It's going to be led by Sarah Levinson, Sarah Levinson Moriarty, who is a fellow at New America. She was instrumental in getting the Levinson Act passed, which was named after her father, who was the longest-held American hostage in Iran and who died in captivity. So I'm going to hand it over to Sarah, and she will introduce the panel. Thank you, Peter, and thanks everyone for joining us for what I think is a really important discussion. I'm sure everybody here will agree. Do we have Cindy? Okay. So virtually, we will have Cindy Lurcher, who is joining us from the Foley Foundation. She's the Director of Research, Hostage Advocacy and Government Affairs. I have a little handy note to myself, so I'm going to put the phone away afterward. Don't worry. I'm happy to introduce Roger Carstens, who's our Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs. There's Cindy. I see her now. We also have Ali Soufan, who's the Chief Executive Officer at the Soufan Center, and he's also a former Supervisory Special Agent at the FBI. And then we have Elizabeth Whalen, who's the sister of Paul Whalen, who's currently held in Russia against as well. Thank you all for joining us. I am going to pass it over to Cindy for a moment. I know she wanted to share a little bit more about the Foley Foundation's annual report, Bringing Americans Home. Thank you very much, Sarah. And first, we'd like to give a special thank you to Peter Bergen and Sarah, Levinson Moriarty, both former Foley Board members, I might add, and we're just so grateful for you leading the discussion today, as well as our panelists and our audience for joining today. Just to give a quick little introduction to the Foley Foundation, we are named after James Wright Foley, who was a freelance conflict journalist who reported often in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria. Jim was kidnapped on Thanksgiving Day in 2012, then held captive by the Islamic State until his public and brutal murder on August 19th of 2014. The Foley Foundation began three weeks after Jim's murder, and since then our president and founder, Diane Foley, has been advocating for the freedom of all Americans held hostage in roughly to attain abroad and promoting journalist safety around the world. What brings us here today is our fifth annual Bringing Americans Home report. Reports consist of over 250 interviews with hostages, wrongful detainees, and their families, as well as interviews with current former U.S. officials across what we like to call the U.S. Hostage Enterprise. That was stood up by Executive Order 13698 and Presidential Policy, Directive 30, also known as PPT 30, that was back in 2015, which all was later codified by the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage Taking Accountability Act in 2020. This year's reports findings, which can be found on the Foley website, are based off of two Foley data sets, which consists of 215 hostage and 207 wrongful detainee cases, going back to 2001. However, this year's results focus primarily on the 2022, up to July 31st of this year. I should first begin by defining a hostage versus a wrongful detainee, which we adhere to the U.S. government and how they distinguish between the two cases. Specifically, a hostage is an individual kidnapped by a terrorist organization, criminal and militant group, as well as pirates. However, we do exclude criminal cases in our data set. Wrongful detainees, however, are individuals held by foreign governments, i.e. state actors. However, we do Foley recognize the strong similarities between hostages and wrongful detainees, such that both groups are targeted for being Americans, and both are held for the purpose to try to effect change in U.S. policy, force concessions, and or request a prisoner swap. At the time the report was written, there were 59 U.S. nationals held hostage and wrongfully detained overseas, and over 90% of those cases were wrongful detentions. And it's been consistent that way. The majority of those cases, 79%, were U.S. nationals that were held in China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela. However, 14 other countries either detained or wrongfully held a U.S. national in 2022 and 23. While we have seen historic levels of U.S. nationals wrongfully detained by foreign governments over the past decade, specifically 175% increased in the number of wrongful detention incidents, and a 580% increase of the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held year after year. However, there has been, which is very good, a 31% decrease since the publication of last year's report of U.S. nationals held abroad. This is due to 25 releases that, at least public releases, that occurred from 2022 up to July 31 of this year, and the year 2022 also contained the highest number of wrongful detainees released overall within our database that begins in 2001. However, while there have been significant number of releases, it's important to note that the number of U.S. nationals who continue to be held remain at historic high levels. At the same time, the number of U.S. nationals held hostage by terrorist organizations, militant groups, and pirates have fluctuated over the past two decades. Overall, there's been a general downward trend since 2016. Since 2022, there have been nine U.S. hostages released, which occurred in Yemen, Afghanistan, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Groups responsible for holding these Americans were the Houthis, the Taliban, the Kani network, and JNIM. While there have been several successes over the past year or so, I'd like to end with a very stark reminder that we continue to still see Americans held hostage in wrongfully detained overseas. Currently, the Foley Foundation is tracking at least 60 of those cases, and of the current hostage and wrongful detention cases, six U.S. nationals have been held for over 10 years, which is an average of 14 years. Thank you very much. And I think that is a great place to kind of start the conversation and think about it. I think there's a lot of details and statistics that are in the report, and I want to get into kind of the nitty gritty and a little bit of the meat behind it. Before we do, I do think it's important to acknowledge the death of Governor Bill Richardson. The funeral is tomorrow. And so I wanted to take a moment, given the success over the past year, and I know that there was a close partnership with Governor Richardson and a lot of the people on this stage, I wanted to give everyone a moment just to say a few words about his impact on the hostage ecosystem as a whole. I'll go ahead and start if I may. Bill Richardson was a great American. He spent pretty much a good part of his life trying to free Americans around the world, whether their hostages were wrongfully detained. I consider him a strong partner. He gave me a lot of advice, especially when I was just starting out. And I can go back to my time, we're trying to work the Venezuela portfolio. There was a time when the United States government just was not gaining traction in Venezuela, and Governor Richardson was able to get a meeting with the Venezuelans, flew down to talk to President Maduro. And it kind of highlights how, in a way, this is a team sport. And there are times when the United States government can't get the job done for various reasons, and yet were able to work with titans of foreign policy like Bill Richardson, who can still try to get the job done. So he'll be missed. He was a good friend and ally. And my heart goes out to not only his family, but also the Richardson Center and Mickey Bergman and the team. I second everything Roger said. I mean, Ambassador Richardson was the trusted third party before there were any third parties. He definitely will be missed. And it's going to be very difficult to have somebody fill his shoes. And I'll just add in that we really appreciated the help that he offered early on when we couldn't get any traction with the Trump administration. And it was good to have somebody down in D.C. going around and knocking on doors for us. Thanks, Elizabeth. And Cindy, I'll pass it to you. Sure. It's a tremendous loss. And I think for most families that worked with Governor Richardson, he was almost a center of gravity in this space. He was a champion, a leader, a trailblazer for decades, focusing on hostage and wrongful detention cases. And truly, my heart goes out to the family and to Mickey during this time. And he'll be missed greatly. Thanks, Cindy. So great. Let's jump into a bit of the meat of it. Roger, if you could just level set a little bit for people. How do wrongful detention cases come to your desk? Someone finds out that their family member is being held. How did they get to you? And how has the Levinson