Welcome to Barbell Logic, Rewind. We're talking about the stress recovery adaptation cycle. We revisited that, right? And we were talking about how the stress has to increase, but we have an ongoing problem with recovering. As the stress goes up, the problem with recovery becomes harder to deal with or can't become harder to deal with. And I'm trying to come up with a way to think about the components of programming, the tools that we have when we do programming that can help us deal with those challenges. So when we're dealing with this challenge of recovering from the stress, which we need more and more and more of over time, when we program, there's some stuff we can do, right? We can add weight to the bar. We can take weight off of the bar. We can increase frequency. We can decrease frequency. We can increase the number of sets. We can increase the number of reps. We can decrease all of those things. There are really only about four things that we can do. And then there's a fifth one, maybe, which would be exercise selection. But there are really only four or five things that we can do. And then each of those has a positive or a negative, right? Add weight to the bar, take weight off the bar. Right, so we can manipulate intensity up or down. Up or down, right? To increase stress or decrease stress. And we can manipulate volume up or down to increase stress or decrease stress. One of the things I wanna talk about, maybe to have a completely separate podcast episode on, is that I believe that frequency is clearly a function of volume. It's one of the ways we manipulate volume, right? It is a manipulator of volume. Yes, increased frequency decreases. You can increase volume by increasing frequency. You can also decrease volume by decreasing frequency. Just like we go from a three-day, squats three days a week to a four-day split, increases the frequency of number of workouts per week, but decreases the frequency, and thus the volume of the squad itself. So is recovery then actually an aspect of volume, right? Like you can't actively, despite what CrossFit says, you can't actively recover. It's only like the absence of work, right? Yeah, so right. So you can't program recovery is what I'm saying. The only thing that's actually recovery is food and sleep. Right. The rest of it is actually managing fatigue, right? So I don't like to think about, it's not wrong, but it doesn't work quite as clean in my head, to think about manipulating training variables for either stress or recovery. I think what we're doing is we're manipulating training variables to increase the stress and potentially increase the fatigue. So do you think that increasing fatigue then is like it's a good thing to do, from time to time? If the stress isn't great enough to cause an adaptation, if there is no fatigue, the stress wasn't great enough to cause an adaptation, right? Well, in LP, there's clearly fatigue.  And then you rest and then you come back and the fatigue's mostly gone. It's 92% gone and you're able to do it again. Sure, wouldn't that be the ideal situation if we could undergo the stress, endure the fatigue, have that dissipate, and then move on with your life forever? Wouldn't that be the ideal situation? It would, except for the only way to do that, we've talked about this before, is that you could theoretically, you get to the point where in LP, as we talked about before, your workout you do on Monday, you come back on Wednesday and you're probably pretty much completely recovered on Wednesday, and then pretty much completely recovered on Friday, but four weeks in and six weeks in and eight weeks in, there's obviously still some fatigue left over from the workout you had two days before, and when you get to the end of LP, there's tons of fatigue, right? You're still very fatigued from it. So at that point, theoretically, you could just keep spreading out your workouts. We've talked about this before, instead of training every 48 to 72 hours, you could go to every 72 to 96 hours. And then you could train once every five days and you could train once every six days and once every seven. And if it was just an issue of stress and then recover and adapt and it was clean, then you could just keep doing that forever. You could just have a really giant dose of stress one day, rest for two weeks, come back and have a bigger dose of stress two weeks later and or show that you made progress, but we know that doesn't actually happen. And so that's why I think that stress recovery adaptation, as I said in the previous programming podcast, is not wrong. Stress recovery adaptation is a simple way of looking at things. And it's generally correct, but because we have to expose the body to multiple bouts of stress in order to make progress long-term, then this simple idea of we stress and then we recover and then we adapt is just too simple for intermediate and advanced programming. Collectively, it's still right. I mean, you still have this period, especially if you're preparing for, say, a powerlifting meet where all of that stress leading up to a powerlifting meet was the stress, was this overload, and then you get to sort of this peaking period that's last two, three weeks before the meet where you try to dissipate the vast majority of fatigue without detraining, right?  That's what you're doing. But ultimately, I think that all of this stuff is really fatigue is one of the things that occurs. That's why I think I mentioned this last time that the fitness fatigue model is probably closer. It's at least a slightly more complicated view of stress recovery adaptation, but that a bout of stress that occurs, like when we train in the gym, leaves us with sort of two outcomes. We get both an increase in the adaptive response, the for us strength, get stronger, but we also get more fatigued and those things are constantly at war with each other. And if the fatigue goes up too much, then even though the stress was enough to drive a strength adaptation, we can't actually perform that strength adaptation. We can't show that that performance is there because there's too much fatigue left behind. And so we're constantly trying to manage an intermediate and advanced programming, we're managing both the stress and the amount of fatigue. And that amount of fatigue that we're managing, the way we do that is with recovery. So the recovery is the word that we use, but it's really this combination of sleep and food for recovery and periods of reduced stress in order to allow fatigue to dissipate. When we have too much fatigue, that's the overreach that we don't want, right? Well, I don't actually, I think that sometimes you do want it. I think that an overreach state is okay. You can just get to the point where if you overreach for too long, then you actually get need to, right? And that's when you get kind of overtraining, right? Now I do think that it's tough to over train. I certainly think it's possible. Yeah, very few people are gonna do that, I think. Yeah, for older guys, they can do it, you know, but it's weird. I think that often overtraining for older populations is probably occurs more, at least at a sort of a physiological and acute level in things like joints and things like muscles, right?  It's not that their muscles are truly overtrained. Yeah, my shoulders quit before the rest of me does. Right. Yeah, and so parts of me overtrain. So do you program then for late intermediate or early advanced? I know you wouldn't say this, well, I think that you wouldn't say this for an early intermediate. Do you actually program to put that person at a certain level of fatigue? Are you seeking that? You are seeking that. Of course, I'm trying to drive up fatigue. That's what a loading period is, right? It's loading and deloading. Now, for early intermediate, late novice, early intermediate, I would never plan for that necessarily. That's not something I'm planning for. But for an advanced lifter, like, sure, we're trying to plan for periods of loading and then we actually have periods of deloading. Now, what I've changed about in my... Hang on, let me stop there. So are you actually, we've been talking about heuristics, is talking about fatigue a way of talking about how you program?  You know what I'm saying? Is fatigue a measure of how much stress they've gotten? Or you actually dig it, right? You could say, oh, okay, he's fatigued. His bar speed has slowed. His first rep of his set on the next training day shows that he has fatigue. Is that something that you're seeking that fatigue? Or is it just something that you use as a measure to say, okay, the stress was enough? Yeah, probably that. Especially going into a meet for something that's competitive. When they're six weeks out, five weeks out, I want them fatigued. They're hating it. I actually want that, right? Because I know their body, and I want them enough fatigue that I don't want too much, but I want them enough fatigue that their body can recover and adapt during that peaking period. And so, obviously, if it's just an enormous amount of fatigue, we're looking for... The problem with that is you could just fatigue the hell out of somebody. Yeah, you could just take care of them. I mean, that's the part of the work to make you do whatever. And so it's super fatiguing. But what we're really trying to do is, again, because of that specificity principle, because we know that it has to be heavy to get stronger. If the goal is to get stronger, we've got to keep getting heavier. But I can't just load them up as heavy as I can, just to fatigue them as much as possible and let them think I'm stronger, either. There's still... We know that there's sort of this incremental increase that has to occur over the stress, in the stress for the period, right? And of course, we've talked about this in the past, that that period for novice is a very small period, right? It's just two, three days. And for an intermediate, it's longer and for an advanced lifter, it's even longer than that. But what I'm trying to do is I'm just trying to constantly manage that level of both stress, to increase stress over the course of the overload period and moderate fatigue so that the fatigue is enough to drive the adaptation. It's enough to disrupt homeostasis to drive the adaptation without driving them into the ground. But also if there's not enough fatigue, right?  