It's a very, very popular institution, and it's very unpopular among political elites for the exact same reason. So it's very effective, and it's brought a lot of very powerful people to book over the last 15 years or so. So the law against the, that's really weakening the powers of the KPK, one part of it, and also this new criminal law, which is going to include increased punishments on things like criticizing the president, you know, on things like extramarital sex, these sorts of things. And so, given that a big part of the reason that there was so much support for Jacobi as president both in 2014 and then again in 2019, was that he was seen as a bulwark against Islamization. And for the relatively, you know, nationalistic, pluralistic forces in Indonesia, that I think is seen as a particularly strong betrayal of those that worked so hard to get him elected. And really, he was overwhelmingly, you know, chosen by particularly, by voters in non-Muslim parts of the country in particular. So in that respect, there's a bit of a shocking shift. You know, very soon after Jacobi was re-elected, he said, well, I've been re-elected, so I have nothing more to lose. And I think we're seeing now the costs of thinking in those terms. You've got five years left to govern.  Can you say a little more about the supporters? Talk a little bit about the coalition that brought him to power and how it differs from, not just the coalition that Prabowo was trying to put together, but coalitions of his predecessors. Right, so there's, you could think of his coalition both in terms of his voters and also in terms of the political parties who helped him get there. So really the core for Jacobi, I think, is again, I mean, Indonesia's sort of loosely divided between two main streams of kind of identification, if you will. So the divide in Indonesia is not between Muslim and non-Muslim. There are far too few non-Muslims for that to be the real divide. The real divide is between those who have sort of a pluralistic view of religion in Indonesia who see Islam as one of many religions and who don't believe that Indonesia is an Islamic country, per se, and those who basically see Indonesia as fundamentally an Islamic country that has inconvenient minorities and that essentially policy should exist for the Islamic majority. And so the strongest part of support for Jacobi, both in 2014 and in 2019, was very much from the side that sees Indonesia in pluralistic terms that favors the national philosophy of Panchasila, which one of its main tenets is that one must believe in a single God, but that God does not have to be Allah. It can be other singular gods. And so really the main cleavage in both elections was really over religion, not one's religious identity in the sense of their membership, but in the sense of the view you have of what role religion should play in political life. And so that's sort of the heart of it in terms of voting, but then as a matter of elite politics and party politics, Jacobi had to get support, or at least Felti had to get support from a lot of quarters. And one quarter that he got a lot of support from this time was from the Nalata Lulama, which is a massive Islamic organization, primarily based in central and east Java. And it was largely with the support of voters from the NU that he was able to carry the, that sort of carried him to reelection in a lot of ways. So he came to power with a complex coalition, not as complex as the Malaysian example, where it's really an example of almost everybody together to get rid of the old ruling party. But in the Indonesian case, so Jacobi certainly had, has people who supported him in getting there who he's got to be attentive to. So his selection of a vice president that is so closely associated with NU. Yes. What does that say about the way he was thinking about coalition building and the role of religion in politics? And what does it say about the role of the NU in politics generally? Right, so I think that people, so a couple of different things there. I think that people can disagree about what it means that he brings in a relatively conservative Islamic figure in his vice president. So one view would be that he's sort of, he's kind of giving away the pluralist agenda. Another view is that he's trying to sort of kneecap that agenda by bringing somebody in an incredibly weak position. I think anyone who knows anything about vice presidents knows they tend not to be incredibly authoritative and powerful figures. And so it was sort of a very, I think a symbolic way of showing that this was not gonna be someone who was hostile to or anathema to the role of Islam in politics, even while clear that was not gonna be his main support base. So in my view, it was actually quite shrewd of Jacobi in the sense that it was a relatively low cost way. Arguably, I guess the jury's still out, but at least preliminarily, there's a relatively weak position to give someone which clearly got him overwhelming levels of support among this enormous Islamic organization. And so then the question becomes, well, how does that follow up in terms of policy? And then does Jacobi gonna feel, is he going to feel pressured to sign laws such as this law on non-marital sex, for instance, right? As sort of a way of paying his debts or just trying to keep that part of this, again, vast coalition of forces together in his favor. So one thing I've noticed about Indonesian politicians and we've alluded to this is that they build these electoral coalitions. And then as soon as they're elected, there's a lot of horse trading that goes on, often including with people who are their opponents in the electoral phase. What does that tell us about personality versus institutionalization in Indonesian politics? And what does it tell us about the popular expectations for change if once people are elected, there's so much horse trading, including with elements who people thought they were voting against when they voted for. That's right, that's right. Yeah, so most of the research I've done in Indonesia, the central project I've had has been tracking this process of power sharing that takes place and the way it happens after elections in Indonesia. So elections are very competitive in Indonesia, but elites are not very competitive because once the election is over, they tend to coalesce and tend to be willing to share power quite broadly. And one way that takes form is through the cabinet. So for instance, the cabinet tends to be divided very, very broadly across parties, both who supported the president in his or her race for the presidency, but also as Evan was saying, also the parties that directly opposed that candidate. So what that ends up meaning is if you're an Indonesian voter, you can vote for people, but you can't really vote against people. You certainly can't vote against parties because you just don't know who that president is going to include, exclude, and how responsive they'll be to their agenda. So as an example, so Gholkar, the former authoritarian ruling party under Suharto from the late 60s to the late 90s, Gholkar initially, they opposed Jaco in 2014 and they were initially left outside of government. They were outside of the cabinet and they've done this multiple times, but then what they do is they find a way to kind of horse trade or cow trade as they put it in Indonesia, dagang sapi trade cows, not horses. They found their way to cow trade their way in and so since 2016, Gholkar has been very much front and center and part of the ruling coalition in Indonesia and I think that helps explain in part why Jaco we can kind of look at parliament, where Gholkar is quite strong informally as well as formally and he sort of be more responsive to what you might call his elite coalition, which is kind of everybody, at least potentially everybody, everybody wants to be part of the winning coalition rather than being responsive to, although we'll see how he responds eventually to the protests, but rather than being immediately responsive to his more specific electoral coalition of people who voted for him expecting a liberal, expecting somebody who is gonna help preserve the democratic gains Indonesia has made in the last 20 years, which are quite substantial and who are I think rightly feel sort of shocked and betrayed by at least what appear to be Jaco's support for or his acquiescence to these bills being passed to parliament. So it's funny, you used the word liberal. So is liberal the right way to describe him, even for those who had that aspiration for him? And in particular, when I hear people who say he's not liberal, one of the things they quickly point to is the presence of so many military and security types in his cabinet and the coalition around him and they say, how can somebody be liberal when they're surrounded by that set of people from the elite? Yes. So how should we understand that and think about it? So I think Jaco is liberal in relative terms and he's particularly liberal or democratic in terms to his opponent from the last two elections, Probovo-Subianto, who many of you might know was the former son-in-law of the former dictator and who essentially kind of rose back into political prominence in very close sort of connivance with alliance with some of the more conservative Islamic forces in Indonesia. So Jacoey himself has never been as democratic or as liberal as his core supporters, nor as democratic nor as liberal as the protestors, the student-led protestors who you see out in the streets the past few days. So I think largely liberalism in Indonesia at the moment is kind of a defense, we're speaking in terms of defense, I don't think there was ever a prospect that Jacoey was gonna be someone who was gonna be pushing forward in all kinds of new ambitious democratic and liberal ways, but he was seen as the more reliable defender of again, these notions of panchisela, of pluralism, and again