Act helped to enable you to do your job? Fantastic first question. So first off, I wouldn't mind thanking New America Foundation and my former boss, Peter, for hosting this. I'd also like to thank Arizona State University, also for their part in putting this together. And to thank my fellow panelists up here. This is a team effort. It's not just the government. It's people like Sarah, Elizabeth, and Ali, who actually do a lot of the hard work pie in the scenes to pull this all together. And in a way, you're all included in that, except for Colonel Liam Collins. You are not included in that. And Liam, you'll see I wore boots just in case I have to quickly escape the stage and ex-fill all the way back to the State Department. So I'm ready for it. Looking forward to your panel. Anyway, so wrongful detention has come to us in numerous ways. I've had mothers send me an email saying, Roger, I got your email from so-and-so, my son is being held in country X. The details are such. Would you please look into that? And that's actually a good thing. We take that seriously. And in other words, we have a hunger to get Americans out. And so however it gets to us, that's a good thing. So if we take that, we will go straight to consular affairs and reach out to the embassy of the country in question and start gathering all the facts that we possibly can't. Because at the end of the day, we want to build a file with the facts of the case, take the Levinson Act criteria and apply that criteria over those facts to see if it's strong enough to send to the Secretary of State for recommendation. But we also get them from embassies. You might have an embassy, a consular officer, see that someone's been arrested in a certain country, and they'll say, you know, something looks wrong about this case. They'll dig into it a little bit, and eventually we'll get a cable coming to the Department of State in Washington saying, embassies such and such believe this case to be that of a wrongful detention. And again, it's not a done deal yet. At that point, we still start gathering information. Journalists, by reporting something, I would say Catherine Squadon gave a wonderful interview. I want to say it was in the Houston Chronicle many years ago. And I don't know how I read it, but I read an interview with this grieving mother and was like, we've got to figure out whether this case belongs in our desk or not. So they come in it in various ways. But once it hits the State Department, it's really the starting point is really SPIHA and consular affairs taking a look at the case and then starting to do all the queries, whether it's going to the CIA, the embassy, talking to reporters, talking to the families. We're essentially trying to vacuum up any bit of information that allows us to build the facts of the case. And when the facts of the case are there, then as I said, we apply the Levenson Act criteria on the top to see if it feels wrongful. And that maybe gets to the, maybe the crux of your question, the Levenson Act has been seismic. For various reasons in that it codified what we do. It's actually put it into law. It's allowed us to garner resources. It's allowed us to write a report to Congress that falsely explains what we've done and what we're trying to do. But I would say the most important part to my mind is that it gives us criteria with which to evaluate these cases. Before the Levenson Act came out, I think we were just kind of winging it. We would try to get a sense of whether someone was held purely because they were an American citizen and a country was leveraging us. And now we can take a look at that criteria and actually take a look at some of these cases and bring them on board. And I would argue that one of the reasons that we've seen an uptake since 2020 in the Mount of Wrongful Detentions is because we now have criteria. And as you probably know, and I'll end on this, when the criteria came out, we sent a cable out all over the world and every single US Embassy and every single consulate had to relook every single arrest.  I said, I know you've probably seen all your cases before, but take the criteria, apply it to the facts, and let's see if we've missed something. So I can't thank you enough and for members on Capitol Hill and everyone else who put that legislation together. But again, it's an example of the partnership of working with family members, members on Capitol Hill, their staffs, and such to bring something together that has been of great value to this enterprise. Thanks, Roger. And I ask the other panelists to forgive me because I'm gonna ask the second question to you as well because I think it's at the top of everyone's mind right now is the Iran deal that's happening. Oh, good, no comment. That was easy. I wanted to ask you just a bit because there's a lot of people out there who might be saying things to the effect of this incentivizes hostage-taking. And I wanted to give you a chance to respond to that in this kind of setting. And then Ali, I have a follow-up question but how do you see this deal coming about and what do you say to those naysayers about whether this incentivizes through these different channels? I think on the deal itself, these are things that we hope for and I can't really say much at all because it's something that we wanna wait until it's all over and then we're going to be very open and engaging with members of the public press, Congress, et cetera. But in terms of your question, the United States has made some trades in the last day two and a half years. The Secretary of State and the President have together worked to make some very hard decisions to bring Americans back. They're hard decisions to make. And yet in some of these trades that have gone down range, we've just not seen the bump up in numbers and we're still gonna run the math. But I would say anecdotally right now, despite the fact that we've, I would say I can think of five people that we've traded during the Biden administration, we've just not seen luck uptick and if anything, I might say that the number of wrongful detainees is actually going down. So you'd think that if you made a trade that would incentivize everyone and everyone would be out there trying to grab every American that they possibly could to use this leverage against us and the data is just not showing that. And I do wanna get a bit into deterrence on top of that afterward. But Ali, I wanted to give you a chance to speak from your perspective as a third party intermediary, how you see the Iran deal and how important adversaries or partners in other countries might be helping us and how we should be thinking about that. I think as an outside third party, I just get about the people who are gonna be released and their families. So towards the end, everything is gonna be political. We're in a political year. People will have different view of anything that happens based on their partisan lens. And to the most part, the American people understand the importance of having these folks back with their loved ones and their families. So if a government official can say no comment as a third party, no, no, no, no comment. Other one I said. But third parties play a very important role. And they play important role in trying to help the government sometimes go around bureaucracy, sometimes open channels and it's difficult for governments to open, reach out into regions that's difficult for the US government to diplomatically reach out to or operationally reach out to and dealing with other partners and government partners overseas in explaining the US of you in order to kind of like grease the wheels for Roger and others to get involved. I think it's extremely important for third party to be very well trusted by all players, especially the US government, have the knowledge, know exactly what they are doing because sometimes third party can complicate a case more than it need to be complicated. Sometimes for reasons that has to do, let's say, I wanna say promotion or whatever, it might also create some difficulties in moving forward and solving a case. So I think from the report, the Folly Foundation just put out, we had about 25 cases this year that were solved. 17 of them were from the, there's two different ways. There's two different categories here. You have the hostages and you have the wrongfully detained. From the wrongfully detained, I think we had 25 cases, 17 of them were just diplomatic efforts of State Department and the US government and Roger. 