This is where I've changed in my programming on an actual practical level. I used to, we talked about how we're not big fans of templates, of eight week, 10 week, 12 week templates for even advanced lifters, but that we would often still use those templates and try to kind of tweak them to the person. But the thing that we tried to bring to the table, especially at online coaching, is that we still watch your videos every single day and break down your videos. And I've actually gotten completely away from the templates over the last six months. And part of it is because, let me explain, because there's a caveat there. I know what block training looks like. And I know what DUP looks like. I know what it's supposed to look like. I know what it's supposed to feel like. I know what the bar speed is supposed to be. And the problem that you get when you lay out a program that's a percentage-based program, which all advanced program templates are, they have to be, right? In order to work from one person to the next, it can't be pre-programmed with weights. It has to be programmed with percentages of one rep max. So there's several problems with that. But one is that thinking that you can operate and that the level of the stress event would be the same for the same percentage of press as it is for squat or deadlift is just not the same. That's not the case, right? Yeah, the deadlift is almost always a lower percentage than the others. That's right. Now, good programming templates account for that. And they'll often have you bench press and press with a higher percentage for even equal volume than you would on the lower body lifts. But still the person that my client that I'm looking at, I would rather watch them on a week-by-week basis and program for them one week at a time. So if they're in, say, an accumulation phase or a transfutation phase and they're in that general realm and I'm programming Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday for them and then I'm watching and I'm going, well, I know they can go up 10 more pounds on squat, but they can only go up five more pounds on deadlift, deadlift is hard. And the fatigue is starting to get there and they're back on the deadlift, right? Or vice versa or whatever. And so what you'll see is that people will make progress and fatigue differently on different lifts. And when you take a template, you're sort of pre-gambling on how much fatigue is gonna be there. That's why a lot of these templates have written in sort of three weeks of loading and a one-week deload. I don't pre-plan deloads ever anymore. I just give them when needed. When the person is just like, you know, workout after workout, they go three, four, five workouts in a row and they're just like an entire week, let's say, where they're just slow and they're struggling to hit their lifts and then I know that fatigue is too high and I've got to back off the fatigue. I've got to get fatigue to dissipate some. And so there's lots of ways to do that, although I actually think that we generally, at this point, most people agree in strength training, even people who would tend to disagree with us about how we program. I think most of us deload is similar way. Most of us stay pretty damn heavy and we just reduce the volume to reduce the amount of fatigue. And so the intensity may still come down two or three or 5%, but the volume is often cut sometimes in half. Yeah, in order to, and of course that depends on the person. So that's just, you know, don't take that as a true standard, but that's what we do. So again, what I'm doing here is I think it's wrong to look at recovery as ways that we can manipulate training variables. The quietness says that evil is just, it's not an active thing. It's an absence of the good. Right. So your recovery is just the absence of the stress. Yeah, that is actually exactly right. Recovery is the absence of the stress. Yeah, so you might think about recovery when you're doing programming and you're like, I better leave some space in here, but you're not programming recovery. It's just like, you're not giving them a bolus, a dose of stress during that period. No, and although we do sometimes actually tell our clients what to do during the week. We're like, hey, listen, this is, you've got a lot of fatigue right now. We're gonna give you a deload week next week. It's really important to get extra sleep. If you can't get eight hours of sleep at night, I want you to try to take a nap in the afternoon, try to get an extra hour of sleep in the afternoon if you need to, especially if they're a nutrition client. We talked to their nutrition coach and say, can we bump them up 500 calories, especially on protein and carbohydrates so that they got the ability to recover. A lot of people will go in a deload week and they're like, well, I'm not training very hard, so I'm gonna back off my calories. That's dumb.  I know what they're thinking. They're thinking, well, it'll make me fat. I don't need that many calories. No, no, no, this is actually when you need it because you're stressed to the point that fatigue is built up and you're not able to make progress because there's too much fatigue. So what we have to do is dissipate the fatigue. Well, how do we do that? Fajitas, man. That's how we do it. Fajitas. You know, the beautiful fajita. Chill. So knowing these things that we just talked about that maybe recovery isn't a thing, but it's the absence of the stress and that so everything that we do is related to stress. And then how can we manipulate that stress? And there are only a few things we can do. Yes, three. We can do something with the weight. We can do something with the frequency. We can do some. No. No? Yes, but what I call that. So we can do something with intensity or we can do something with volume, which is frequency, same. Well, okay. Stay with my thought process for a second. And then what's the third one, which is a clearly a secondary. Which would be the exercise selection, I think. Exercise selection. That's basically it. Now I actually said that primary training variables that we manipulate are intensity and volume and secondary are frequency and exercise selection. But then I explained frequency is secondary because it's really just a function of volume, right? So I get it. I'm sort of arguing semantics, but what I like to do is try to make things as simple as I can first, and then we can kind of get into the weeds and what that looks like. Yeah, well, it's not semantics, but we need to organize these principles. So when somebody comes to programming, they can say, okay, there are three things I can do here. Intensity. Intensity, volume, and exercise selection. Volume and exercise selection. So let's take intensity first. What can you do with intensity? Which is easy, right? Intensity is easy. Intensity is easy. You put weight on the bar or you take weight off of the bar. That's exactly right. That's it. Those are the only two things you can do. And then that one then in turn affects the second one, which is the volume. That's right. So they play with each other. Outside of early in a program, in an advanced program, or during novice programming is the only time that intensity and volume do not have an inverse relationship. Right. They must have an inverse relationship. Let's be super rigid here. Okay. The relationship still stands. We just don't manipulate it. Correct. So in novice programming, when we said this in the last podcast, was in novice programming, frequency stays the same, volume stays the same. That entire volume component is the same. Exercise selection doesn't change. The only thing that changes is intensity goes up. Right. So you know stress goes up because everything else is a constant and one variable increases. That's it. When we need to reduce stress to make room for recovery, we manipulate at the end of LP. We manipulate the intensity by lowering the midweek squat session. Correct. Bar the weight on the bar. That's exactly what we do. We only manipulate intensity during novice linear progression. That's the only thing we manipulate. And at the end, you start getting to advanced novice and making the minimum effective dose changes into Texas method or heavy light medium. Then we start playing with other things. But intensity is simple. Yeah. There's not much more to say about that programming component. Volume is complicated. The next one is volume. What can we manipulate with volume? Sets. Sets. Reps. Reps. Frequency. Frequency. Those are all the things that can be manipulated. So let's talk about sets first. Okay. In LP, clearly it's three sets of five unless it's the power clean, in which case it's five sets of three or the deadlift, which is one set of five. Sure. When we do the minimum effective dose change, we will often drop one set. Or add one set. Or add one set. Often I'll do them in tandem. So we talk about the minimum effective dose. Sometimes the minimum effective dose is changing two things. So it might be, I'm gonna add a set Monday and I'm gonna drop a set on Friday. And in doing so, because there's an inverse relationship between the volume and the intensity, I'm able to actually put some poundage on the bar on the Friday. We lose some volume that leaves room for an increase in the intensity because there's an inverse relationship. And you lose some intensity on Monday with the increase in volume. So then you start to see that the stressor on Monday is the volume. It's really tonnage is what I said last time. And then your Wednesday is the... The stressor on Friday is intensity. And then yeah, Wednesday is what? And Wednesday is a little bit of a D load. And so what you end up with, you have a tiny block. You have a five day block. Yeah, so Wednesday, we've talked about this before we probably do an entire episode just on Wednesday and argue about what's really going on Wednesday. And again, I think it's probably smart to say we actually don't know. It's one of those things we're not entirely... We think that... I don't know, you talked about you drop it out so much just fine too. I think what Wednesday is is I don't consider it a recovery day. That's why I think the terminology is wrong there. People think about Texas Method as being that Monday is the stress day, Wednesday is the recovery day, and Friday is the adaptation day, is the performance day. I disagree. I think both that Monday and Friday are clear, heavy stressors. The volume is a heavy stressor. The way that volume stresses you. I keep giving this illustration, I'm gonna do this again and again and until people get it. If the Friday doesn't count, then you're stuck with strong lifts.  