the idea that being a non-Muslim in Indonesia does not mean you're gonna be a second class, third class citizen or worse, which if you look around the region look at places like Myanmar, look at places like the Philippines, Thailand, in a lot of these cases, ethnic minorities fair, religious minorities fair, far worse, India, China, et cetera. So I don't think the idea is Jacoey is so liberal per se, I think Jacoey himself, the reason he is so well liked is because he's got a really great common touch and is seen as very kind of low-key, very hands-on, he's the kind of person who really gets out, if there's a problem he gets out, he goes and talks to people, he's got this very, very common touch, which is very, very unusual among Indonesian politicians and so he really stands out and but what he really cares about is not so much democracy, what he really cares about is development. He was a businessman, he was a mayor, what he's there to do is build infrastructure, what he's there to do is sort of generate economic growth, what he's there to do is sort of see the country thrive and prosper, that's what he's really all about and so I think when these protests, if they're seen as getting in the way of that, he's got a very strong law and order side and certainly his allies, who he's drawn from, again, largely from the military, are definitely very law and order and so I think his initial response to the protests has been in that vein and I think it's gonna be a real political problem for him if he can't step back from that a bit and try to take on and recognize the power of these demands and these protests because in Indonesia, unlike in most of the region, when these kind of protests gather strength, they tend to be quite powerful and hard to stop without serious concessions. So that begins to pivot from the politics to actually what his agenda is and how he realizes it. I've noticed, so the markets, there was a story in Bloomberg this morning that there had been a $1.2 billion equity sell-off in the third quarter of Indonesian stocks. So the markets are reacting even before he's inaugurated for second term in a fairly negative way and what I would take away from that is, number one, they're looking at the protests and number two, they're looking at the combination of a perception of growth potential against the backdrop of obstacles to reform. So if you're Jacobi and your agenda's development, you're trying to move from being a 5% growth country to a 7% growth country, what are the obstacles to that? And if we're not gonna call them a liberal, let's call them a reformer as a strongman. What does it mean to be a reformer in an Indonesian context from a developmental perspective? And how do you overcome the obstacles that you face to do that? Right, so I think that if the, again, for someone like Jacobi, if development is the main growth, then Indonesia is certainly a place that's, it's a complicated place to do business. It's a complicated place for foreign investors. It's got lots of regulations, certainly not a lot of labor market flexibility and the like, and it's largely a resource dependent economy, resources and then kind of low level, not very high skill manufacturing. And so what that has meant is on the one hand, Indonesia has actually grown quite robustly since democratization. So if people like to give you the story that authoritarian regimes grow and then democracies don't, Indonesia really kept growing after democratization in a pretty impressive way. So democracy is not really hindered growth in Indonesia, but the problems that China is having for sure because China has been a major, major market for Indonesia's natural resource exports. And so what you see is this kind of flagging of growth. In the Indonesian case, it's not a place that's really able to tax its wealthy very effectively. This is not a place with a ton of government savings, government revenue, and so they really need to attract this foreign investment. And so I think one, again, one part of this battery of laws has been laws to kind of relax restrictions on foreign investment. But Indonesia is a very, very economically nationalist place, what people call resource nationalism. There's a strong sense that Indonesia's natural resources belong to Indonesia. There was a very, very strong anti-colonial movement back in the 30s and 1940s. So there's a lot of sensitivity about outsiders controlling too much of Indonesia's natural resource wealth. And so to the extent that wealth is gonna be generated, growth will be generated, as you say, that bumping up to 7% is gonna be through kind of deregulation, welcoming in more foreign investment, there's gonna be real political resistance to that. And that's one of the reasons the protesters are out in the streets. You probably wouldn't see protests like this if it were just the natural resource law and not the criminal law and not the KPK law, but there would certainly be protests against it. But then the other real hindrance here is just the fact that you can only do so much with natural resources. And the other important point in Indonesia at the moment is the fire. You've got massive fires going on yet again in Indonesia. Malaysia and Singapore are just choked with smoke. It's not haze. They like to call it haze. It's not haze, it's smoke. And you've really got an environmental disaster going on in Indonesia as well. And so I think in the longer term, this might not be just for Jacowe's term, but ultimately the real challenge economically for Indonesia is relaxing its dependence on natural resources and trying to develop an economy that's not so dependent upon, I mean literally just burning down trees for palm oil plantations and for other uses for natural resources. So there are those deeper, broader constraints that he and the country face as well. But can you talk about some of the pieces of the agenda, though, when I hear him talk, the things I hear him talk most often about one is infrastructure, a second is education, a third is healthcare, and then a fourth is essentially diversification, economic diversification. So pick some of those apart a little bit. Talk about who the constituencies are that are pushing for those things. And then what some of the political as well as social and economic constraints are. Yeah, I think these are goals. I don't know if they're goals that are that different from what most Indonesian presidents have had. I think that Indonesia's got a pretty strong bureaucracy actually. And in fact, there's a lot more expertise in its bureaucracy than in parliament. And so what you often see with these kinds of proposals is different government ministries coming up with kind of best practices. And Indonesia is a very internationalized place. The high ranking bureaucrats there will be people who will be very internationally networked and have a pretty strong idea of what has worked elsewhere. It's not an insular place, it's an island place, but it's not an insular place at all. And so I think these kinds of agenda items are I think kind of in keeping with what we see elsewhere. I don't think there's a real Indonesia-specific story to the kind of health, education, labor, sort of reforms that are being pushed for. But I think ultimately for Jakowi, it's really about the construction. I think for people around him and businessmen around him, even these big projects like building a new national capital. If it relates to construction, if it relates to projects, anyone who studies Indonesian knows this, projects are where it's really at. People are always trying to get in on projects. And I think that the easiest parts of the agenda to fulfill will be where it would be involved. Let's give a contract to somebody to build something and do that as opposed to really changing the way education works, changing the way the healthcare system works. These are much, I think, harder reforms to do. And also these things are tricky in Indonesia because the place is so decentralized. Because one of the big decisions that was made when Indonesia democratized on 1999 was they went really all in very quickly, big bang and really decentralized in a very, very major way, which in some ways is good for democratic accountability. But in other ways, it's extremely inefficient. And I think that anything that Jakowi does in terms of deregulation, in terms of changes to the formal rules is still gonna run into this sort of thicket of different layers of government, which I think people and investors recognize from other federal, Indonesia's not literally federal, but it's de facto kind of a federal sort of system. So also Indonesia you're just gonna have very, very different kinds of constraints and different kinds of capacities in different parts of the country. So there's no singular story you can kind of tell about Indonesia. You have to kind of know where something is going, which province, which community. Right, so here's what's interesting to me about that. You said there's a lot of continuity in the agenda. And there's a lot of continuity in terms of the obstacles that they're facing. But there isn't a lot of continuity as some people in the audience know from the moment that we're at in Asia. Indonesia's not developing in a vacuum and there's actually a lot of competition that would change. There's supply chain change, there's structural change, China's, even without the trade war, China's trying to move its industry up the value chain. So there's an opportunity for countries that are all in competition with each other to number one, bottom feed off of some of that bottom 20% as China moves up the value chain. But at second there's gonna be a reorientation of supply chains, the geography of manufacturing and the countries that are gonna be the winners are those that have the right set of conditions domestically and also to some extent for foreign investment. So that's labor market flexibility, conditions