12 of them were third party and government. So there is definitely a big space for trusted third parties. They have to be trusted in order to get involved and I think they can help the families and they also can help the US government reach to a good conclusion bringing those folks back to their loved ones. Thanks, Allie. Elizabeth, I wanna ask you a bit about your own experience. So your brother has been held since 2018. You've seen over two administrations how these kind of cases are being handled. What's your perspective on what we can be doing better? How should we be thinking about this and how has the hostage diplomacy as a foreign policy grown from what you've seen since 2018? Well, it has been, it's almost been five years since Paul was wrongfully detained and I actually, I don't like the term wrongfully detained. I consider Paul a hostage because he's being held by a foreign government who wants something for him and that's hostage taking. So I tend to refer to it as state sponsored hostage taking rather than wrongful detention because I think wrongful detention is too soft of a term to describe what's going on. And I would say, I'd like to speak just for a second as part of this response to this whole business about, does giving some kind of trade or whatever incentivize further hostage taking. And I'd like to point out very particularly my brother's case because Paul was arrested, no trade was made for him, but then Trevor Reed and Brittany Griner were both taken. So the Russians were incentivized by their own minds. As to what they thought. It had nothing to do with anything that we have or have not done in response. So what a hostile foreign government decides to do and why they decide to hold Americans. There are a myriad of reasons but it very rarely in my opinion from what I've seen in five years has anything to do with a trade that went before. Now I will say though in Russia's case that we have seen them try to play the US government with their trades. In other words, at least Brittany Griner and not Paul because they knew of the partisan chaos that that would cause back here. And so one of the things that I have been doing recently is pushing to make sure that Paul is not left behind for a third time. We have another case and I feel for any family in this situation and any detainee, but I want to see Paul home. And so my job when I'm here in DC is to go to the NSC, the State Department and such and say thank you for all the work you're doing because we have seen a huge upturn particularly after the Levinson Act has passed and in this administration of people really caring and trying to do as much as they can. But you can't say that every stone is being left unturned if there are some stones that still need to be turned over. If there are some boulders that we've gently pushed against but we haven't done anything more with. And so I have to come down as a family member representing Paul who can't be here and ask the government to push over those boulders to do what it takes to actually get my brother home. It is no good to go 80%. This other 20% that would result in a win is what is necessary. And I look for a winning mentality from any administration. Thanks Elizabeth. And Cindy, I'm gonna ask you to speak for a minute just to build on that some of the big boulders that we see. What information from the report could we take and really push maybe if we had to prioritize one or two of the findings in the report that we should be encouraging Congress and new legislation to build on the Levinson Act? What would you say we should be thinking about? Yeah, to build, you know, I think it's great. Everything that Elizabeth just said because she represents a family's voice and the work that we do at the Foley Foundation may come alongside family members. So we work with them days after their loved one is either kidnapped or picked up in a foreign government. And so we understand the challenges families face as they try to navigate the DC in hostage enterprise. Most families don't even know what the hostage recovery fusion cell is, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. They're just not aware, but the Levinson Act has been and I agree it's been a lynchpin to the hostage enterprise. But the biggest challenge and I would say this even for wrongful detainee families and for the audience, I think it's important to know the only one that has the authority to make the determination for a wrongful detention is the Secretary of State. So some of these families to be able to get that wrongful detention determination to be able to get access to Ambassador Carson's office there is an enormous challenge. And I think the largest challenge and one of the biggest takeaways is the fact is to identify the fact that there's a gap between how the State Department might view a case versus how a family views their case. And a family can have a lot of information, a lot of intelligence, but it's unclear whether or not that internal process in the State Department before it reaches the State House office if they have all of that. So it's really an opaque process for a lot of these families. So one of the things that we would like to do and it builds off of our recommendations as well is to help try to close that gap. So it's less of a opaque process for the families so they know what they're fighting for, what they're fighting against, they really just don't know. And it can take a few months to get the designation or it can take a couple of years and it would just be advantageous and helpful for families so they can know, they wanna put that right foot in front of them, they've made the left step, they wanna make the right step. Which direction does that need to go? And I think there's a lot of room within our US government to be able to close that gap to help make that more of a transparent process for families. Thanks, Cindy. And I think that there is work being done on the Hill in that regard. And I'd love to give you a chance to respond but I'm conscious of time and I really wanna get to deterrence because that's where my passion is right now because I think that it's great that we're bringing so many people home but we need to stop this practice. So I wanted to ask both of you and I'll have you guys weigh in in a second but the secretary had in 2021 been part of the Canada Initiative, the Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention and State-to-State Relations. What's happened since then? What should we be looking to? I know the secretary is very big on deterrence. How should we be thinking about this both from a government, non-government and private corporation perspective? I'll try to be very tight on that. By the way, I should say thank you to Cynthia for that great report, another wonderful report that you've put out and also to the Foley Foundation. I see Ellen back there scribbling notes but thanks for all the work that you've done and this report is actually very important to us so thank you. In terms of deterrence, the secretary, I think within the first 14 days of his time here he put his hand on my shoulder and said we've got to get this to where this problem goes away that we put it on the dustbin of history and this may take 10 to 15 years but we have to start it now. And since then we have been working with the Canadians. They're up to 74 signatures at this point. You may or may not know but at the UN General Assembly in New York next week the Canadians are hosting a gathering to talk about the declaration. The United States is co-hosting along with Costa Rica. So the secretary has stayed right on top of this. He's kept it front and center. And I would say is I just want to make sure that everyone else has a chance to talk here. We try to look at this very holistically. I think right now something happens in the foreign policy arena and the United States feels they have to go for a deterrence effort. They'll quickly reach in their bag of tricks and pull out sanctions. And it's probably it might be an overused tool by this point. We would like to take a look at this more broadly across the all elements of national power, what you might call the dime bill. Diplomacy, information, military, economic, legal efforts, economic, financial, informational aspects. What can we do across the entire elements of U.S. national power to start using tools to make a country not do this anymore? To raise the price of this so that a country like Iran, for example, will say, you know what? We used to do this, but now if we do it again, the U.S. is going to raise the cost. But in a way that's not the entire answer. This has to be a multilateral effort. Right now the Iranians are gonna take hostages from the Swedes, the Belgians, the French, the United States, country X, country Y, country Z. And then they'll make their separate deals with each. We wanna get it to the point where a country suffers one of their citizens being arbitrarily detained in Iran and 10, 20, 30 countries all band together and tell