite the fact Busch is starting 10 spots higher. Busch has just been better than Truex in the 550 package. So even though Truex is starting 15th, I'm not as high on him as I expected to be entering this week. Just I haven't seen enough from him in the 550 package to be super enthused. So I'm gonna rank this tier Larson one, Hamlin two, Kyle Busch three, Martin Truex Jr. four. And again, that could change based on what we see during the Saturday race. The second tier is Kevin Harvick at $12,000 through Joey Logano at $10,000. There are two guys in this tier starting super deep in the pack who you wanna build around. Those guys are Chase Elliott and Ryan Planey. Elliott is starting back in 29th. He got disqualified last week, which is why he's starting so low. But grades out well, he finished fourth in the second Pocono race last year. He enters with two straight top five finishes in this package and he was also runner up in Charlotte. So really good form for Chase. I love him here at $11,000. Planey is a former Pocono winner. Did that back in 2017. He has not finished top five cents, but he has been good enough in this package for me to have a lot of confidence in him. He won in Atlanta. He had a top eight average running position in both Vegas and Kansas. Planey is 10-3, starting back in 27. Between these two guys, I would rank Elliott higher, but I want a lot of both often in the same lineup. And I think that for cash games, you plug in Chase, plug in Blaney, then go from there. They are the top two guys of any salary for Saturday's race. Brad Keselowski is starting 18th. I would also mention him as a place differential guy. He has been better in this package than the 750 package this year, which is the inverse of his teammate, Joey Logano. I feel like they've done it where Keselowski is all out for 550. Logano is all out for 750, and then Blaney's kind of like the hybrid guy. It seems like that's the way Penske broke this year. I'm not sure if it was intentional or if I'm just reading too much into it, but it kind of feels like that's the way they've broken for this year. I'd also mentioned William Byron as a potential assumed winner at 11-5. He gets the access to Hendrick at just 11-5, race winning upside. So if you're looking for pivots off of Larson, I think that Hamlin and Byron are the top two guys I would turn to to potentially do that. I would rank this second tier, Chase Elliott-1, Ryan Blaney-2, Brad Keselowski-3, William Byron-4, Kevin Harvick-5, and Joey Logano-6. Harvick's been better, but just the speed and the 550 package, not quite there enough for me to get super enthused about him. The mid-range is Alex Bowman at $9,500. They're Matt DiBenedetto at $8,200. Bowman, Tyler Redick, and DiBenedetto are all starting 13th or lower for the Saturday race.  I am pretty intrigued by Redick. It's not a track you'd usually associate with him. So it's not like a situation where I feel like Redick is gonna benefit from it, but he's gonna have speed because he had a top 10 average running position in both Kansas and Charlotte. Both those tracks are multi-group tracks, but RCR cars have speed and they typically have really good pit strategy, which is a plus here. So Redick, despite not being a track you would associate with him, I think he's interesting for this week. DiBenedetto is starting 21st. He ran really well in this track type last year, both in Pocono and in Indy. He has been good enough in the package this year for me to like him. So I'd rank him a smidge ahead of Redick and a smidge ahead of Bowman, but I'd rank this tier DiBenedetto one. I would go Redick two by a hair over Bowman, but all three, definitely interesting. Christopher Bell four, Kurt Busch five. I'm a bit skeptical of Bush's raw speed for this week, which is why I'm okay being a bit lower on him. The value tier is Austin Dillon at $8,000 through Ross Chastain at $6,000. Chris Buscher starting 25th in this tier and I like what he could do from that spot. He is technically a former Pocono winner that happened because of a well-time rainstorm. So don't count that in his favor, but what does count in his favor is his performance in the 550 package so far this year. Buscher ranks 13th in aggregate average running position across the five races. He had top 10 marks in both Homestead and Atlanta. Those tracks both have a lot of tire wear. Pocono does not. So it's not like a super great track to look at, but I do think Buscher will run well here because of the speed Roush Family Racing has had at the 550 package so far this year. I wanna try to be overweight on Austin Dillon. He's starting in 12th, so doesn't quite fit the place differential mold, but he's got speed. He ranks 10th in aggregate average running position in the 550 package that's ahead of Kevin Harvick and Joey Logano. That may seem odd. Maybe it'll make it seem like the idea of putting weight on that is flawed, but I think it makes sense. He also has the best ranking in that metric above anyone with a salary under $9,500. He is $8,000. So I think that Dillon will be a good contrarian pick to pivot among the value plays. I have wood for cash gains, favorite Di Benedetto and Buscher, but I think that Dillon is someone I wanna try to be overweight on for tournaments because I think the speed should be good for him on Saturday. I'll rank this tier, Buscher won Dillon two, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. three, Ross Chastain four, Eric Jones five and Eric Amarola six. I have not seen enough in the 550 package