for foreign investors and so on. Couple months ago I was talking to a group of CEOs and they essentially was in a low tech business but they basically gave me a list of six countries and they said, but we'd really like you to talk about kind of stack these countries for us. Think about what's going on with politics, what's going on with investment list. So here are the countries, there's Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India. And what was interesting is obviously the countries that look good on paper are not necessarily the ones that are winning from the change. And sometimes the countries that look worse on paper actually have things on the ground that make them very attractive. Cambodia is another one that's in great time to talk about. So you've got continuity of the agenda but you have this disruptive moment happening around the country. So why, to what extent do people see the moment, feel a sense of the moment? And is there an impulse politically or by business to seize the opportunity that Indonesia has? And how much of the benchmark against the competition? Yeah, well I think that in some ways this is a return to the past in Indonesia and in Southeast Asia more generally. And it relates to that point I made earlier about dependence on natural resources and kind of low edge manufacturing. Back in the 80s and 90s, after the Plaza Accords, especially the Japanese yen appreciates and Japanese investment just started flooding into Southeast Asia. And this was really a real economic boom times largely because, and also Japan, US trade tensions. So there's a real kind of return to that sort of pattern. And in a way it's kind of, I think the good news is Southeast Asia is sort of there for investment and it can benefit economically from these things. But the bad news is that yet again, here they are 30 years later and they're again trying to just attract this sort of low skilled kind of investment from Northeast Asia while China has kind of leapfrogged and China's becoming kind of an economic leader in all these areas. So I think it's a real pity that in Southeast Asia, even a place like Singapore, they haven't really proven a capacity to do that. So again, I think that they're, here they are, they've got a long, in some ways this is the easiest, most familiar thing to do if you're an Indonesian economic bureaucrat or leader. When you think about how to generate growth, you think about how to attract investment and you look to Northeast Asia and you look to these places. And so I think there's, in that respect, it might seem disruptive in the sense of the US-China relationship. But the idea of Southeast Asia, Indonesia specifically being kind of on the market and shopping for and trying to, this kind of beauty pageant of attracting foreign natural resource investment. I mean, it's the oldest story in the book at some level. So not so disruptive there. But it's clearly, as someone like Jacowe, who's so focused on growth, so focused on development, as he looks at kind of flagging growth in general, it makes all the sense in the world he's gonna think about ways to try to smooth the pathway to get, to win this beauty pageant in a sense and get as much of this foreign investment as possible. And how much the local and regional stories matter in that?  That's right, that's right. You have this new generation of local politicians that defy some of those political stereotypes. That's right, that's right. How much does that matter? Well, so it's both the local and also just the national. So it's, on the one hand, it's the fact that any local investment or regional investment you make in Indonesia has to deal with local regional government. It can't just deal with the national government for one thing. But also, you've got to deal with the political resistance to the kind of labor market reforms that you're talking about, right? So, yeah, I mean, so I'm not a CEO. So I won't try to pretend I'm a CEO. But if I'm a CEO, yes, I like labor. I don't like labor market inflexibility. But what I like even the less is political instability. And so, I mean, you should just think about France for a moment, right? Think about what happens in France every single time they try to say we're gonna finally bring about labor market flexibility. Well, the country goes into complete shutdown, right? And so the problem is these things have to be politically palatable. They have to be politically acceptable. And so there's gotta be a navigating between on the one hand recognizing the need for job creation with the fact that, again, Indonesians like people in any country have some built-in established expectations of how protected their employment is. And how when those things get, one person's reform is another person's job loss. So I think that the look at these protests and realizing, so it is certainly true the markets are dipping. And then the question kind of a puzzle, right? So what would make the markets bounce back if they really keep cracking down on the protesters but push through these labor market reforms, right? Or if they say, okay, we're gonna need to step back, make sure we've got political stability. I mean, my sense is that it's a lot worse and a lot more of what's being priced in, I would suspect is not changing views of the promise of Jacqui's reform agenda, which I think I doubt anyone was too convinced that was marching forward anyway. But I think seeing these protests, these are the biggest student protests since the policy hard time.  I think investors have to be looking and saying, okay, is there gonna be some kind of political agreement that's gonna be able to be forged here where parliament can pass these laws, but society is not gonna be completely up in arms over at the same time. So I'm sure the markets are kind of, again, they have other places to go, as you noted, and they can kind of go somewhere else and wait to make sure things stabilize. In my sense is for Jacqui, he's gonna need to meet with these protesters, make some moves in the direction to try to take the edge of these protests. He has a winning hand to play. And so far as there's a lot of sympathy for him, there's a lot of support for him. And I think if he just can separate himself from the parliament a bit here, and sort of, I think in some ways he could really position himself as a little bit of the, rather than the villain, if not the hero, at least be someone who can say, well, parliament wanted to take all of these things away, but I'm standing between you, the people in parliament, and work with me. Jacqui could come out of this if he's politically savvy about it, looking pretty good, although it looks bad at the moment, but he's got time to play this well, I think. And is he politically so? I mean, so that's the smart play. But if you're benchmarking this, the inauguration's on October 20th, right? So you got three weeks until the 20th. Then there's the first few months when people are gonna be domestically and internationally looking closely. So game that out for us, and just what do you expect? And then not just what's the smart play, but what's the likely play? Well, I think Jacqui has actually been very smart and very savvy in the way that he has dealt with Islamic protest. So these are very, very tricky issues. And in Indonesia, there's such an allergy about inter-communal conflict. There's so much fear of religious conflict and the like. So when during his first term, there was just some of you, I'm sure many of you know, there was this enormous controversy over the governor of Jakarta, who had been Jacqui's running mate, ethnic Chinese gentleman, who had then replaced Jacqui when Jacqui became president. Goes by the name Ahok. Ahok was accused of insulting Islam and led to these truly massive protests, largest sort of Islamic protests we've seen in Indonesia. And this is very, very delicate stuff. And I think that in Jacqui's case, he managed to not, he didn't use force. They kind of allowed the protests to take place. And I think it was a kind of, he met with the protesters and I think that he, and again, with his vice presidential selection, I think he's basically, he managed to sort of inoculate himself from and try to reduce polarization in a way. In a sense, what Indonesian politicians tend to be very, very good at, unlike politicians elsewhere, is reducing polarization and making sure things don't kind of spiral out of control. Now they do that in many ways by colluding with each other. So they're downsized to this, but they do tend to be good at reducing polarization. What's different here is this is not him trying to deal with the inter-communal, inter-religious question. It's dealing with people who are his own, kind of from his own camp. And to the extent that he sees his re-election as really emboldening him and sort of saying, well, who are you to protest me after I've just won this new stamp of approval, you could see him doubling down. And he certainly does have, again, these allies who are very much law and order types. And those people have his ear. So I think that if he responds similarly in the past, he's shown the skill to be able to manage this in exactly the way I described. I expect he'll come up with some version of that because I think as these protests go on, he sees this is not gonna die. He doesn't want this to have his second term as defined. I mean, basically all the roads into Jakarta, except the one to the airport, as I understand, are now closed. This is not, a development guy doesn't like that. I think he's gonna, my hope, my hunch, is he's gonna find a way to sort of negotiate through this and not completely just dig his heels in on it. So I'm relatively optimistic. He'll stand back from where he's been so far. But I also didn't think that he would respond initially as he did either. So he could continue to disappoint. Politicians often do, so. Okay. So that's Jakarta. Yeah.  