the Iranians, you've done something wrong. We believe this person's wrongfully detained and we're all getting together to use these tools across all elements of our national power to raise the cost of this. If we can successfully do that over the next 10 to 15 years, we can take a practice which is essentially 4,500 years old and put that away. Thanks, Roger. And I'm just gonna weigh in here as an active moderator and say that I think there's a couple of things that you and I have talked about that would build on that and the U.S. can lead the way in terms of making wrongful detention officially a crime as part of Title 18 or opening up the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act to allow for private litigation against wrongful detention. I also think from an American perspective, we need to stop having people travel to these countries and build more awareness so the State Department has a website for do not travel to certain countries or the risk of wrongful detention but making more awareness of those risks so that people don't go to these countries. Ali, I know you had some thoughts on the declaration. I wanted to give you a chance to add it and I think we're wrapping up on... Oh, okay. Well, I think the Canadian initiative is a very important step. As Roger said, there is, I think, more than 74 co-signers. I think we need to have a common definition between all our partners and because what's happening, like for example, I'll give you an example instead of talking around it, Geoff Whitkey was kidnapped in a Sahara region but he was kidnapped because they thought he was French and they know the French policy in giving concession but when they found he's an American, they kept him for seven years. Same thing with sister Sue Allen. So every country, even from our allies and partners and Western partners have a different definitions in dealing with these things. You know, constraining the liberty if any individual is illegal according to international law and according to UN laws. However, they always define it as a hostage, not wrongfully detained. So states are using this, like states like Iran or Russia or China and many of the entities that's using the wrongfully detained just to use that term for the sake of argument, they are using it because they are trying to get something and those individuals or these countries are heavily sanctioned anyway and they are pariah states, some of them anyway. So just putting additional sanction on the regime is not gonna affect the people who are making these decisions, probably affect the people. So we need some kind of an international coordination with the international community in dealing with these two issues, not only from a hostage perspective, but also as a nation states using detention as an international relation tool that they have. So this is essential. This is important to have something like this and hopefully that down the road can be an international love and sin act, right? Codified all these things in international law and international treaties. The other thing is prevention. I think I would love to see, for example, if you're buying a ticket even online from any of the platforms, something comes up that it explains to you the danger of going to that place and you have to say, yes, I agree or I read that and understand the complication of what you're gonna put your family through and what you're gonna put your country through. So I think that can be something the travel industry and state department hopefully can work together on something like. The third, I think, is pre-deployment to training. Journalists, I think the Foley Foundation, they have a course for journalists to independent journals, especially who go overseas. Also, this pre-deployment training can be done with coordination sometimes of the US government or by independent third-party experts for NGOs, faith-based organizations, individuals, groups of people who are more at risk, students and so forth to go for research to these areas.  They know what their families need to do. They prepare themselves just in case. So these are things that can happen and I can see them happening, but we definitely need to do it in order to create prevention and also to create deterrence. Thanks, and I'm gonna go to you in a second. I just wanna say for the record that I've been trying to get in touch with the ad council. I really think we need some public service announcements around this and I think when somebody goes to search for a location in Google, you should get targeted ads as a result of travel to Iran or travel to Russia so that you see some of these risks and have more of that awareness as well as the hostage flag being up at passport agencies or I understand that Congress is putting in the passport book some legislation to have information in your passport book about the risk of wrongful detention. Elizabeth, I know you have some thoughts on this. Well, I had wanted to throw another sort of entity in there that I think could play a part in helping with hostage taking a wrongful detention. We tend to look to the government and to NGOs to solve these situations but we are letting corporations, large corporations who already operate globally and have contacts and connections in different countries, we're letting them off the hook. They are allowed to not participate in helping bring Americans home. And I feel very strongly about this because my brother was a corporate security director for BorgWarner Automotive and would travel around the world doing business for them. And so he was not in Russia on business, he was there to help a friend with a wedding but they had contacts and the ability to potentially help Paul in those early days. And instead what they did was they made sure that their investors were protected and they eventually a few months later terminated him so that he was no longer an employee. He hadn't, at that time, there was no Robert Levinson act so it took him almost a year and a half to be declared wrongfully detained and it was just the biggest blow to him that not only was he the global security director but he had created a process for dealing with hostage taking and kidnapping and his own corporation didn't apply it to him. Another case that I only know of of course as an observer is the Citgo corporation when the Citgo 6 were taken and they did not do what needed to be done for their employees. So we see on the other hand the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are doing what they can't, for Jason Rezaian and now for Evan Gershkovich, they have a bully pulpit and they're definitely able to weigh in but is that at the expense of some of these other detainees like my brother for example. So what I am looking for is for a way to, whether it has to come from the government or how else to have a level of accountability from global corporations who might have connections and ways to help, whether it's help the US government, help the Svihar or whatever, but that that is considered only the, that's the acceptable standard and not helping is considered unacceptable. Thanks Elizabeth. And I think we brought a lot of information into a really small discussion. I think we could talk all day about this but I know we're out of time so. Oh, good. Oh, I got the hook. Okay. Okay, good. All right, perfect. Then I can go over to Cindy. I don't know, Cindy if you want to weigh in on your perspective from everything that's just been said. Five more. Okay. Sure, I'd be happy to. I mean, of course going last years everybody had great opinions on this. It's challenging. At the end of the day, accountability is what matters. Having the world watching when you're committing crimes, that does something. You know, and I agree. I agree with sanctions, right? Like, you know, there's sanction fatigue, right? But at the same time, you know, if we look at the sanctions that we do have is do we have the ability to delist some of these individuals? Does that help, would that help in steps and negotiations or lead to future and further negotiations? In addition to that, you know, along with what Ali was saying, having that international attention, having that broad definition, so it impacts globally. You know, there's the international convention against taking a passage that, you know, that was written in 79 that has not been updated to include hostages taken by foreign governments. That would be a good tool to use. My last suggestion, I'll be real brief here and this is kind of a long stretch here is the United Nations again, what would happen if you had, if you, here's the word again, if you do sanction somebody globally?  