Right, until it couldn't. Friday doesn't count. If Friday is only a performance, then just take it out and just do your five by fives on Monday every Monday and only on Mondays and do a light day on Wednesday. Well, that doesn't work. Like that's obviously Friday is enough of a stressor. So yeah, you can try that yourself in C and you can also look at other people's training logs and look at people's success or failures with the strong lifts protocol and then you'll know that once the novice phase is over, you have to have, we have to have periodization. You have to have some changes in intensity and some changes in volume to drive the changes. Correct. I wanna say something more about midweek. By the way, next time we have Sully on, we need to just, we should talk about midweek because he's firmly in the camp that nobody knows what happens in midweek. For my older guys, I say I drop it out. For my older guys, I will often do that. For my underweight guys. By the way, you don't drop out your midweek. You just drop out the squat. I drop out the squat. That's right. And so keep the other stuff. That's right, right. But for my underweight guys, I've got them squatting for eights because I'm trying to put some meat on them. Let's start with what we do know about Wednesday. What do we know is going on on Wednesday? Well, we know that Wednesday is a day that is there to not increase fatigue. Right, so we're- Fatigue should not increase on Wednesday. There's clearly still fatigue left from Monday because Monday was hard and sucked, at least once you've been in it for six weeks or so. Wednesday cannot make that fatigue number go up. So if you're left on a scale of one to 10, if you're left with a fatigue rating of six and a half, right? Just for purposes of argument. Six and a half rentals.  And now your fatigue is an eight. You can't go in Friday and squat a heavy set of five. So Wednesday is there to help fatigue dissipate while still getting good work in. And of course the other stuff is important too. And so I think that Wednesday often helps avoid detraining. I think it's practice for form. Although again, I was thinking about this the other day. Form changes dramatically when you go from 60% to 70% to 80% to 90% to 99%. And so I've heard before that Wednesday is sort of a practice day for squat. And I would say, well, using your own definition of what practice is, don't know how much practice is actually going on there when the weight is as light as it is compared to your truly your fiver at max or whatever. So let's go back to our principle. We know fatigue is going to be reduced. So you can do anything from what you're doing, sets of eight with your young guys to nothing on squat with your older guys, anything in between. But your younger guys can probably handle sets of eight. It doesn't beat them up bad at all. And they're not terribly heavy, right? So let's go back here. So we were talking about volume and the first thing we said that we can do is change the number of sets. Correct. And the other thing we can do is change the number of reps. That's why you'll see, you know, in our discussion with Andy Baker from a few weeks ago, we were talking about moving guys to three triples on their Fridays. And then later, a couple of triples or maybe a single triple. So we can change the volume. We can drop the volume from five reps to triples. Again, to serve what purpose? To drive the intensity. If you drop it from five to triples, it's to get the intensity to go up, right? And, you know, obviously the sets in the reps are intimately connected as well because you can manipulate one or the other and the other one usually changes. So for example, like you can go to three sets eight, like what you're doing for your younger guys on Wednesday, but I'll often go eight sets of three. Yeah, it's fine. I actually tend to like that better for the strength adaptation. And so those are all things that can be so you can change the number of sets you perform to increase or decrease volume. You can increase or decrease the number of reps you perform to manipulate volume. But you can also increase the number of sets or the number of reps by increasing the number of bouts that you have per week or any given time period by increasing or decreasing frequency, right? So one of the things I can do if I need to get more volume in, then I can just add another session of that thing, right? Or maybe it's just another workout in general to increase the total systemic volume on the body. And so that's why frequency is almost always a function of volume. If I have somebody sort of later advanced sort of people in novice programming, they are pressing 1.5 times per week and they're bench pressing 1.5 times per week. And by the time they are advanced, they are often doing both of those three times a week. Yeah, you know, those two movements can withstand the most bouts in a week. Especially by the way, I think bench press can actually handle more than press in spite of like we know that there's a way to press that shouldn't beat your shoulders up, but it does seem like the standing up with the weight in your hands and your shoulders and everything that's going on with, especially kind of the rear delt and infraspinatus and whatnot, you know, you can beat up your shoulders if you're doing both. And so the first thing I would do is drop one of those press movements, but the frequency continues to go up and that's because by the time they're advanced, if they're pressing two or three times a week and they're bench pressing three times a week, I can't get that much volume in if they were only doing those things two times a week each or 1.5 times a week, like you just couldn't do it. And so we often manipulate volume with those upper body lifts by just increasing the frequency. How many heavy reps can a person do of a pressing motion in a given workout? You know, 25 to 30 would be the most I would ask of someone.   And we end up adding half of a day a week when we go to the four day split. That's right. And then later on, we'll even add another slot in a four day split.  And then we'll have him press again and he's gonna do a pressing variant at this point. So we've added a slot in his four day split. Oh, what you doing on an upper body day? I'll do it on upper body day. So I'll usually add one of those to a lower body day. So I'll bench and press on the two upper body days. So I'll do both. So that gives you your four slots and I'll add a fifth slot to one of the lower body day. So I'll squat and then I'll either press or bench press and I'll deadlift or whatever that variant is at that point. It depends on what you wanna do. Like if he presses competition press, three sets of fives, you know, something vanilla, and then you have him bench press, it probably something less vanilla. And then you add another slot. I got him on the ropes. He's already fatigued. So now it doesn't take as much weight in that third pressing slot. So then I can use exercise selection because I got him on the ropes. He's already very fatigued. So a little extra work goes a long way. But if I have a guy that I want him to have lots of heavy in his hands, then I'll do what you're talking about. I'll put that extra press at the end of his squat and deadlift day because he can move something probably heavier that day for that extra slot. So now we're at exercise selection. So we've talked about adding sets, reps, slots. We've talked about frequency. And now we're at the exercise selection. We can select exercise variants of our four main lifts to either put more weight in their hands or less weight in their hands. Yeah, and I think let's give the caveat to first that we know, and I think that there's almost nobody that would argue with this, that for strength, I'm sure there are some, but in general, nobody would listen to this podcast would argue this, that for exercise variants to help drive a strength adaptation, especially a strength adaptation on the four main lifts, and those variants better look really similar to the four main lifts. Yeah, people talk about carryover. Does it carry over? If you want them to carry over to the four main lifts, they better look really similar to the four, they better be pretty specific to the four main lifts. So something that is still a barbell, right? Dumbbells don't carry over very well. Really light doesn't carry over really well. Single leg, single arm doesn't carry over very well at those sorts of things. And so what we're trying to do is, just like you said, we're trying to choose a variant that either increases the weight we can handle. And as a trade-off often has a reduced range of motion or decreases the weight we can handle, but increases the range of motion. That's almost always like the only exception with that is a tempo piece, which is usually the same range of motion, but done slower, therefore the stress goes up. And because it's slower, there's more time under tension and therefore you use less weight. But with everything else outside of tempo, what we're doing is, is it's more weight, less range of motion, less weight, more range of motion. Yeah, a lifter seems to be able to do X amount of work in a given lift. And remember from our junior high physics, work equals force times distance.  Or if F goes up, D has to come down. So we can talk about like the deadlift. On a deficit deadlift, you're gonna pull the bar over a longer range of motion. D has gone up, so F almost has to go down. So the weight on the barbell has to go down. And then the rack pull, we can move that rack pull up to two inches above your knee and you can maybe pull 30% more than your one rep deadlift, you know? Sure, so when I pulled a thousand at a 18 inch deadlift, 18 inch deadlift is just below the kneecap. I pulled a thousand at a strongman, silver dollar deadlift, strongman meet. Now here's why. Lots of guys dropped out in the 800 range and then I pulled a thousand at 800. The bar wouldn't bend enough to get just above the kneecap. But at 900, the bar got just a little more flex and you could get your kneecaps under the bar and put yourself in a little better position. And then I was able to lock out a thousand in the same thing. Of course it's strongman, so it's straps and hitching. And you know, if you ever watch me lift, I've got a clean hitch. I've got like a pretty nice hitch.  