out of either Eric, Eric Jones or Eric Amarola to like them even though they're starting outside the top 10. So I'd rather take Swipes and Stenhouse, Dillon, Chastain than load up on either Eric, just because I don't think the speed necessarily will be there for them for this week. The punting tier is Daniel Suarez at $5,800 on down. And honestly looking at this year, it's not great. There's nobody here I'm super jazzed about. I want to be more balanced in order to avoid this tier. But three guys I am willing to consider are Daniel Suarez, Ryan Newman and Bubba Wallace. Suarez is mostly based on strategy. His crew chief Travis Mack knows that this team is not fast kudos to him for having some self-awareness. So he does some quirky stuff to get track position and it can work. So with strategy mattering more in Pocono than other places, I think that Suarez actually is kind of interesting. I'll take Swipes, he's starting 14th and not like a place differential guy, but I'll take Swipes in tournaments. He also does have RCR power. Talked about liking Redick and Dylan that should apply to Suarez as well. Newman occasionally has speed in the 550 package. He finished seventh in Homestead. He was 13th in Atlanta. He's $5,300 and starting 19th. It's not inspiring, but it can work. So I guess I'm okay with Newman down there. And Wallace is pretty similar to Newman where he has occasional speed in this package. He ran well in Charlotte. It's another track with low tire wear which could bode well for him. Bubba's run well at Indianapolis in the past though. That was with RPM and they had an affiliation with RCR. So we talked about Dylan and Redick, Suarez having speed. Wallace benefited from that speed last year and is not with that team anymore. So I would say that nobody in the punting tier is like worthy of core consideration. You wanna be above this for your core but sprinkles of Suarez Newman Wallace as potentially being low exposure plays for tournaments who can get you wiggle room to get back up in the upper range more often. Let's finish up here at Picks to Win. Last year I did Picks to Win for both Saturday and Sunday. Kinda doesn't matter what order they're in but let's do it anyway. Definitively winning Saturday. Kyle Larson and Alex Bowman. If we do one above 10,001 below it I'm pretty sure Bowman's been the pick below 10,000 like every race this year when Byron hasn't been down there. So why not we'll run it back. Larson and Bowman the Picks for Saturday. For Sunday, we'll go Hamlin above those at $10,000 or higher just because I think the speed should be good. Knows how to get around this place. Knows how to pass at Pocono. We'll take it. And then the guy below $10,000. I kinda wanna have some fun with this one because like again Bowman is the one who's highest in my win simulations followed by it looks like Reddick and then D-Benedetto, Busher. But let's have some fun. Let's pick Ricky Stenhouse Jr. He's at the speed this year. And if you give him track position on Sunday he might be able to hold it. So we'll go Hamlin and Stenhouse on Sunday. Larson and Bowman on Saturday as our picks to win for the Pocono double header. That is all the time that we have here for today should be a fun weekend. Getting two NASCAR Slates in one weekend gonna be a blast. I'm looking forward to Sunday especially because again we don't get chances where we have clear place differential outlets in a race where we want place differential that often. So to me these second races double headers are one of the best plus EV races we have the entire year for NASCAR and it's the only one we have for this year. So looking forward to filling out lineups for that one. If you have questions for me on Twitter I am at Jim Sonnis, J-I-M-S-A-N-N-E-S you can also follow the FanDuel Podcast Network at FanDuel Podcast reminder once again to check out Austin Swain's UFC podcast for UFC Vegas 30 that is posted now. Also the solo shot up for the Friday Slate. Find that by searching for the Number Fire Daily Fantasy Podcast feed on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts. No matter where you get your podcasts you can find us. Big thank you to everyone for tuning in. Good luck to you both on Saturday and on Sunday. We'll talk to you once again next week. This has been the Heat Check Fantasy Podcast powered by Number Fire.


Hey weirdos, welcome to another episode of Behind the Microphone where I share something that happens to me during my voiceover day that you don't normally see on YouTube. And today I was doing a spot for a grocery store, and well the grocery store requires that the section that I've voiced be exactly 15 seconds. And usually I can hit that pretty close because the scripts stay right, you know, take that into consideration. Sometimes I'll have to go in there and digitally remove a breath or two, or maybe digitally squeeze or expand it. I actually have a program that'll do that, Adobe Audition, where I can actually force something to be a certain length. And you know, sometimes it doesn't sound all that great. Well today I made the mistake of typing in the wrong number. When I tried to type in 15 seconds, I accidentally typed in 15 minutes. And so I squeezed it to sound like this. And actually the system couldn't handle 15 minutes. It actually squeezed it to only two minutes. That was as far as it could squeeze it. It just said 15, no I give up, again made it two. Good thing I didn't send this to the client before listening to it again. That would have been awkward.