But in addition to that, the UN will come on top and also sanction that individual that meets their criteria. And they usually, and they typically do that within the first week, up to a month when the US does designate. And that restricts travel globally for the countries that do participate as well. So that's just another look at that. But again, it's really difficult. The challenge here with holding individuals responsible for state hostage taking essentially is how high up the chain do you go? You know, what, you know, how is a sanction effective if, you know, if, because you can't hold the entire regime accountable when you can, but at the same time, how effective are individual sanctions if it's difficult to be able to identify which individual is responsible for those human rights violations, I wouldn't say. They have to feel the direct impact of it. Yes. Can I give you some good news? I would offer that when the president put out his executive order last summer, President Biden, he actually directed that we keep pushing on this deterrence effort. So it's not even just the secretary of state saying you will, it's the president of the United States with all executive authority saying, to the interagency, figure this out and let's get a deterrence effort up and running. And additionally, he did give us a sanctioning authority within the sphere and we've so far used it against the Russian FSB, their intelligence services and the Iranians IRGC IO. So there is an ability within the Spihal realm to like throw a sanction down on an offending organization or person. But the most important thing is everything that we're talking about, we have an order and a director from the president to figure this out and make it happen. Yes, and I think when those sanctions did come out, Josh, I'm not sure who it was exactly, but said that it's okay to build sanctions upon existing sanctions because it's about hostage-taking, it's about wrongful detention-taking. And so I think seeing more Levinson Act sanctions is something that's very much welcome and then building upon that. I do wanna allow for one or two questions out of the audience. I'm told I have a time for that now. So Peter. So this is really, first of all, a comment about Roger. Roger is, I think, one of the very few senior officials who was held over by the Trump administration, from the Trump administration into the Biden administration precisely because he's been so effective and the families really wanted him to stay in that position. So just wanted to thank you for all the work that you did. It was your leadership, Peter. I learned when I worked for you. The other thing is I wanted to put a little meat on the bones because Ali had been talking about third parties. And Ali was involved in an effort, I think it's all public now, that involved David Bradley, who's the former chairman of the board here at New America, which is Theo Padnos, an American journalist, was taken by an al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria and held for, I think, at least two years. And Ali and David Bradley were instrumental third parties in getting him out. So Ali, just if you could reflect a little bit on what you can say about that. You know, I think the way we were dealing with hostages and, excuse me, wrongfully detained was very different before than it is now. It was very complicated and frustrating to deal with the government. And I think due to the leadership in the FBI today, there is a different culture looking into things and more cooperation between the bureau and outside third party. And I mean, just to build what you said, Spihar, Roger, his office, everybody in the office, they have been fantastic to work with. We really feel that we are one team. I think with Theo, it was very difficult to reach out into the groups in Syria. We dealt with a trusted, I think at the time, Qatar to reach out to some opposition groups in Syria and those opposition groups reached out to the folks who were holding Theo. And there was a deal that was facilitated through I think Secretary Kerry and other folks who had involved in this. And I don't wanna go on a lot of details because sometimes we utilize, we still utilize some of these tactics. So I prefer to keep it, and one of the things about third parties, I believe that the moment that they start talking about what they do a lot, the moment that means that we're having failure because you need to operate a little bit behind the scene just to facilitate what needs to be done. And we have a lot of friends around the world, a lot of partners around the world. And those partners have been instrumental and continue to be instrumental in solving a lot of the difficult cases. And I think what I can talk about, what I cannot talk about, I think it's better to have Roger talk about these things. I think you already said no comment. We have one more question. Yeah, me and Colin, senior fellow with New America. I guess as many of the panelists know, my background in hostage recovery is probably a little different than what we're talking about here, though it might have a role in deterrence for non-state actors, but I don't wanna ask about that, but the media, we haven't really talked about that. So I can imagine the media can be helpful in bringing awareness, but at the same time, when you're trying to get a deal across the finish line, you're just like, can you just stop? We're close, now you're causing problems at home with politics at home, or the actor you're trying to deal with. So it might be a question for Roger or someone else on the panel, but what's the role of the media? And do you find them helpful or harmful in your efforts? Well, thanks for that question. Liam and I, when we were young officers, we served together in Germany before we went off and did some more high-speed hostage rescue stuff, so great American hero right there. I look at the media as, this may be kind of strange to say from a government perspective, but I look at them as a part of hostage recovery enterprise. They've done so much to bring awareness to this whole topic. They've brought cases to our attention. They've held us accountable. I mean, I probably have one or two uncomfortable interviews, I would say almost every week, to where I'm held accountable by the media. And we actually, strangely, I think appreciate that. I think when you have a journalist asking hard questions, that's all right. I think they have a reason to and you all have a need to know a lot of this stuff. When it gets classified, I've been encouraged by the amount of journalists who when we say this is going on, please hold that story. I would say almost 100% of the time they do that, even if they lose what could have been a groundbreaking release. So overall, I would say the journalists we've had the opportunity to work with have done a great job of doing all the things that you would expect of a journalist. And yet in that one area, I guess those few examples where it could actually violate national security, they've been kind enough not to report. Specifically, you might talk about what's going on right now. I think everyone's doing their job and part of our job is not say too much or even say nothing until after the fact. And I think we have that relationship. But to my mind, we've not really had anything go seriously into the ground because of reporting. Maybe that will happen in the future. We make sure that we work with journalists. We have a very good relation all day long. We're talking to them. So I think in building those relationships we can make sure that we do our part and they do their jobs as well. And again, I'll repeat, because of what they do, I feel like they're a part of the hostage recovery enterprise. That scratch the issue. I answered that. And I'm just gonna add to that. And then I know we're now officially out of time, but I'm just gonna add from a family perspective, I think that they're really, it's really important that they also have the courage to cover the stories that maybe aren't as sexy. We were talking in the green room before this about how important it is to recognize when people come home that they actually came home as opposed to the mechanics of the deal and beating up poor Roger or others about the deal itself. But focus on celebrating that five Americans, hopefully, God willing, come home next week or the week after, whenever it might be. I also wanted to add, I've been doing this since 2007 when my father was first taken. I think we've grown in this ecosystem tremendously and we continue to move forward in such a great direction. And I hope one day we won't have to have these discussions because maybe we'll have brought everybody home and stopped it. But until that day, it's been a pleasure to have these colleagues next to me and hopefully we'll have something similar in the future.