I mean, of course Jakarta's not the only set of protests he's facing right now. That's right.  And it seems to be a media blackout and an information blackout. Yes. But what I've seen that's seeped through is that something like 30 people were shot dead. And so that raises a whole other set of issues. Yes. The common variable of being protest, but a lot of uncommon variables in terms of the way they started, what seems to be driving them and the implications from the body politic in Indonesia. So talk a little bit about that. Sure. Well, kind of an enduring fact of Indonesia. It's unbelievable. It's a cliche, but unbelievably diverse country sprawling archipelago, many different religions, different ethnic groups, different languages, et cetera. And, but that doesn't mean, but the country's remarkably nationalistic, remarkably cohesive given all of that. And so you've actually had very little in relative terms, you know, separatist sentiment in the country compared to what you might expect. But one of the main hotbeds for that has been Papua. So the western half of Papua New Guinea, which is the eastern extreme of Indonesia, and basically since democratization, 1998, 1999, there've been basically, there were sort of three areas initially, three regions that were real problem spots. One was East Timur, and that was settled very, very quickly by referendum and then it separated, became a separate country. It was horrible violence, punitive violence against the Timuris for choosing so, but they did get their independence. Aceh, the insurgency picked up again and you eventually got a real peace deal and you have Aceh kind of brought back into the fold after the very tragic tsunami that hit there in 2004. But again, so political negotiation and an arrangement was met. And then now there's Papua, and Papua is the one that they haven't really managed to sort of negotiate their way out of or deal with yet. And I think partly it's just, it's so out of Indonesian people's consciousness. It's so far away. And I think the Papuans are seen as so kind of not, you know, not central to how Indonesia's think of who they are. And as you say, when things get bad, these things get blacked out. So there's not a lot of, I think, awareness or it's not very salient in the political center, especially it's one of the issues that's coming up in protest, but it's pretty low level compared to these questions of corruption and these restrictive, religiously motivated laws and the like. So really worrisome thing with, well, of course many, many worrisome things when this kind of violence breaks out, but one particularly worrisome thing for the country as a whole I think is that what seems to have prompted the latest round of violence in Papua was actually an ethnic conflict that broke out in Java and some anti-Papuan discrimination that took place there. Now anyone who knows anything about Indonesian history and particularly the Suharto period knows that nothing justifies authoritarian controls and putting tight controls on anything like inter-communal conflict, right? And so to the extent that again, so my worry at the moment, really probably my biggest worry is that again, all of these kind of military law and order types who surround Jakowi are gonna be looking around and saying, well, if you look at what's happening with Papua, we've really in general, we're gonna need a lot more emergency powers, a lot more controls in place to keep things from, keep conflicts from getting out of control and that you'll see kind of the conflicts combined in that kind of way and the protesters will be seen through the same lens as well people out in the streets protesting are kind of by nature sectarian and they're not doing for the nation, they're splitting the country, they're destabilizing the country and we have to deal with them all in the same kind of way. Students have been shot in Jakarta, so we can't, and this is obviously incredibly tragic and we have to be concerned that that's gonna get worse rather than better if there's not I think pretty quickly and politically and I think historically astute recognition that students see themselves as the conscious of the nation in Indonesia. When they come out in this kind of force, they're not going to go away lightly and it's gonna need to be some kind of deal struck. Back in 2014, this is something kind of like this happened, the new parliament led by the opposition to Jakoi, they abolished regional elections and massive protests as a result and the former president, President Yuriyono, signed this presidential decree saying no, we're not going to abolish regional elections, people see them as the best way of getting rid of corrupt politicians and people really value this and so essentially it's a veto but a presidential directive and so really the Jakoi is in a position now where he can do the same thing and hopefully he'll be willing to use at least some of these, some of these presidential powers to say these laws, problems passed are really, I mean very clearly against the will of voters and at least to some degree try to take some of the heat out of the flame. 20 plus years since Suharto fell from power right in the late 90s. So should we conclude from this that the institutions of Indonesian democracy are weak and brittle? Or as somebody argued, somebody that we both know argued to me that the fact that it's Jakoi's core supporters and constituents that are on the street, that's actually a sign of the strength and resilience of Indonesian democracy because it's not the opposition that's out there trying to carry the election forward, it's actually people who are trying to express themselves after the election in a way that they think their man, the president will be responsible. That's right, that's right. Yeah, I mean Indonesia I think has always had this very, very muscular student movement. I mean they essentially won independence from the Dutch through an armed struggle that was led by youth. So the term Pamuda in Indonesia or youth has this kind of almost magical power to it, right? If you're the Pamuda it means you have a conscious, you're not opportunistic, it is your job to save the country when the country's in peril, right? And so like any muscle memory is a problem. And so it's been a while, we haven't seen as much protest in the past decade or so. You don't see Indonesian politics in the news very often and that's a good thing because things actually in Indonesia are pretty in general pretty stable. So I do think what we're seeing with these protests is that muscle memory is not lost. I mean it's striking, you think about, if you just look at photos of these student protests in Jakarta today and then look at photos from 1998, the fashion might be a little different, the cell phones, there'd be some differences but they look the same. And these were people who weren't born or had barely been born when their predecessors were out protesting. So it just shows you, it shows the importance of history for one thing, it's nothing else. If you come away from this afternoon with nothing else, just know the history of these places when you think about what's going on there. In Indonesia this shows you the power of the history and of memory and these students know what their role is. It is their role to be the ones. When the political class all gets together and says you know what, we can all prevent corruption investigations. We can all do this, right? The people and the students of the front-end, they say no. And so is this good news or bad news? Well, what parliament did was bad news. The protest in response is good news. The crackdown in response is bad news. So you've got this mix going on right now. It's gonna, we have to see how it plays out. I mean students getting shot is not good. This is not, obviously this is bad news. This is a bad, it's an unfortunate set of events. My hope is that the president will realize his electoral coalition is what matters. Not his elite coalition. You got to keep the electoral coalition to do anything else and he just can't squander it. He's got to stand back from this kind of repressive initial response and figure out a way to you know, not give parliament everything it wants in this case. So I want to open it up so the audience gets a crack at you and we have more of a discussion. But I do want to ask you one last thing because you're a comparativist. You're not just an individual specialist. What does Indonesia mean to Southeast Asia generally? Not in the ASEAN sense or the strategic sense, but in the sense of its democratic evolution over the last couple of decades. In terms of how you think as a student of democratic institutions within this region. It's example, good or bad, or about the demonstration effects of what it's going through. No, I think Indonesia is, I mean if you told anyone who studied Indonesia 25 years ago, this is what Indonesia will look like in 25 years. I mean, will you take this deal or what you actually expect to happen?  