So here's the question. Why would we do a movement that reduces the range of motion but increases the intensity? Well, what are we trying to accomplish? Well, in that case, we may want to train that range of motion, right? We may want to increase the strength that lock out in the example of the rack pull. We may want to do that. Or a board press or a slingshot or a pin press. Any of those. Pin squat, even. But oftentimes I want to give them some more training stress, but not as much as they would get from pulling from the floor from the deficit deadlift. There are some people though, well I'll tell you there are some people that the rack pull just devastates them. That's also why these templates don't work all the time. You know, I often put a rack pull in to actually reduce stress. It's heavier weight, but reduce stress. For most people, I think a rack pull tends to be a lesser stress event than a full range deadlift. But every once in while you find somebody there, it's not, it's the opposite. Yeah, there's something about the time under tension it takes to get the thing to come off the pins. I think that tears up certain people. And I think they're a pretty small minority. It may be a minority of one, one bob ten. No, it's not. Well, and here's the other thing. My other experience is talking about specifically a rack pull. When we talk about a rack pull, the first several weeks you do it, it's really hard on your body. More so than even most other novel exercises. By the way, there's an argument out there that the novelty of the exercise increases the stress and that helps you get stronger. And I would agree with the first two thirds of that statement. The novelty of the exercise does increase the stress. But novelty doesn't make you stronger. Just because it's novel doesn't mean it makes you stronger, right? I think skateboarding wouldn't make me stronger. Yeah, what you'll find with most people when they rack pull is especially if you set a rack pull where the kind of where most of us do it, which is like an inch below the tibial tuberosity, a little bump on your shin. You started about an inch below that. So the weights, I don't know, three inches, three, four inches off the ground somewhere there. So it's reducing the range of motion of a deadlift by three, four inches, right? Most people deadlift less the first two, three weeks they deadlift, they can't rack pull as much as they deadlift. They do it and they're like, man, why is this so hard? It's a reduced range of motion. Well, because you're out of no man's land, there's no tightness there. You set up, you can't get tight. You're used to getting tight at the bottom of a deadlift. Yeah, we like to start. I think me and you both like to start. I learned it from you. Start our partials in no man's land. No man's land is that place where the lift slows down. Four or five inches off the bottom of the squat, an inch and a half below the knee, right above your hairline and the press. We like to start them in that place because we wanna train that place as much as we can. So we talked about, we can vary the intensity, we can vary the volume, and we can vary the exercise selection. I wanna go back to volume because we didn't carry that all the way out. We can add slots in the week, right? We talked about that. We can add extra bouts, but we can also look at that volume for a longer time horizon, right? Weeks or even months for these advanced blocks of training. Yeah, you have to. Again, I think tonnage is a better indicator. Here's why it's a better indicator. I'll give you a simple math example, right? Which can you do more weight on? Three sets of eight or eight sets of three? Eight triples. Obviously, so it's exactly the same volume, right? It's 24, but it's a higher tonnage, which is why I think that that tonnage number matters. That tonnage number matters, right? Like, it's a tonnage is a good quantifiable metric for volume. It's not the only thing that matters, right? I certainly wouldn't put it above PRs. Although I do think a tonnage PR is kind of an interesting thing to keep, but I also think that at the point where the weight isn't heavy, we could all do German volume training, do 10 sets of 10 at 60%, and that's a tremendous amount of volume, but did that make us stronger? We need a coefficient to put on the tonnage that will also tell us something about how high the intensity was. Intensity, yeah, sure. Yeah, so we need to take our tonnage and then maybe divide it out by the average load on the bar for each of those. I think that would give us an integer that would tell us something about what was going on. The smaller the number, the better it would have been actually. Yeah. That would be an interesting way to do it. Yeah, that's, yeah, I like that. We like Saber metrics for lifting. Right. We'll create these new metrics where it actually, you know. We've already created the Reynolds, which is the fatigue unit, and then the Hamburg, which is the recovery unit, and then we need to put a quick coefficient. I know you're not a sports fan, and I'm not a sports fan anymore, but I used to be, but the movie Moneyball, you're familiar with this movie? I have heard that it exists. I'm sure you've never seen it. There were some guys that came out, they were the Oakland Athletics years ago, early 2000s. They didn't have any money. They were a poor franchise, and they just became these sort of very, they really honed in on statistics. And a very simple one in baseball that makes sense is that for years, batting average was where it was at. What is the guy's batting average? What's his batting average? And then they came out and said, well, wait a minute, on base percentage is actually far more important because you could walk, right? Some guys walk a lot. Well, a walk is exactly the same thing as a hit. That's what they said. So what is the difference if a guy walks, if the guy, there's four balls and he gets to walk to first base versus getting a hit and he has to run to first base. What's the end result? First base, that's the end result. And so they said, well, that's a better metric, right? So I think what we're doing here is to say, look, there's clearly, there are limitations to using any of these single metrics outside of PRs. I think PR is the metric that like, if you're continuing to set PRs in different rep schemes, different set schemes, different, whatever, I think that that's the main driving force. But as you start to look at these other things, the problem with volume alone doesn't take into account intensity. Tunnage does take into account intensity except that you can still play the game and keep driving the tonnage up and not have enough intensity to drive a strength adaptation. And what you're saying is, there's probably a metric we could come up with that utilizes both tonnage over average intensity, right? Is that what you said somewhere in that ballpark? To get a number that say like, okay, now we can actually see what kind of progress we're making. That's interesting to play with it.  Let's figure that thing out and we'll plug it into some of the numbers that see what we come up with. Yeah, we need an intensity weighted tonnage number that we use. I think that would tell us more. Cause like, you know, I gave the example of my man Tim in the 36,000 pounds of tonnage for his press. And so, you know, trying to figure out what we would do next, it would be very useful for me to know what the average intensity was during that 36,000 pounds. It would let me make better programming decisions. The way it is now, I'm gonna have to actually go back and look at every program press workout that he did during that cycle, then iterate on that. And so the weighted thing would be better. So let's wrap it up. Yeah, we believe, I believe, I'll speak for you. There are only these three things that we can do when we program. And those three things give us a great deal of variability. You know, millions of options actually when we do the programming, but every decision that you make will boil down to manipulate one of those three things, the intensity, the volume, or the exercise selection. And to look at it any other way is I think to overcomplicate it. It's complicated enough because of the number of potential options that are available. So looking at it in those basic ways, I think is the cleanest way to do it. You could sit down and look at the man's program and say, hmm, we need to drive intensity this cycle. And then you know, because there's an inverse relationship between it and the volume, that the volume will have to come down. And then you can use variance. So you can drive the intensity by reducing some of the volume. And then you can also use variance to allow you to put more weight in the guy's hands and by using partials and things like that. So you can look at the problem at hand, think about the three options that are available and then use the variance inside those options to then get to the goal that you need for your trainee. That's a good general way of stating it, although I think it's also important to state the practical for the vast majority of people who are listening to this podcast, the goal is to get stronger. That's exactly right. So here's what we know. Regardless of what the goal is, as long as there is a goal, stress must be increased over time. We know that stress has to go up over time to keep making progress. Whether your goal is to run a marathon or whether your goal is to squat 800 pounds, right? But if your goal is to squat 800 pounds or to just get stronger, then while intensity is a variable that can be manipulated, the end goal is that intensity always goes up. Always goes up. Like it has to, right? And again, I'm talking about intensity, not just in terms of percentage of one rep max, but actual one rep max or actual load on the bar or actual magnitude, whatever you want. Like the actual weight on the bar, if the goal is strength, that is what the strength is force production. If for force production to go up, the weight must go up. Now we do recognize, and hopefully we flesh this out decently today and we'll do so in future episodes as well, that we can contribute to force production increases via manipulating volume and making volume go up. So certainly that is an important variable to use. But ultimately, ultimately, intensity has to go up if the goal is strength and ultimately stress must go up over time in order to keep driving that adaptation, past two. That was an interesting conversation for me. I hope other people enjoyed it too. Yeah, me too. Thank you so much for listening. This again, the Barbiologic Podcast and we will talk to you guys in just a couple of days. Thanks.