Hello and welcome to the NPTEL course on an introduction to programming through C++. I am Abhiram Ranade and in this lecture sequence I am going to talk about cosmological simulation and the reading for this is chapter 19 of the book. So let me begin by saying a few very very broad things. So you could say that the goal of science is to understand phenomena so that we can predict the future. Predicting the future is sort of a major test of science. And what this means? Well given the state of a system today we need to say what will happen to it tomorrow. In contrast the goal of engineering is to decide how should we interact with the system so that we get the state we want. And these questions are actually interesting in every field, pretty much every field. So in cosmology the questions would be how did the universe start and what happens tomorrow. In meteorology the question is what will the weather be like tomorrow and even in something like biology these questions are very important and for example these questions effectively are asking well how does an organism grow and even how can we make it grow well. The goal for today is to write a program that can predict the position of stars after some time given the position and velocities today. So this is the central question of cosmology and we are going to look into it. But the methods we use in principle are applicable to almost every other problem. So what is cosmological simulation? Well we are given positions velocities and masses of some n stars and we will use r sub i v sub i for the positions and velocities of the i th star and m sub i for the weight mass of the i th star. And since the positions and velocities are functions of time we may put 0 after r i and p i and I should point out that r i and p i are vectors. So they have 3 coordinates each. What do we want? Well we want the positions and velocities at some time t which we will specify. So we want to know how our universe has evolved and we also want a movie of this evolution exactly what happens to the stars. Well of course this requires us to know some physics and the main thing it requires is how one star exerts force on another star.  Here g is a constant and let me explain what that r i minus r j means.  So let this be any origin and let us say this is r i and let us say this is r j. So our mass m i is over here and our mass m j is over here and we really want this distance. So r j minus r i so this is r j going in this direction minus r i is really this vector. So this vector is r j minus r i and what is being done in the slide is that we are taking the magnitude of this. So magnitude of r j minus r i so we are dropping the direction and we are squaring it. So this is the famous inverse square law that the force varies as the product of the masses and inversely as the square of the distance between them. And what is the direction of the force? So the direction of the force is from star i to star j so it is an attractive force. So the force on star i due to star j is attractive so that the star i is going to be attracted towards m j. So we can write this as the unit vector in this direction. So the direction can be indicated by the unit vector from star i to star j and alternatively the unit vector may be written as this which is the vector divided by so it is r j minus r i which is the vector itself in the direction i to j divided by magnitude of r j minus r i. So this would be the unit vector because we are dividing by its magnitude. So now we can substitute this quantity into this so to say to get a vector. So what happens?  So what has changed? So this was the magnitude to it we are multiplying by the unit vector. So now this becomes a vector quantity and its magnitude is still going to be this. So we now have the force due to star i due to star j on star i as this vector. Now in doing this cosmological simulation we want the total force on star i due to all other stars. So this is simply obtained by adding up this quantity for all j which are not equal to i. And in fact we are most interested in the acceleration so that will be this divided by the mass of i. So it is the same expression except that the mass of i has been divided out. So this is what we need to know in order to calculate the forces and the acceleration and in addition of course we know we need to know Newton's laws Newton's laws of motion. So or we need to know basic kinematics basic kinematics is that if there is a certain velocity then that velocity is the derivative or the velocity is the rate of change of the position and the acceleration is the derivative or the rate of change of the velocity. So here is an outline of this lecture sequence. So I am going to start by discussing the basic method or the first order method as it is also called. Then I will talk about an algorithm for cosmological simulation using the basic method. Then I will talk about a more accurate second order method and an algorithm based on that. After that I will show you the code for the second order algorithm and a demo and then I will conclude. So what is the basic method and this basic method is due to Euler. So the input to the basic method is the value of a state variable at time t. It could be position, it could be velocity, it could be temperature. The method really is applicable to pretty much anything not just cosmology. So and we want to know what the value is at time some t prime bigger than t. So the main idea is to approximate it, approximate the whole process using the derivative. So what does that mean? So it means that if f is the variable you want to estimate and you are given this value f of t. So we said that the value of at time t was given to you so f of t is given to you and you want to know the value at time t dash but let us say for a minute that we want to know the value at some t plus delta. Then the value at time t plus delta can be written as f of t plus f dash t the derivative times the time difference. So maybe I should draw a picture over here. So say time is going in this direction and I am plotting the variable in this direction. So suppose the curve of that f, the plot of f versus time looks something like this and so let us say this is t and let us say this is t plus delta. So we do not know this point but we want to know this, this is the point that we want to know, this is the point that we do know. So what the method is saying is that at this point you can approximate the curve by the tangent. So this is the tangent and then you are going to multiply the tangent by this. So this is delta and notice that the slope of the tangent. So f dash t is the slope of tangent at time t. So and the slope is nothing but this distance h divided by delta. So all that is saying is that h is equal to f dash of t plus sorry f dash of t times delta. So this h is f dash of t times delta. So what is this entire thing? This entire thing is this distance and that is f of t. So f of t plus f dash t times delta that is what we have written over here. So it just, this is just a simple thing which comes about by approximating the curve by a tangent at that same point and another way to think about it is that we have already talked about the Taylor series expansion. So this is just the Taylor series expansion to one term or in addition the increase is expressed in using one more term. So this is called the first order estimate and it is called so because delta appears with power 1. Now this expression turns out to be reasonably accurate for small delta and delta is often called the step size. So how do we, what do we do if we want to go all the way till time t dash, well we divide this interval into steps of small size delta that is step size and then take as many steps as needed to go from t to t plus t dash. So how many steps will be needed? Well we want to cover the distance t dash minus t so that many divided by delta that many steps are needed. So we repeat this t dash minus t upon delta times so that we will first get t of, we will get f of t plus delta then f of t plus 2 delta f of t plus 3 delta and so on substituting t plus delta in place of t over here and keep going in that manner. So this is the basic first order method and it requires us to know the derivatives at all points and I should also say that this applies to scalar or vector state variables. So f could be a scalar, f could be a vector. So what if f is a vector, well then we are taking the derivative of each of the three components separately. So how do we use this for our cosmology problem?  