I mean, it's done unbelievably well given that there was the risk the country was going to completely come apart become a failed state. People really thought this in 1997, 98. The idea this would be a military regime forever because it was pretty economically successful and there wasn't a lot of anti-military sentiment as far as people could tell. The fact the military just take over military coup, all of these kinds of things. And the fact that it's been such a robust democracy and like ours, like every democracy in the world, a flawed one and one that has struggles and one that especially struggles with illiberal democracy and illiberal trends that are worldwide right now. I think a lot of what we see in Indonesia right now in fact is more to do with just the way that the state is being securitized. Police, military, just everywhere media, civil society is just struggling against new kinds of policing, new kinds of tactics against them. So I think a lot of the struggles Indonesia has are not specific to Indonesia. So I still think of it as, this might rub people the wrong way, but I do think of Indonesia as a beacon. Now it's a beacon that it brightens and fades and it has its problems. It has very, very big problems and very, very big challenges. But I think given compared to expectations and if you look at the Philippines right now, if you look at Thailand, these are the cases that I think were again, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which would be doing better? You wouldn't really know. I think Indonesia sort of has, I think pretty definitively outperformed Thailand and the Philippines in terms of democratic performance over the last decade or so, even the last two decades arguably and that's remarkable given the things that we think about what it takes to produce democracy. The fact that again, if people say things like, well, Islam and democracy, can they mix? Well, the world's largest Muslim country is also a very robust democracy. And in fact, Malaysia too. Arguably the two most democratic countries in Southeast Asia now are, it's two main Muslim countries. So I think these are, this means a lot in Southeast Asia. I think it should mean a lot to the world. Great. All right, so let's open it up and we have a microphone and if you could just say who you are. So Dan knows who you are and let's start with Tom over here. Thank you, Tom Kerr, others. Dan, thanks very much for the remarks. Very interesting. Could you go back to the divide you talked about between the two sort of more pluralist, somewhat secular conception of Indonesia and the more conservative Islamist one. Is that a divide that you feel portends something troubling that could deepen and become problematic or was it something that you think flared up in the last few years more as an electoral game that some people were playing or this incident regarding the mayor that somehow might have been a one-time thing. And maybe you could draw in a comparison. You did this interesting piece with Maya Tudor on comparing Indonesia and India. The rise of Hindu nationalism, India's intolerant majoritarian sort of force. Do you worry about that with Indonesia? Yeah. The way that the Indonesian Republic is defined, it's defined in an inclusive way. It's defined in a non-religious way. Again, you can't be an atheist if you're Indonesian. You can't be a Shia Muslim. You can't be lots of things. It's not a secular place, right? But if the spirit of secularism is that the state is relatively neutral among people of different belief, again, it is by no means a perfect practitioner of that, but it is certainly more like that than in many other places to be sure you think about Pakistan, you think about Malaysia, these places where it's very clear who the favored, who the favored religion is. Not just informally, but formally. And so I guess I think what's going on in Indonesia is Jakowi is trying to manage it. And I think he's tried to manage it in part by absorbing it, not by rejecting, not by cracking down. Again, there was absolutely, there wasn't even policing. I mean, much less repression of these enormous Islamist protests that took place surrounding the Ahab case, right? So we really just don't know. We don't know whether that's the right move or the wrong move. My sense is it's the right move. Again, he won reelection. And the thing is that Indonesia could become, I guess the way I see it in a way, in comparative terms, it could become very polarized like a Thailand, right? So Thailand became very polarized between different identity groups in a way, red shirts, yellow shirts. And democracy broke down in that way. But then the other danger besides polarization is this sort of collusion scenario. And we see that in the Philippines where basically the entire political elite is just sort of cravenly supporting, and there's just no opposition to Duterte whatsoever. And so just the whole political elite can watch a democratically elected leader turn authoritarian and do absolutely nothing to check that elected leader, right? So one could imagine if in Indonesia they keep doing things in the exact same way, it's not gonna worsen sectarianism and polarization, but you're gonna wind up in that Philippine-like scenario. So I think there are these dueling dangers in a way. I think Indonesia has a lot of raw material in society for dealing with intolerance. I think it's gained worse rather than better, but I'm hopeful that it's gonna, and again it's something where elections become very much about religion, and then it does seem to tie down a bit. So it's not just an electoral game, but it is something that is really exacerbated by the way electoral competition is happening. So I'm sort of cautiously optimistic that they're handling it well, I would say. We have one right here. Good afternoon and thank you for being here. My name is Julian Kyle Lewis from the American University here in Washington. The former Secretary of Defense, General Mattis, he traveled to Indonesia on an official state visit and they were performing like a ceremony for him. And just like out of nowhere, they just pulled out like a bunch of snakes and just bit all the snakes heads off and everybody just thought it was just like the most amazing thing and made international news. I was wondering if you could just speak to like culturally like what that is, like what that means, because we don't really, you don't see any armies do crazy stuff like that. And in addition to that, the other half of our question is President Obama's daughter recently began taking classes at the University of Michigan where you are a professor, Professor Slater. So in the event that she would so happen to register for your course, what would she expect? Thanks. Heads off to class. Indonesia's a really, really diverse, super diverse place. You should go. You should visit. Everybody should visit. Everybody should go. Everybody should travel around as much as they possibly can and see all the different kinds of, all the different kinds of practices that people have. And so I think it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful place. So I wouldn't be, it's neither just the beaches of Bali nor is it some of these stories nor is it just the act of killing. So like a lot of people see the act of killing and think that this is, they get these kind of chilling view of the place. So impunity is a very big problem in Indonesia as it is in a lot of places. But no, it's a remarkable, remarkable place. And I think that the, if you want to understand why democracy has succeeded as much as it has, it's really, it's not Indonesian politicians who've done it, it's the Indonesian people who've done it. I mean, they've stuck with, they have, they've twice rejected this, again, very former authoritarian populist figure and voted for, again, the much more moderate candidate. And so I think Indonesia's, I think it's a good example.  And so I think it's again, a place that you can learn a lot from and try to understand how is it that you generate a strong civil society in a place with so much diversity and so much difference over questions of religion, so much linguistic, ethnic diversity. Place is not, it's not terribly rich either, right? It's not like it's, it's not like people in South Korea out with candlelight, you know, these are a lot of people from tough backgrounds who wind up being very politically engaged and very, very politically involved. It's a lot of heroes. I'm gonna do one on the back and then we'll come back to the front. Hi, my name is Karen St. John. I'm retired, but I did live in Indonesia for a few years and I left in 2007. So back before I left, there was a lot of movement in terms of trying to give Papua greater regional autonomy and a bigger portion of the natural resource wealth. And I was wondering what's been going on in terms of economic development in Papua. And then second, after living in Jakarta, I mean, it's very vulnerable to climate change and just wondering what the medium to long-term outlook for the city is.  I mean, no, like no government is equipped. Like show me a government that's mean that the state of Florida is not equipped to deal with, you know, what's going on in Florida right now. I mean, this is, I mean, none of us are equipped for. And so, again, this is something where the natural resources question, as an environmental question, it's both local and global, right?  It's got a fever, right? Well, you extend that metaphor and think about, you know, our rainforest, right? Think about our forests and think about like what's happening to Amazon right now, what's happening in Indonesia right now. I think if these are the lungs of the world, well, we've got lung disease too. And, you know, these are really, really serious problems. And that's not Papua specific, but I think it's just worth noting.   I mean, just people don't go. They get kind of left to their own devices. And I think it's kind of a Wild West sort of phenomenon, right? And so again, there's not much media coverage. We don't really know. I'm sure the kinds of abuses going on must be pretty chilling if we really knew about them because there's not a lot of accountability. And so I think that it's just something where it's in some ways, you know, like some of the more distant areas of Myanmar where you had just kind of ongoing conflicts and then people figure out how to start making money in conflict zones and no one from the outside wants to really try to fix it. And so it just kind of goes in this low, this low miserable burn for long periods of time. And so now we're seeing this flare-up which is sort of kind of an outside shock, right? Because you've got this, I don't know if it was YouTube but some equivalent of YouTube and a video then circulates of this, you know, this awful conflict that took place in Java. And so that kind of disrupts things. But in general, I think it's kind of a slow, it's a slow, sad story. And the question is what then, what breaks that narrative? In Aceh, it took a tsunami, you know, paradoxically. It's hard to see where the impetus is for things in Papua to change in a significant way from the way they've been for quite some time, sadly. Okay, let's come down front, here. That's it, I guess.  