Matt says we have a 365 group a non-team and would like to set what's a non-team non-team It's not just a group not teams. Yes. I would like to set numbers to have read only access However, there are areas we can't edit this and where we can doesn't work Good phrasing an example is the calendar. We want it only editable by owner Editable by owners but allow the members to view it any insight like to set members to have read only access Yeah, oh, it's I read I got an outlook group. They got an outlook group It's a it's a non-team then it's got to be an outlook group. Correct. Yeah 365 group with us yet. Yeah, where's that calendar hosted that we're sure point great So it's your point you can change the permissions, right to where you can have the owners permissions be I Just didn't know in the team I didn't know in the office 365 where that calendars Hosted and you know, they don't automatically show up in outlook anymore when you create them. You have to power shell them back in Like they used to be default there's a button now. Is there a button now? Hallelujah Okay Okay, perfect because that should have been a button from the beginning. It's like no have this show in Callan in the outlook, but It's it's not stored in exchange That calendars not in like a outlook exchange calendar when it's at a Christie's point It depends right is it a SharePoint calendar? Is it an outlook calendar? Is it a group calendar that was created with the group or is it an exchange calendar that you created as a shared calendar? That's not associated to specifically to a group. So it kind of depends if it's a Exchange calendar you can manage permissions very very easily if it is a SharePoint calendar You can manage permissions very very easily if it is a group resource calendar that gets a little bit more difficult So much complexity around calendars. I've never said this before but I think there should be like an e-book that Organizes Some links on how to mentioned it's been mentioned, right? Just crazy. Yeah, I Also think it's just sorry folks just soapboxing here for a second, but I also think it's it's kind of like tasks across Microsoft 365 I know but I won't like but there's movement there and there's some there's a team that's looking specifically cross-product At that and I'm just saying that Microsoft should hey, Jeff Tipper Should be somebody dedicated to Calendars I guess I put calendaring right up there like they've consolidated and Simplified sharing as an example across all the products and said hey It needs to be homogenous and needs to be you need to have a consistent Experience when you're sharing no matter what product across all of these different platforms Calendars falls into that category. I believe there needs to be consistent behavior. There's features that are missing It I've handled completely differently. It needs to be consolidated It's like calendars as a service should be something that is centralized and that every platform then Consumes that service Calendars Outlook you can overlay calendar share point you used to be able to now you can't anymore. So seeing a centralized calendar Everybody needs that I mean I have this not just in my own tenant and all the different workspaces, but In my world, you know, we have like 15 logins for each customer How do so we have we have to get an outside service like Calendly that lets us Cross mesh all of those read them and find our availability for people because Just because I'm available here does not mean I'm available over here Matt you opened yet another can of worms there Yes, indeed and you can use third-party web parts for this So like quiz quiz has a fantastic calendar plus one part that I use for one of my clients That essentially can bring in your existing in 365 calendars and then do overlays and you can customize like how it looks and How people access it and permissions and things like that So I mean it can be done, but there's kind of like there's something that has to go in the middle to make that happen If you are using a group calendar as opposed to the SharePoint calendar or the exchange calendars that you can do the permissions Behind the scenes there are ways to do it. It's just a matter of if you're asking out of the box No, but if you're asking can we do it with some custom stuff on top? Yes You should grab a link to that you said yes, please I haven't heard that one Yeah, I'll throw a link in here for you. So I'm actually a partner with them And I've been real happy with a lot of their products, but they have Some pretty neat pretty neat web parts Oh, they've done they asked me to be an evangelist for them at one point and They figured out the features that should have been built into SharePoint 20 years ago that we've been asking for like creating a secured views of lists So you can secure a view instead of or secure a column which we can't do out of the box at SharePoint So I think the SharePoint team used to go talk to those guys and figure out how they did it and build it in But yeah, there's a lot of really neat stuff. I've been a big fan of them Good tool


I'm autistic, and this is what sensory joy feels like for me. What sensory things bring you joy? Let me know in the comments.


If you like to travel and you like to travel in luxury, you might be a fan of this next fountain pen unboxing. Let's unbox the Visconti Homo sapiens travel edition fountain pen. And this pen is known as the perfect luxury writing accessory for the jet setting writer. The Visconti packaging is always top-notch, it's very classy, very clean, very clear. You have your ID card along with some branding material and info on the pen is all tucked underneath the false bottom of the box. The fountain pen is packaged along with the traveling inkwell by Visconti and an eyedropper. Okay, and here's a good look at this pen. It's the very popular Homo sapiens pen design from Visconti. It's got your hook safe lock mechanism there on your cap. The pen is fitted with an 18 karat rose gold nib to match the pen's trim. And this unique set is modified with the addition of a solid bronze blind cap. And it's packaged with a matching Homo sapiens traveling inkwell that was customized to coordinate with this pen. Highly collectible, this set is limited to 300 pieces. Shop at pinchlay.com.