Well f dash is the derivative of the position so it is the velocity so it is v i. So of course these are functions of time but I have not put time here right now just to keep my notation simple. And let us say for simplicity that t is 0, so then what does this equation look like? Well so instead of f we are putting in r i the position of star i and t is 0 so this is just delta and then this f is just this r i and t is 0 and this is v sub i because we said that f dash is v sub i and the delta is there. So what have we said that if you want to know the position at time delta and given you know the position at time 0 then to the position at time 0 you just have to add the velocity times the whatever time interval that is going to elapse and this is going to be the velocity at the beginning of the interval but the point is that if the interval is small enough we can say that this is the velocity for the entire thing. So this is an approximation that is why we have put in this approximation approximately equal to sin over here but if the interval is small then this is not bad this will be essentially constant during that interval. So that is it that is what this expression that we had on the last slide means as far as the position is concerned. And it is reasonable for small delta as we just said because in a small time interval we can sort of assume that look the velocity will not change all that much. Now the velocity actually changes so we also have to apply to the velocity so we are now going to ask what if this f were to be representing the velocity well then what does f dash represent? So we said earlier that the derivative of the velocity is the acceleration so this is nothing but the acceleration. So what does that get us well it says that V dash of delta or the velocity at time delta is the original velocity so it is the original velocity plus whatever acceleration that might have accumulated in that time difference delta. So again it is kind of a reasonable thing. And now let us use what we know about acceleration well we mentioned earlier that the acceleration on of star i due to every other star is proportional to the mass of the star times the distance between them upon the square of the distance and of course the q of the distance well so this is a vector quantity and this is a scalar quantity so it really is mass upon square of distance in the direction in this direction. And in our earlier expressions these zeros were not there so time was not mentioned but here we are we want to apply this to time 0. So we actually know this let me point out that we actually know this quantity why because we are given the positions at times at time 0. So therefore we know the accelerations at time 0 we are also given the velocities at time 0 so therefore we can calculate this as well. So we know the velocity at time 0 so we can calculate this we know the velocity at time 0 and we know the acceleration at time 0 because the acceleration is this which depends only on the positions and we know the positions. So basically what has happened is that given the position and the velocity at time 0 we are able to determine the position and the velocity at time delta for all delta sorry for all i so for all the stars. So basically we can predict what happens to our system after delta time units and of course delta has to be a small number in order for this prediction to be reasonably accurate but once we can do it for a small number we can just keep on repeating it and then we will get we can get to whatever time we want. So here we got we went from 0 to delta but then we can start with this and apply these two updates and then we will get to t equals 2 delta and 3 delta and so on. So the first order algorithm is quite simple but I am going to state it nevertheless you probably many of you probably have understood what exactly we are doing here. So in the first step we are going to read the simulation duration step size and the number of stars into the variables t delta and n. Then for each star we are going to read its initial position and velocity and mass into these variables so these are arrays actually arrays or vectors but let us say arrays because we also have the physics vector right now so the ith element of the arrays will get the initial position of the velocity and the initial position and the velocity and of course the mass is not changing but the mass of the ith star will be put in the ith element of the vector m. And then we have to go from let us say the time 0 to some target time t so that is what this the simulation duration is so from 0 the current time to the target time t. So we have to take steps s going from 1 to t upon delta so we have to take t upon delta steps. So what happens in each step? So basically we are going to do what we said on the last slide. So here what I have done is I have calculated the acceleration of star i due to all the other stars and this is at the current time. I have put down instead of the subscript j I have put down index j because the mass of the jth star is now in m of j and similarly r of j minus r of i to get the difference between the vector difference the vector distance between the jth star and the ith star and this is of course the cube of the magnitude of the distance. So this we are going to calculate with whatever values we have in r i r j so these are at time 0. So this is just the acceleration at acceleration of star i at time 0 because in the first iteration this these are values at time 0 and in general you will see that they are going to be at time s minus 1 times delta. So s in the first round is going to be 1 and so this is indeed going to be in the first iteration it is going to be the acceleration at time 0. Then we are going to apply the position update rule. So the position update rule was that we take the current position add to it the current velocity times delta and we will get the new position at time delta ahead of whatever time we started. So this is going to give us position at s delta because at the very beginning over here we knew the quantity r for all stars at time 0 or in general at time s minus 1 s minus 1 times delta. So when we do this update we will know the quantity at time s delta and this is the velocity update. So the velocity update says take the acceleration at time s minus 1 delta or 0 in the first iteration and multiply it by delta and add it to the velocity at 0. So this is actually 0 or s minus 1 times delta. So this is exactly what I have written down in the previous slide but we have put it in a loop and we have sort of put it in terms of variables rather than formulae. So that is it, that is the entire algorithm. So at the end of this we will have r i and v i contain the velocities and the positions and velocities of the i star and at time t because we would have taken the right number of steps over here. Now the performance of this is actually not that great and let me just give you a clue to this. So even if I take two bodies let us say the sun and the earth. So what this ends up doing is that the earth will very quickly spiral out from the sun. So this is the sun, see this is supposed to be the orbit of the earth and if the earth is somewhere over here in the first step it will go a little bit outside then it will go further outside and by the time it comes over here it will have gone out substantially and within 2, 3 turns it would go out very far and this would not work at all. Or let me put it another way if I want this to work I would have to take that step size so small that it would take an excruciating amount of time to make the simulation go through any reasonable amount of time period. So that step size would have to be really small and if the step size delta is very small then that really means that the number of steps I have to take is going to be huge. So we are going to fix that though but let me just remind you what we have discussed. Well we discussed the basic cosmological simulation problem and we discussed the first order method due to Euler and next we are going to talk about a second order method but before that we will take a quick break.


I'm Michael Evans Kibuwage. I was born in 1st of October 1997. I schooled first of all in primary, it was Nairobi South Primary School in South B. Then I went further to progress my studies at Mukumo Boys High School. I joined in 2013 to 2016. The same time I was in FISA Academy. So FISA Academy was the one which sponsored me to go to Mukumo Boys. From my school, you know, I was in a school that sponsored me my education. So I thought about myself and it was like it is really motivating for me because what can I do for the school now that they are paying my fees. So I thought it was wise considering the payment of the school fee so I give my best and I focus on football. So always a good thing to be called in the national team, you know many players wish to be here. So I can say in the national team it's a good thing as it encourages one even when you go back to the league. We are very strong because in national team we always call when you are at high. You cannot just be called here to come and relax. So I can say if you are called in the national team then you are truly a great player. Now considering I'm young with the good advice I receive from the coaches and everyone. I just dream to play abroad in the best league unlike Van Dyke from Liverpool here. No, I don't have any regrets for the move because now at least I have the much play time. KCB need me the most because in FC you have more great players. So even play time comes once when maybe you have an injury but in KCB you are now a regular. And the more you play the more you get to know how the league is the more you become a great player. The first loss you can say that it was just an unlucky because Sudan just used the home advantage. Because we created chance considering we are at our way field. So I think I just say football they were just lucky because we didn't use our chances. It's a good the right path we are following because we can see in this country football has really changed a lot. Because now can see the quality in the senior and we are still playing the same football even in the under 23. The head coach is still head coach also. So we still implement the same so that it's like we are preparing here in the under 23 so that when we come the senior team still remains the same.