Oh, hi, my name is Bob Pringle. I'm retired foreign service and retired sometime, director of the Indonesia-Philippine project at something called the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm delighted to hear that you're starting something a little bit like that, even though it may be a scale program because I, and what I did, basically, do a big, a lot of opinions about what I thought should be American interests in those two places are actually more my ideas than anything else because I discovered you can't possibly be impartial about it. I suppose, given what my job is, I should say I'm gonna do my job and keep talking about emerging democracies. And so these questions of under what conditions democracies emerge, why are they struggling around so much of the world? And why do authoritarian regimes last as long as they do? I think Southeast Asia's got really, really interesting less, really not the kind of, you know, but the, essentially, it's not really a free and fair playing field, right? And so that at the level of elections that it's hard for opposition to break through, but then you also have cases like the Philippines, which are really more like an illiberal democracy kind of scenario in which you have, you know, essentially people get elected freely and fairly and then they govern in ways that just completely defy, you know, all kinds of basic principles of how, you know, democracies are supposed to work. And so I think that there are all around the world, there are other, you know, examples of that. I think Southeast Asia can be a little bit of, you know, an interesting place to find examples of multiple, of all of these things going on. You can learn a lot about the rest of the world by working in Southeast Asia, I think. So I'm really interested in the question of democratization for sure, but I've always been very interested in questions of development, questions of governance. And so one nice thing about taking on an assignment like this that's specific to the region is I can really, you know, kind of get, get those juices flowing again and start thinking a little more about development. And it's, I, you've thought about these things a lot back in the 90s and it's kind of funny to watch all the discussion about China and investments and Southeast Asia parade and trying to attract, and I was like, this sounds really familiar.  It's like, you know, a few decades have passed but the same story is unfolding in some ways. So I'll be thinking a lot about that as well, so. But I'm just looking forward to learning, not to teaching people things, but to learning things. Okay, ooh, lots of hands. Let's do two at a time. So we'll do one here and then one here. We're gonna do one from each side. Thank you, I'm curious. So as you look at Chicoi's second term and his objectives, which are largely development, education of the workforce, do you anticipate that there will be the kind of structural changes that will invariably result in disruptions of interest and possibly more conflict? I mean, do you anticipate some of these issues arising? Able to withstand some of the pressures for backslide in various ways. But I don't think he has an agenda of structural change. So I don't think there's any real place where that would necessarily come from unless things start really unraveling in some way. So I think Indonesia is a very big place. It's a fragmented place, it's not an easy place to move in a decisive direction even if you want to. I think for Chicoi, again, he runs things like a mare. He thinks about what kind of people on the street want, how do we get more development, how do we make things work a little better, and hopefully we'll have five years of things working a little better and some problems tidied up and five more years of not having someone trying to run the country like an autocracy as is happening in so many other places. So hopefully we can, that would be, I think at this point where it's not so much about whether Chicoi can do all kinds of great new things as much as can he hold the line against the trends around the world and in Indonesia as well. Okay, let's come down front here. Thank you, I'm Carter Banker from the Albright Stonebridge Group, and I wanted to ask you, I think both of you referenced that the protesters were mostly supporters of Chicoi, but from at least what I've seen, it seems like a lot of them were gold putters or non-voters. I mean, I think it's hard to tell, but I'm wondering from what you've observed, what do you see the role of those non-voters in this protest movement? Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think, yeah, people should not be jumping to conclusions about which of these students were doing what in the last election and the like. So I think that the argument would be that these are like social forces from which Chicoi would generally draw support, I think is the point. And I think there's just this, it's a little bit of a, you get a little bit of vertigo because during the election, everything is around this axis of kind of religion and identity, right? And so these are the kind of folks who would have very clearly been opposed to Poboho and these sorts of the kinds of laws being pushed, right? And so, but then once the election's over, that has then kind of at least gone by the wayside, at least for the moment, and then you're seeing this, well now what's really going on is a government which is kind of working what seems to be in a very anti-reformist kind of way. And so just the cleavage kind of just switches like very quickly, right? I mean, in an enduring way in Indonesia, you've got a religious cleavage in politics, but you also have this reform cleavage, you know, and then the goal putters. So goal put means like not to, you don't have to go long on puti, right? The white group.  Just to be clear. So the idea is that there's this, again the students of the heart of it, in an enduring way in Indonesia, people who see the real struggle in the country as building a stronger democracy, you know, free of corruption and trying to remove and weaken old authoritarian forces in the military. And like, that's an enduring cleavage in politics as well. And it only comes out at certain moments. And again, this is one of these moments where there it is again. It hasn't gone away. But you know, the fact that someone like Jaco in 2016 kind of teams up with Gold Car and kind of just, I'm gonna join, and essentially try to lead what I would call the party cartel, that can work pretty well for a while. It doesn't galvanize resistance. But when you, I mean, to put it bluntly, parliament tried to take too much. It didn't just take one cookie out of the cookie jar. It tried to take all the cookies at once out of the cookie jar. And people saw them do it and they responded. So it is not only by no means should one assume that every protestor out there was a Jaco'i voter or out there campaign for Jaco'i. A lot of them, I think, have a much more radical approach to politics. And would sort of say that, you know, Indonesian democracy is seriously deeply flawed and very principled critics of the shortcomings of Indonesian democracy for sure. Okay, let's go in the back there since you're standing right next to him. Hi, thanks very much. I'm David Timberman with Freedom House, an occasional writer on the Philippines. It's waiting for the Carnegie Endowment. For the Carnegie Endowment. Dan, you mentioned Prabowo, you haven't mentioned Megawati. I'm just curious, can you sort of, can you talk a little bit more about the elite constraints or the elite dynamics that, you know, affect what Jaco'i might or might not do going forward? Yeah, it's just so funny, honestly. I mean, in Indonesia, you would just think, you would think that elites would feel a lot more constrained by their voters and a lot less constrained by each other. But that does not tend to be the way they think about politics. So if you think about the previous president, President Yudhoyono, he was in this incredibly strong position. He won these huge landslide victories. And he lived, he absolutely governed in terror. He governed in nonstop terror that he was gonna be impeached. He was gonna be toppled. He was gonna be removed. And so he had to share power with everybody. Megawati didn't wanna join his government. He begged her for 10 years, like, please, I don't want anybody in opposition. I want everyone supporting me. Something really bad could happen. There's this incredible fear of opposition coming from within the elite, which is just, I think, at some level, pathological. It simply doesn't make sense. And so I think that in Jaco'i's case, so there's no real reason why he should be constrained by Megawati at all. Megawati is the former president. It's still the leader of Jaco'i's political party, the PDIP. So I don't think that he should feel highly constrained. I suppose that if his view is I need, what I really care about is infrastructure, which I think is basically true. I think he basically cares about infrastructure. And if his calculation is to get the parliament to vote for my infrastructure bills, I need to sign these, because I'm sure Jaco'i is not rejoicing at signing the anti-KPK law. He's not rejoicing at a law criminalizing nonmarital sex. And there's just no way, this is something he could feel good about doing. I can't imagine that he does. But again, he just seems to feel constrained. Seems to feel that's the only way he's gonna get other things that he wants. And so again, hopefully he can look out in the streets and see a source of potential power. He should feel in a way empowered by, it's good to feel empowered by winning an election, but not in the way that you say, now I can ignore the people who just voted for me.  