That's stuff about me. I'll cut through that pretty quick.  I know that I have, I work in the Virginia tech, I work in the IT security office there and we have the tomb of software which is a 100 sleeve DVD case. I'm sure you guys have something similar. You've got all these bootable tools, all these things that you need for different environments and it's a big pain to keep up with. You loan them out, you lose them and sometimes you need them, like incident response, you need them right away. So I thought, well, I'd try to put all that stuff together. So what Katana does is it brings a bunch of live distributions, like backtrack, together with portable applications that will run in Windows from a single USB flash drive. So no longer keeping up with the tomb of software and wondering which computer that certain thing is installed on, you can put it all on a single flash drive, keep it in your pockets, very convenient. I'm sorry, it's not showing up in here, it's showing up in there, so I'm definitely not messing with it. And another thing about USB flash drives, which is a little more convenient than your normal CD DVD, is you can change things on there on the fly. Unlike a CD, you know, you've got that, you can change it, but you have to re-burn an ISO, burn it again. USB flash drives as a dynamic environment makes things a lot easier for you to modify. CD versus USB. Some of this I've just covered, but a lot of it is speed. I don't know if you've ever tried to boot a live CD versus a USB version of the same live operating system, but it is way faster. Especially when you're, you know, you're doing stuff and everything's cool, then you click on something new and then just got to spin up again and find that stuff. It's a lot faster from USB flash drive. Two of the drawbacks, you can see up there in bold kind of the things that I deemed to be a benefit for either side. The one benefit, there are two benefits for CD. One, a lot, almost every distro, every live distro basically supports CD. I mean, some are just floppy, but that's very old. And the other is the buyer's support. If you're working with some older systems, if you haven't booted from USB, the biases sometimes have it turned off or turned on. Most modern biases will support USB boot. I'd say that started in the early 2000s, but prior to that, they're like, you want to boot from what? No, CD is the way to go. So that can be an issue when you're working with some of the older systems. All right, so I mentioned, you know, I have this Grandia's tool suite and we'll talk a little bit more about what's in there. But I want to talk about who made the cut. It's really hard, you know, when you're looking through all these suites of tools because there's so many and they're so awesome, but a lot of them overlap. So what I tried to do is I didn't, I'm not necessarily saying that these are definitely the best tools. They're just the ones that I found. As I said, the dynamic environment, you can actually modify and, you know, add or remove as you want. Free for personal use. You that are working in the corporate environments with Catana, you need to check the licenses before you use it because I was looking at it as, you know, a personal, fun thing to use all the time, but I can't guarantee all the licenses are that unique. I mentioned that and currently supported, for most part, something like, you know, NetCat, which was made a long time ago, works beautifully. I kept that in there because, you know, current support. I don't know when the last time the official version came out. It was quite a while ago. But for the most part, everything needs to be currently supported so that you guys can get the best and brightest new software out there to keep around with you. All right. So I have a DEF CON free release. It is available at the Hackers for Charity booth just on the other side of these walls over there all the way to the back. This is the, so it's 2.0. I have a 1.0 and 1.1 release so if you don't get it there and don't want to like do the DEF and the new stuff, you can get it on the website. It seems so bad after the presentation today that I have to say that there's a couple of flaws in this release. That's why I said instead of pre-release, it is now officially a beta release. And I will get into more of that in just a second. So the starting lineup for Katana. This is what I've included by default. You can really think of that as the default settings. This is what I give you. I tried to kind of get the wide gamut of different kinds of tools that system administrators might use. Not really trying to focus on anything in particular. You know, I took backtrack as the pen testing one. I have cane as the forensics one. Are there other great distros out there? Absolutely. And I encourage you to look into those too. These are not, this list is not the only things that do this stuff. But I couldn't include everything because it's already several gig in size. And if I gave you a file that was 32 gig download, I'm sure nobody would ever use it. So this is the default lineup. I'll talk about installing stuff a little later. Here's my epic fail. Second epic fail, apparently. Backtrack is not working. So it's not the fault of backtrack. Beautifully.  My thumb drive died on Friday as I was dev'ing. Everything was great. I was all ready to make my, you know, it's all in the rar files, ready to put it together. It dies on me. My last backup was two and a half weeks prior to that. So I know. And look, no, lessons learned. Lessons learned people. I had a backup. What does it say? Back up often. Back up the backup. And back up often. Okay. My mistakes, you know, you guys can learn from that. Yeah. So that was awesome. So basically using some of the forensics tools provided, plug. I could not use autopsy to recover all my files. Very sad. I ran, this is forensics hints for some of you people. Autopsy is awesome. I ran strings against the entire 8 gig flash drive and had to analyze that. So I got a couple of things back like the documentation. And that was really all I got back. So I had to kind of start from scratch ish from that point. So I spent one day trying to recover and then I stayed up for 36 hours basically fixing everything that I had done in the prior two and a half weeks. So I apologize for that not working. If there's any other bugs, especially there's misspellings. I just kind of, there's new features and this stuff should work. And I tested last night. It seems like all the other operating systems working fine. But that particular thing, epic fail on my part. However, there's a simple fix. You don't have to do anything crazy. If you download, oh, I left the raw. It's actually in ISO. The back check for ISO. Download it, burn it. Copy the CASPER file into the back check folder on Katana. Replace all the files. Basically what happened is the whole file system didn't finish copying over.  So it is a simple fix but it's just not going to work right off the bat. Again, a thousand apologies. Okay. So going back to the original, getting everything to work.  What you need to do is get used to messing with syslinix or grub, which are the boot loaders. And then there's the initialization files. And that's kind of how I got everything working. Because you cannot have duplicate directories in the same structure. And that is the fact that everybody here should probably know. So what happens, all the file systems want to load from a certain area. So you have to change that area. So you have to figure out how to do that. And every single operating system is different. So they would be beautiful if there was one like quick fix for everything. But no, I have to analyze every operating system differently. Baseline ones, Ubuntu versus Slack versus Nopix versus, you know, if they've modified it and, you know, the security distribution that has also made modifications. Those are changes around. So that's why it's not just a simple straightforward thing that you see posted around a lot. I have to go through and analyze a lot of these files. I put in binary. The first time I started developing, I didn't know that it was an image file that I was messing with, which is easy. You just mount it. And I wish I'd known that. I went in with a hex editor and tried to replace things. Which was not good. Because the file that I want to change is the same name as like everything. It's called the Casper file. And like that word is everywhere. So looking through a hex editor, trying to find it took forever. And then, you know, that took like two months to look at. And then, you know, I've read some posts somewhere. They're like, oh, it's just an image file. You mount it.  Mount it. And then, you know, two seconds later, everything works. So that's another, you know, that's when you get into building tools like this, the things you have to get through. And that was about a year ago. I guess I should have mentioned I started this project about a year ago, right before DEF CON last year. And the cleanup. I tried to make this, as I said, I wanted to make a dynamic environment, people to be able to change and update things as they want. So I tried to clean up the folder structures. So you didn't have, I mean, if you look at the Elton Boot City, it's got folders strewn everywhere. It basically looks like the systems folder in Windows. You know, you just get all kinds of stuff. So I made a big effort into making things in nice little compact directories.  And you say, okay, well, that's where that stuff obviously is. It wasn't that way originally. So I made a big effort to make it a lot easier for people to modify on their own. So adding distros, I don't have a ton of time. I am a grad student and I am trying to graduate soon. So I can't devote all this time to all the great distros out there. And there are so many out there that it's very difficult. I just try to cover what I can. So I'm going to go through a little bit about how you can add your own distro or, you know, popular distros that I haven't supported yet, how you can go through and make these modifications to add your own. So I'm going to give the example of Samurai, the current version of Samurai. Pretty simple in the beginning. So you just get the ISO downloaded, you mount it or you burn it, however you want to get access to it. And save it. Yeah, for this particular one, yeah, you just make a Samurai directory since it's called Samurai. In whatever distro name, you kind of insert that there. And then this is the tricky part is figuring out which initialization files to mess with. For basically Ubuntu versus NAPIX, a lot of those are the same. I'll cut through this pretty quick because I know this is dry and boring, but I want to keep these in the slides for people to contribute to the project. So yeah, this is just an example of, for this particular one, the file structure needs to be changed. And then you change the boot menu, adding everything there. And you edit and add some more stuff to the main configuration file for the boot menu. That is long and boring. So I'm just going to show you if this works. I would be very lucky if I could actually do this. Oops. Yeah, okay, there we go. This is what it looks like when you boot up. Same as a lot of other distros. If you're used to booting from live stuff, it's here. Most of the stuff works except for the first one, which most people will end up using. So that makes it like the worst possible thing that could have failed. So when you add stuff in here, it'll pop up, you add a new distro, pop up in the menu section. Congratulations, you've got an even cooler tool on you. Okay, leaving that and going back to the demo. Oh, going back. Okay, so I just went through that boring information about changing the realization files.  