The following is a musical journey through the career of the game Triple H. Paul Levec has accomplished just about everything throughout his career and along the way has been fortunate enough to be Accompanied by some pretty brilliant entrance theme songs that have always suited his character to a T Whether it was an elegant classical music masterpiece or a heavy metal masher You could always recognize Tripp's music because the intros to his songs gave fans an immediate sign that it was time to play The game from blue blood to bell tolls. Let's take a look behind the themes Look, we all got to start somewhere right and that's where our story begins with the young and green game getting a gig with WCW where he would debut as the menacing monster known as terrorizing so a bit of a backstory about the name Okay, Andre Ryzen was a popular NFL wide receiver for the Atlanta Falcons at the time So Tripp's messed around with his previous gimmick of the terrorizer a name that was given to him by his legendary trainer killer Kowalski paired it with Andre's last name changed the spelling and voila terrorizing was born signed to only a one-year contract Terror wasn't rising anywhere So he was repackaged and renamed Jean-Paul Levec an uppity French aristocrat WCW being WCW Continued to use this generic butt-rock theme for him which made absolutely no sense But Paul was merely using his time in the promotion as a platform to get noticed by the WWE and his plan worked Because when his contract was up he said excuse a moi and exited center stage As a continuation of his WCW gimmick the future Triple H started off his WWF career as the Connecticut blue blood hunter Hearst Helmsley snobbish Regal and extremely arrogant Helmsley would provide free of charge lessons in etiquette and class to the unwashed masses of Wrestling fans in various taped vignettes prior to making his in-ring debut Which by the way some fun fact trivia for you was against none other than the slovenly Sexual predator himself Rock-and-roll buck zoom-hawk this classical theme obviously worked so well in the mid 1990s when hunter pranced his way down the aisle looking to rid the WWF of such disgusting riff-raff like Henry O. Godwin Duke the dumpster drossy TL hopper and Mantar with its relaxing harpsichord melody This may sound like elevator music or something you'd hear while drinking your way around the world at Epcot Center But it's a fine theme for a nobleman of trips of stature naturally If CM Punk was the voice of the voiceless then hunter Hearst Helmsley was the snootiest of the snooty The Connecticut blue blood is a far cry from just how much trips his overall character has evolved throughout his career But gifting him with this song showcased how highly the wwe thought about him That is at least until the infamous curtain call happened Sauntering to the ring to the most triumphant piece of classical music perhaps ever written the king of kings Strutted his stuff to the jubilant ode to joy from Ludwig von Beethoven Not Ludwig Borga written to celebrate the brotherhood and unity of mankind This tune was meant to convey Triple H's superiority over everyone as he won his first Intercontinental championship and was well on his way to winning the king of the ring But he had to go and break kayfabe becoming nothing more than a blue blood jobber for a little while Perhaps no entrance music spoke more to the cynical use of the late 90s than that of degeneration x Seemingly having flipped the bird or at the very least given one big giant crotch chop to the old timers and their traditions When they made their curtain call dx became the wwf's resident rebels all about thumbing their nose at the authorities and breaking all the rules Becoming the de facto leader of the group after wrestlemania 14 was Shawn Michaels dropping the ball Hunter leveled up dx and made the group hugely popular performed by the chris warn band This song will go down in history as one of the most recognizable entrance themes for any stable in wrestling Are you ready captures the feel of the attitude era with an amped up sense of chaos and arrogance to it? Oh, yeah, and if you're not down with that, we got two words for you Once upon a time triple h was not hated by the internet many fondly remember his penchant for making the timely and quick-witted Penis joke as hbk's little buddy However, all that changed in 1999 when hunter turned his back on his little buddy x pock at wrestlemania 15 And reunited with china joining the corporation trips stabbed his fellow degenerates in the back for the almighty dollar to become a Quote-unquote corporate player this also meant that he could no longer break it down as a fan favorite and had to resort to Using this jim johnston creation that served as a one month transitional theme to show his burgeoning sadistic side This track is often forgotten when discussing wrestling entrance music because it's a little generic but still has some pretty dope guitar riffs After vince mcman broke up the corporation triple h's focus shifted to the one championship that had eluded him his entire career The wwf title simply put it was now his time and it was definitely game on My time was initially released on the wwf the music volume 4 as our time and being credited to both triple h and china Is basically the final product of a song that started out being called cerebral assassin and also higher brain pattern Chris warren returns to deliver the vocals and he's really concerned about finding out if anybody knows who's sleeping with Who with so many big names fighting atop the wwe trips had to make a statement to stake his claim as the number one guy And my time was that declaration this amplified anthem served him so well during his first dominant run in becoming one of the E's top heels so manipulative so angry and so thirsty yo jimmy definitely hit us with that triple h Seeing as how joseph run simons daryl dmc mc daniels and jam master j are one of the most Influential acts in the history of hip-hop culture It should come as no surprise that the trio was also the first hip-hop act to perform live at a wrestlemania like they did Way back in 1989 however a decade later the legendary rap trio from hollis queens remixed one of the most iconic theme songs in all of pro wrestling for the rap rock compilation album wwf aggression kicking off the album with their adidas laced tight The kings is featured as the lead-off track and sees run dmc walk their way back to their rick rubin produced days Although primarily a dx theme not a triple h theme the track was mostly featured on tv being used by hunter's dx compatriots while the game was out rehabbing a knee injury It's time to break the game Cementing himself as a main event heel to carry the wwe into the new millennium Triple h began to officially refer to himself as the game written and produced by jim johnson in less than five minutes Because the song only has three chords the vibe worked wonders for trips his metalhead character Add in the fact that the wwe was able to get motorhead to sing makes this one of the most iconic wwe entrance songs of all time while my time is still a kick-ass theme in its own right Having lemmy sing your entrance is like god mode son The single distorted opening e power chord gave fans an immediate sign that the cerebral assassin had arrived Add to it the signature sound of lemmy's stern haunted gravelly voice and it was truly game over Being the boss's son-in-law probably gets you a leg up in securing the best entrance theme songs, right? Oh, well say it with me fam evolution is a mystery And gosh dang does motorhead make some incredible wrestling theme music so back when triple h was dominating the wwe In 2003 he formed an alliance with the nature boy rick flair and two impressive newcomers in dave batista and randy orton Evolution was born and with it came this impressive theme song as a modern day four horsemen Evolution was never a run to the ring together kind of faction They were more about celebrating their past present and future which line in the sand was great for It may be a bit on the slow side But a song touting the four biggest heels on the roster at the time didn't need to be speedy as soon as that clock Starts ticking the excitement builds at the beginning and this song kicked the ruthless aggression era into overdrive and your knees dying Behold the wwe's chief operating officer's theme that finally rounds out the trifecta of motorhead Mashers over the course of his 20 plus year wwe career triple h has captured every major championship Headlined multiple wrestlemania cards won the royal rumble match multiple times and spearheaded two of the most Influential factions in sports entertainment history and yet despite all these accolades the game might just be scratching the surface When it comes to his legacy this theme took over as hunter's primary music when he became the mouthpiece of the authority And when trips would be cutting 20 minute promos to open monday night raw as opposed to wrestling This song was originally released in 2006 on the wwe's reckless intent compilation album featuring rock metal rap and hip hop artists doing versions of entrance themes as well as providing additional original tracks king of kings is a perfect blend that's best for business In complementing the game's post in ring career demeanor and his powerful coo office personality We'd be remiss if we didn't talk about all of the game's theatrical high budget WrestleMania entrances the grandest stage of them all is for some superstars Not necessarily about the match they put on but more about the feeling of hearing your theme music Play you to the ring in front of thousands in attendance and the millions watching worldwide and these words definitely ring true for triple h Over the years he has taken great pride in crafting memorable entrances befitting of the show of shows from channelling his inner Arnold swatsenega to the skull king triple h is the wrestler most synonymous with having elaborate entrances that get everyone hyped up before his matches At WrestleMania 27 trips would try to end the undertaker's undefeated WrestleMania streak so he wanted to show that he was ready for war this point was hammered home as Centurion guards and metallicas for whom the bell tolls rang throughout the georgia dome as the music built to a climax Triple h emerged bathed in a spotlight and clad with a spiked cloak and skull crown Signaling that the king of kings was ready for an all out war And that's it for our documentary We hope that you've enjoyed this episode and we look forward to taking you further behind the themes in future documentaries If you have any suggestions or recommendations for us Please leave a comment down below and don't forget to give this video a massive thumbs up Go ahead and also share it with your friends You think might also enjoy it because it really helps our channel grow and reach new people Also, if you haven't already, please consider subscribing for weekly wrestling theme song content And don't forget to follow us on social media so you get all our latest updates and we will see you next time wrestling behind the themes