So hopefully that's the lesson he'll draw from this, but it's, again, I'm not a CEO. I've also never been a president.  So we'll see. But it's a very curious kind of thing. I think the real risk in Indonesia I'll have to say is that what Negawadi will do, what Sonya Gandhi did in India, which is try to construct this dynastic party. And so I think one reason why, to go back to Tom's question about India, a big problem in India is that the Congress party became so dynastic and very unpopular. That's one reason they've floundered so badly. If the PDIP really weakens in Indonesia, I mean, they're against the KPK, they've gone along with these laws. They are there, an unbelievably weak defender of pluralism and reform of any sort, but they're kind of the best that Indonesia has.  Electrally end in the interim. All right, well, now I have to go to Len Pasko because he was the American ambassador in Indonesia during some of the period that you were just talking about. Set me straight. I got a loud voice too, so thank you. Thank you very much. It was extremely interesting. And I agreed with your last comment that I left Indonesia a dozen years ago and not much has changed. And so it all seemed to ring true for me. But the one thing that really jolted me is when you put Inu into the bad guys category of the religious groups. I mean, this is the party of Gus Dure. Things must have really changed in the last decade. So could you go a little bit more into Inu and Muhammadiyah and the main strength out there of what most people see as been the main stabilizer of Indonesian society now? Yes, yeah. No, thank you for giving me a chance to clarify that. No, I did not mean to put Inu in the bad guy lump. I think the vice presidential nominee he picked was a particularly conservative member of the Inu. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the relatively tolerant brand of Islam that thrives in the lots of Islam is saving Indonesian democracy to a large extent. Because again, I think the India comparison is informative here. You could basically have the, I don't know if it's still the world's largest Islam organization. It used to be, and probably still is, this massive multi-million member Islamic organization rallying full force behind who is clearly the more pluralistic, less religiously motivated of the two presidential candidates in, to some degree, 2014 and especially in 2019. It's because in Indonesia, nationalism is not defined by religion. You can be a pious Muslim and a devout nationalist at the same time in Indonesia, right? There's a way in which religion and nationalism don't, they work together in a way. You can be a different kind of Muslim. You don't have to put religion first to be a good nationalist. This is the problem in India now is that increasingly Hinduism to be a good nationalist means being a hardcore Hindu first kind of figure. So I don't want to get outside my depth here on India, but I think that that's the risk in general. And so the fact that Jakowi had a strategy to bring the lots of Islam on board, Gustav, of course, was, I mean, despite his problems as president, obviously one of the heroes of democratic reform from the late 1990s, no question. Well, to some degree, this is, I think, debatable, but one reason why his relatively tolerant, liberal approach was adopted by the lots of Islam and during his years was because it's such a hierarchical organization. The fact he could kind of, it's his views, values weren't necessarily shared by the rank and file as widely as one might hope. But I do think for sure, the lots of Islam and Muhammadiyah have been on the whole, bulwarks for tolerance and democracy in Indonesia in really important and impressive ways. The challenges have come more from some of these new groups, new organizations, things like the Islamic Defenders Front, which are kind of outside the ambit of these very well-established mass organizations and that have a much more radical, much more intolerance agenda. Come back to this side here. Virginia Ferris with the Catholic Bishops Conference. So your comment just segues nicely into my question about Saudi Arabia and to what extent it is very influential in terms of its support for the Islamic Defenders Front and also, since I'm coming from the Catholic Bishops Conference, to what extent do you see Christian organizations, which are obviously a very much minority, to what extent are they playing a bridge-building role in terms of mitigating conflict? Well, I think lots of, there are lots of very principled religious organizations that play a very supportive role in terms of reducing conflict. There are Christian groups, there are Islamic groups, there are all kinds of religions. So overwhelmingly, what religious organizations do in Indonesia is work toward religious peace. And again, that's because the country's motto, the country's whole philosophy is built around diversity. And so, as is so often the case, you need your motto to be unity and diversity because if you just left things alone, there wouldn't be unity and diversity, right? I mean, anyone who's had a lot of conversations in Indonesia would just talk to people because there's a lot of, of course people can be very, very intolerant in their views. And then the trick is for people with authority to try to keep those things, channel things in a way that's productive rather than destructive. Indonesia has plenty of destructive impulses, so does our own United States of America. Any country in the world has plenty of destructive impulses. It's a question of how they're dealt with. So I think that the fact that if you're a Catholic bishop in Indonesia or a Catholic leader in Indonesia that at least formally by the rules, you have a very big role to play, I think puts Indonesia in a different category than a lot of places where for someone from a religious minority to try to assume that kind of role would be just, it would be objectionable right off the bat. So Indonesia has its struggles, it has its extremists, it has its prejudices. It has long had a very broad set of influential people working against those tendencies and trying to keep the country on track. And so we just can kind of hope for their continued success and keep giving them moral support in every way that we can. Well, the Saudis are, I mean, this is something, again, not an expert on Saudi Arabia. I do know they have a lot of money. I do know that they are certainly have, there've been efforts to try to shape, so for instance, religious instruction in a lot of the world. But here again is where I think, you know your history, right? So in Indonesia, this organization, Nadlata Ulama I was talking about is first and foremost, it is an institution built around religious instruction in rural areas. And so for the Saudis to come in and completely change the way that Nadlata Ulama teaches religion and the way that these pazantran and these santri who are these religious teachers, the way that they function, it's gonna be a lot harder for them to do it there than they could in a place that doesn't have this incredibly strong grassroots sort of organization. So again, I think back to the ambassador's question and point, these massive organizations are their potential resources, and real potential benefits. And again, the fact that Jacqui, to just like kind of a pure human rights activist, right? And so who I kind of agree with on principle in every way, but who look at the move he made, say you're essentially leaning toward radical Islam or you're doing these things you shouldn't be doing. I just think, well, you're also, you're doing it in a way that brings Nadlata Ulama on board. You're rejuvenating, rebuilding that old historical alliance between the nationalist party that the kind of Sukarnoist forces in the country, and then Nadlata Ulama. You're rebuilding that. And that is what defeated Proboa. When anything else, it was that alliance that did it. And I think that's, again, is that a deal that's gonna create, it's already creating problems, right? It's gonna be a battle. It's gonna be a struggle, but that's what democracy is. You're just gonna consistently every, you never win the fight. The round is, there's gonna be another round. And we'll just have to see how the more tolerant forces fare against them for sure. And one, and you're absolutely right, these external forces, there are things going around the world in terms of religious extremism, not just in Islam, but in Christianity as well, that have to be watched and that everywhere is gonna be shaping. One down in the middle here. Thank you. My name is Jonathan. I'm from the East West Center. I'm also from Manila. So this has been very interesting to me. My question is on the influence of social media and the political discourse now in Indonesia. Are social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, are they shaping political opinion, political sentiment as strongly in Indonesia as they are in the Philippines? I would say that they are, they matter in similar ways in the Philippines. I don't know if I would say shaping in exactly the same way. I mean, I definitely think that, I think the way that I would think about it is that things like what Twitter and Facebook do is they just create this sort of funnel effect. And sort of, in this kind of assiloing and assorting of people into different communities of conversation. So it's not so much that Facebook is doing something or Twitter is doing something or that there's, but just the fact that people are increasingly in these kind of echo chambers and that they are pretty, they're very robust ecologies for false news and rumors and panic to kind of, to