It's, you know, kind of technical and whatnot. I've created a script front end to make things so much easier. So you don't have to go through all the pain that I've gone through in developing it. All you have to do is select which one you intend to install. Oh, thank you. I'm going quick, too. Thank you for the applause. Yeah. So this should make things a lot easier and maybe, you know, things will work for you guys. So all you have to do is you select which one you want to, the distro. Right now, I have three different ones working. You download the ISO, you tell it which directory, and you hit go, install, and it'll, you know, install for you. It's like UnetBooten. I think a lot of people have probably used that before to install things, except they only install one at a time, and I have to somehow figure out how to, you know, make all these things work together happily. So right now, I have three different ones working. Samurai, Weaknet, and something else that I'm forgetting off the top of my head. But hopefully, by the full release, I'll have at least a dozen is what I'm shooting for. So while you already have, what, 10 distributions on there, you can, you know, if you decide, I want, you know, the kitchen sink, you can have 10 different distributions, or I guess at that point, you know, like 20 different distributions on your thumb drive for any kind of response. So as I mentioned before, I encourage people to look into other ones, because I don't have a lot of time, and then I can add that to this. So your contributions help quite a bit, and especially if you're developing a distro, I'd like to add it here. I can, you know, walk people through how to do that for their individual distro. Okay, this was the basic navigation stuff. I just kind of included these slides because I wasn't sure, you know, people had done that before. So getting on to the Katana toolkit. So the live ISO side, a lot of people are used to the live booting side. This, not so many people have used portable applications. So what portable is basically it means it doesn't have to install onto your host system. That's not to say it doesn't actually edit some registry or make some other modifications. So I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent forensically sound to run all of these to say, oh, no modifications were made, but you don't have to install them. So they run quick. You've got a whole suite of tools. They, yeah, they'll run in native environments. Yeah, actually, this is funny. I, for about two months my, my host operating system was screwed upside, but I was booting off of backtrack three live and they didn't have open office and I needed it for class. So I actually ran a portable open office through wine in backtrack to get open office to work easily. And later I found that you can actually add slacks file to get that done. But at the time, that was an interesting way to get through it. So wine is a windows emulator for anybody who doesn't know that. And so this portable application was running through there. I ran VLC through it. It worked pretty well. So, you know, some of these applications that I'm talking about on this side, you can actually run in Linux through wine. But a lot of them are targeting windows systems, so they're not going to really be too proficient. The, what? Okay, yeah, that's true. That's true. I knew I'd misspeak somehow. Wine is not an emulator, but it will allow you to run windows files. We, everybody's kosher with that. Okay. So happens when you speak at Defcon, you just get called out like that. And the other option is ultimate boot CD for windows. If anybody has a mess with that, it's pretty cool. It's not included by default because of Microsoft licensing stuff. Come on. I didn't get a boo for mentioning Microsoft licensing stuff. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you. So it's a portable version of Windows XP-ish. It's called Windows PE. You know when you install Windows and you have that nice little boot menu and all this stuff's going on, it actually loads this small condensed version of Windows into memory and that's what controls everything. This extracts it. So it won't run everything beautifully, but it'll run some of the stuff so you can kind of carry around the portable version of Windows with you, which can be very helpful in certain situations. And configuration and updating. It's very simple to do. I'll show you in a second the structure of everything, but you want to update it. You can update it. It's a USB. So you just have to install it in a certain directory. Bam. It's an updated. You don't have to worry about, you know, waiting a year for the new ISO to come out. You can update it instantly or add your own files, whatever. So these are kind of the areas I focused on. It's the basic stuff that I feel like anybody would look into security and want and just admins, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot of tools. There's things like, well, I guess I'll go to the next slide. These are just a few of the tools that I've got running on there.  It's nice to have a portable version of SIGWIN around because you're like, ah, I have all these cool scripts for Linux. And then I've got to work with these, you know, Windows boxes. What do I do? SIGWIN on a stick. Very handy. All kinds of other stuff. A lot of these, about half of these are actually new to this edition. So if you're thinking about, okay, well backtrack, screw it up, I don't want to go and get that. This one, a lot of the new stuff is like in-map and cane and metasploits. And I haven't fully tested metasploits, but it works and it runs and I haven't seen anybody else who actually got it running in Windows on a USB drive. I feel like if I say that in this crowd, somebody would say, I know, but as far as I know, this is the only place that metasploits running in Windows off the flash drive. There's all kinds of other tools you might recognize on there. It's pretty convenient. And adding your own applications. In Windows, there's a lot of portable app websites out there. Those are the ones I've gone through. Basically, they just don't have to make registry edits or install things in the system folders or whatever. So some of the smaller tools in the utilities I've actually found that are very common that are just singular binos like putty. Putty is a perfect example. When you install putty, you don't get the nice little icons. It doesn't install. It just says extract me somewhere because I'll run anywhere. So that's a good example of a portable application. Something like that is included on here, but there's a lot more. Linux, you can make static binaries if you want to try that. Will that work 100% of the time? Probably not. Have I tested it a lot? Absolutely not. But it is possible. Yes. For the Windows side or the Linux side, I believe so. I mean, it loads everything in. But that's another thing that's the 64-bit, sorry, he asked if there's a way to differentiate between 32-bit and 64-bit in Linux. And that's actually an issue with a lot of these things that people, I've tested this on a 32-bit machine. Some of these tools have 64-bit counterparts that will do the same thing. I developed this for 32-bit. A lot of times if you see a tool and it's not running, you can try to look it up. That's one of the things I didn't put in the slides.  That's one thing that I found that was difficult when learning new distributions was like, okay, let's go ahead and have these tools. What does that do? The only description I have is a name or something I've read. So the documentation for Katana actually has a brief summary of every single portable application out there, hence time consumption. And then a brief description of the distributions, but not all of their tools because I'm not crazy. So a lot of them will give you the websites. So if it doesn't work 32-bit, you can go and get the 64-bit version. And as far as the Linux goes, I know that you can do this. I haven't tested it. I know that the Unet Bhutan for Linux is a static binary. You can get the source, but it will just run. So you have to tinker around with it. I don't know from distro to distro, but it is possible. So you could carry things, trusted applications around with you on your thumb drive without having to trust the host operating system. OSX, I don't know. Whoever you'll get a Mac, I have no experience with Macs whatsoever. If people know how to add portable applications to Macs, that would be awesome. I'd totally be into that for you Mac people out there, but that's just not anything I've explored so far. So Wakasashi, so Katana is a sword, Wakasashi is a smaller sword, a theme. Forge is a forge. So yeah, I've stuck with a little bit of a theme here. USB right blocker. This is pretty handy. So I've tested it a little bit. So the reason I included this, or I've been working on this, is malware. I don't know if you guys know this, but malware is now targeting USB drives. You might have been aware of this. You might have seen this in your environment. You might have come to DEF CON talks and heard about this. It's live. It's native and it's a beautiful way to transmit malware because everybody's so concerned about it. My Firefox is up to date. Do I have no script? Do I have all these security features in place? And then USB drive, they just hop right on there and then you never know the wiser. So while a lot of these things on there will be definitely flagged by antivirus, there's a meta-sport is on the stick. The antivirus just explodes when you stick this in. And almost everything, at least half things on there, it's just hack or tool. I couldn't even scroll down fast enough. It just kept shooting up. So that's another warning. If you're going to mess with this, your antivirus is going to just throw a hissy fit. It's going to go crazy. So you might want to disable it before mounting this. Sometimes it doesn't auto run. If it won't auto run and scan the device, sometimes you're okay, but the first time you click on something, it tries to get at it. So two reasons that I have the right blocker one is for malware. So it doesn't get on the drive and you're not transmitting that everywhere. And the other one is to prevent those pesky antiviruses from deleting all of the awesome stuff that's on here. I tested it. It worked. I'm sure because I announced this at DEF CON, next week they're going to be able to figure out how to leave my tools from Katana. But for now, as of like today, this works preventing anything from accessing it. Problem side, a lot of these tools do want to write stuff to their directory. So some of them might not work in this way and you can't store your information there. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, there's another thing. The Waka Sashi is very tiny. I recommend not putting it on a flash drive because that's kind of not the point. If you put it on a flash drive to run and prevent the other one, well, congratulations. The one you just put in got infected. So that doesn't help anything. I recommend, you know like the business card size, and this isn't quite right, but the really small CDs, some of you can keep in your back pocket, business card ones, it's like a couple K if that. So you can easily keep it on something else, a medium that's not going to be infected by malware. It's very simple to use. And I think right now, yeah, I'll try to bring up my live demo, which checks something else real quick. Yeah, I did get that in a minute. But it's, I have an eight gig, mostly because I like the idea of being able to add a lot. Actually, I developed on a 16 gig. It takes four, you could put it on a four gig.  And yeah, so I'd say, I suggest 16. They're dirt cheap now. And of course, more epic fail. It won't move to the other window. All right. So I now officially hate compass barrel or compass fusion. I just love it because it makes you do it. You can do cool little things like twirling desktops and wobbly windows. And it's great. And now that it has destroyed my presentation at Defcon, I'm officially against it. I probably if there's anybody on the compass fusion team here, this is a problem, serious problem. You guys need to fix that stuff. All right. I find you. Okay. Well, so that live demo, I can't Windows gets stuck on this one and won't go up there. What in the world? Are all you Linux naysayers? Congratulations, you now have more fuel for the fire. All right. Well, it's, it's pretty simple. Sorry, it's not up there. You click a you run the Waxashi, you hit yes, and it makes it read only, you hit no, it makes it read writable. When you want to mount something, it, it edits a registry value. So you, you change it and then you mount it and then you can unchange it doesn't matter, it's only at the point of mount that things make a difference. So don't, you know, you can unmount it and you really want to change it back because if you're on a user's computer and you know they're trying to plug in their iPod and it's not running and they're going to find you and you know that's obviously the most important thing on their computer is that they can sync to iTunes. So if you went in and had to, you know, remove some virus that's really not as important to them as being able to sync to iTunes. So you really want to undo what you do when you make it read only. So it sticks up there. No live demo. Great. Katana is available at the Hackers for Charity booth right now. The older versions are available on my website. So here's the, the 4GIG. The new one, I, I'm still in debate about adding some other live distributions but for now it's about 4GIG. So you can run on a 4GIG drive. It's a raw file. I think I get to that in a second. Yes. It's a raw file. I have so many people ask me, why can't I burn this to DVD? It's because it's not, it's not supposed to be burned to DVD. It's a raw file. You extract it. It is on DVD there but in raw format.  The instructions are on there. I just thought I would put that out there because people come up to me all the time or send me emails and stuff and say I can't get this to work. You extract it into the root of the flash drive. If you extract it into a sub folder, it's not going to work either.  I think that's most of it. That's just the instructions there. You can create an ISO. This is new for this version as well. There's a couple new things. The 4G one is new. This is new. It works okay. Some of the live distributions change a lot of things around between USB and CD versions. So while it will make, it's really nifty if you want to hand it out to a lot of people. You can create the portable application stuff. You can configure it any way you want, add, remove, whatever. Hand it out to all the people you work with and then you have all these tools on there. So a live ISO option is really good. Some of the applications, or some of the live ices will boot, or some of the, sorry, the portable distributions will boot. By the time this is full release, I hope to have them all working right now. It's just some of them working. But that is the final plan is to make the ISO exactly the same as the USB version. So tips and tricks. Since you're working in a live environment, scripting is awesome. The one beautiful thing about live is, and I know this is why I really enjoy it, I screw things up sometimes that might have come across already. So it's nice to be able to boot into a live distribution, do whatever you want. Absolutely angered the kernel and then you just reboot and everything is magically back where it was. So that's one of the great parts of an ISO. But the other flip to that is modifications can be tricky unless you do persistent. I'm not going to talk about that much here, but look into persistent mode, you can actually save things on the system. So if you do want to update backtrack, you want to update Ubuntu, you can. If you boot into persistent mode, it will store it there. Everything should work fine. But if you like me, enjoy the live environment and being able to mess around with things and not having fear of screwing stuff up. Scripting is awesome. This is just a couple of URLs for a portal applications that you can look into. As I said, I didn't include all of them. There's a lot of them there. Actually, I did find this one website for OSX stuff, but it's like the really high end open source applications like open office. So there wasn't any security stuff. Yeah. So this is my beg and plea. I only have so much time. I'm basically the only dev on this entire thing. And I'm a grad student, so I really just don't have tons of time to work on this. So if you want to help buy, recommendations are welcome. If you want to recommend tools, that would be awesome. If you want to, especially if you want to work on scripts to add distributions, thank you so much, because that's the most time-consuming thing I'm sure that I ever work on. If you have tools that you are writing that run portably, let me know. I'll check into it. Yeah. I mean, anything you can do to help out. I have a forum, post everything on there. I'll get Q&A in just like two seconds. Is that cool? Okay. Actually, I think that's the next slide. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. This is a good good timing. You were you were right on about that. So again, the pre-release is at the Hacks of Charity booth. You can get it fully working. There is a lot of new stuff on this version. I know none of this was actually like, this is how you hack into this thing. But I did provide a whole lot of tools and some documentation. So if you're starting off the bat, this is a great thing to mess around with. And yeah, if the HFC guys want to come up real quick, we're going to have some free t-shirts. Anybody raise a hand? Hacks for Charity t-shirt? You guys want to come up? Yeah. Raise your hand if this presentation was awesome. Yeah! I had to catch you when you were off guard. All right. So while everybody is looking around, the Hacks for Charity booth is again on the other side of these walls all the way in the back. Come check it out. If the t-shirts don't fit, we'll swap it out for you. You got the All right. My last thing before I'm going to do a little bit Q&A, we're doing some auctions there. We got some really cool, we're auctioning off stuff like this. Come, it's all for charity. We're asking for any kind of donations you want to give, but these are bidding on. We've got a lot of stuff on there that's really cool. Of course, one of the kind items. So yeah, check it out. I guess I have a minute for Q&A or five for Q&A. But I'll probably head over there after I answer this question. So if you want to get the new version and want to talk to me, I'll be over there. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So the problem, the difficulty, he was asking about, he said he loses thumb drives all the time and was wondering about encrypting a thumb drive. Yes, you can. The problem is the, it depends on your environment. If you're windows only, you can say, hey, you can slap TrueCrypt on there, encrypt it, that's great, but if you want to go to the windows side or OSX side, then you know, you have to get that software working and unencrypting it the same way. So because it's portable, you can encrypt a hard drive, or a thumb drive, just like a hard drive, but because the idea with this is that you can run it on all these different platforms, that makes it a little more difficult. Yes. I don't know about, since that's the bootloader system, I think that modify, it might work on there, I'm not positive, but you have to, you have to run that through windows as far as I know. He's asking about the TrueCrypt bootloader and that might be an option. I've never looked into that. So then you could have it in the bootloader, but then again, you have to, if you're considering the portable application side of things, you have to unencrypt the whole thing. So since it's both, it would be great. If you guys want to look into that, I think that would be an awesome option. Yeah. It's not right now, that's a good option. This is basically, we just finished this and it's really prototype testing, but that's good. It's actually, it's a visual basic script. So you can modify it any way you want and it will run in any system. It's a visual basic script. Yeah. What I have for the, actually the Katana portable pops up as the auto run. So the, like the portable applications, if you suit yesterday the auto run, that pops up first. I could maybe look into adding that, but yeah, that's a good point. If I could get that running in the auto run, it'd probably make more people more conscious. Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the, that's a good point. He said you can run the auto run and it will work before the drive is running, but I don't know, I don't trust that as much as, once it's physically in, I just consider malware able to access it. So, you know, it might be good, but it might not be the absolute perfect way for doing it, but it is an option.  And there are expensive, the SD ones. So, it makes it read only. Okay. The gentleman here was saying that there are SD card ones and this should run off of any flash disk, hard drive, whatever. You can install it to your base system if you want. Everything should work there, but you can buy SD card reader write blockers that for like 30 bucks. So, I didn't know that. That's pretty good. Does it really? Oh, yeah, that might be a good option for SD cards. If you get a USB adapter, then it makes it more universal. So, yeah, that seems like a cool option. All right. I think I'm going to head over to the HFC booth. You guys have more questions. You want to get the pre-release, we'll see you there.