fester. I think these are real challenges. I think that in terms of regulating social media or just trying some way to manage these kinds of, these kinds of problems is a very, very real, real issue. On the other hand, you don't get the kind of protest that you've had over the past few days without being able to use social media to organize them, right? So technology, it might be a bit of a kind of a cliche to say it's politically neutral or normatively neutral. I think that's largely the case. They each come with their own specific challenges and benefits, but it's certainly the case that Indonesians are very, very wired in. They're certainly getting their, getting their information, responding and organizing through these kinds of media as well. So anything happening around the world I think is happening in Indonesia as well. It's not a distinctive Indonesia story. It's just, again, it's part of the global picture. Thanks very much. My name is Gibson Haynes. I work at the Center for International Private Enterprise, I'm just down the street and I used to be an intern in the Beijing branch here. So this is the first election where the presidential and parliamentary elections have been held simultaneously. And that's definitely had an impact on how the horse trading has taken place. Do you think that has any impact on how we've seen Jacoi react to this last kind of last ditch round of laws? And if so, what happens in the future with that? Well, you would think, if anything, again, back to David's question before, you would think this would empower the president. So in past elections, you could at least make the argument that the president needed to build a coalition of parties and parliaments to get elected and so therefore they're more accountable to and more responsive to and more trembling in their boots in response to parliament because that's how they got there. And now you just don't need that anymore. And it's not the case that you have to, again, promise cabinet seats to a party to get them to endorse you for president. You just don't have to do these things where you shouldn't have to anymore in the same way. So you would think that the kind of, what at least at round one of the battle is the president sort of seemingly just wide open door to have parliament do whatever they want to do is pretty surprising. You would think you'd be in a stronger position to signal that's not something to support. Like I'm about to get inaugurated. I'm not gonna see fires and road closures and students getting shot in the streets of Jakarta so you can gut the anti-corruption commission. Like not gonna happen. Like you will not have my support, right? You think he was in a stronger position to do that. But I guess either his calculation is that he's not or he's become persuaded. I mean the elite discourse around the KPK is just so completely off.  I mean one of the last times I was in Jakarta I was being told by people, well the KPK is really, really bad for corruption. They keep catching all these corrupt people. Like they're clearly not helping. Like there's clearly so, look at all the corrupt people they're catching. And this is sort of like the kind of thing you hear because just there's this disbelief that it's necessary or that it's been helpful. So it puzzles me. But it's not just Jakowi. There's a more general puzzlement I have about Indonesian political elites being so incredibly self-referential. So totally focused on what other elites are doing or thinking as opposed to, but again, especially the students, the pamuta, the youth, they're not gonna be ignored. And they're doing it again. Got a few more minutes, is there any other questions? Yes. One of the things that we saw, oh sorry, Zach Abuser from the National War Culture. One of the things that we saw during the first term of Jakowi was that the military through policies such as Bala Negara or through the new terrorism law has really been trying to claw back some powers. And it's not just been in internal security. We've seen it in terms of broadening the definition of what a threat is to the state or in terms of food security. How do you see civil military relations playing out in the second term? Thanks. That's a good question. And I think that the, again, one reason, I mean, Jakowi, I think he saw that the real danger to him was coming from some of these emerging, radical, extremist Islamic forces. And so for him, the military was a nice ballast against that. The problem is that's a deal with people who have their own agenda and see things in a certain way. And again, everything is security and everything is, again, it's a very new order discourse that we've been hearing a lot more in Indonesia for sure, right? And in these last few days for sure, everything is gonna make the country tear apart. Everything is gonna make the country collapse. You need a strong hand, these kinds of things. So I would say civil military relations is such that I think we expect more of the same, which is not a good thing in the sense that it means military influence in politics is gonna stay very, very high. Now the, and it is only aligning, the silver lining with the dark cloud is that especially when you look around the region, you look at some place like Thailand, for instance, right? You look at a place like Myanmar and look at the role of the military there. So if you look at those three cases, right? The three most historically militarized cases in Southeast Asia, right? Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, where is the influence of the military the least? It's Indonesia, right? Now, this is not to say it's not still enormous, but it is to say with Jakowi as president and with Jakowi doing the things he's doing, the risks of a coup, the risks like a military takeover are essentially nil, right? And again, one wouldn't say that in Myanmar right now. Thailand, of course, they've only in the slightest way undone the coup that existed before. So again, it's a little bit like the story with radical Islam, right? There's sort of the Indonesian way, if there is one, it's not culture, it's politics. The Indonesian way is you accommodate, you compromise, someone's got some strengths so you make sure to make a deal that they're not entirely excluded and become a real problem for you and they end up having a lot of influence. And so I think you're gonna still see a lot of that and the downsides of that are very, very real. And I think actually perhaps I wouldn't say more real but more immediate, more imminent, more obvious than the cases of political Islam where I think you could make the case that, again, like giving the vice presidency is a way to make sure you're not giving a lot more. All right, well with that, Dan, I'm thrilled we got you to Washington today but more importantly, I'm really thrilled you're our new teammate. I'm thrilled to be part of this team. Stay tuned because Dan's gonna help us build out some new streams of work here on Southeast Asia within the Asia program where we're really excited to have him join us. So please join me in thanking Dan. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yes.


This history of science video will be on a somewhat specialized topic. Why did Aristotle think that women have fewer teeth than men? This question has become something of an internet meme used to mock Aristotle. So whenever there's a site that doesn't approve of Aristotle very much, they will always bring up this fact that Aristotle thought that women had fewer teeth than men, sometimes used to show how women were oppressed in those days, although exactly how you oppress people by mistaking their number of teeth I've never quite managed to figure out. This may be started by Bertrand Russell. So Bertrand Russell mentioned Aristotle's views on women's teeth several times in his writing. For example, in his book The Impact of Science on Society, he said, Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men, although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wife's mouths. Okay, well, that's very amusing, but if you think about it a bit, you'll notice there are several things that are a bit fishy about Bertrand Russell's claim. So we can ask the following questions. First of all, if Aristotle didn't look, where did he get the information from? Did he just look atop on the internet or whatever the equivalent was in those days? This seems unlikely because Aristotle was one of the earliest and greatest observational scientists and one thing he was really good at was making enormous numbers of observations. The second question that occurs to me is, did Bertrand Russell examine any of his wife's mouths before saying Aristotle was wrong? Well, I don't know, but he certainly never mentioned he did, and who knows?  And here, he definitely didn't. So let's have a look and see what Aristotle actually wrote. I think I'll zoom in a bit so you can read it. So here is the section on women's teeth. You see, Aristotle says, males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine. Okay, that seems clear enough. Aristotle really did say that men have more teeth than women. But then he goes on, in the case of other animals, observations have not yet been made. Okay, well, that very strongly implies that Aristotle did observe some woman's teeth, or maybe he got his research student to do it, who knows? So why did he get the answer wrong? Well, nobody really knows. The most obvious guess is that it's something to do with wisdom teeth. So some people don't get wisdom teeth at all or get them very late, and maybe whoever Aristotle checked didn't have wisdom teeth. Well, probably not, because if we go on a bit, we see that Aristotle knew all about wisdom teeth. He says, the last teeth that come in man are molar, so-called wisdom teeth, in the case of both sexes. So he knew women get women teeth, he even mentions cases that have been known in women upwards of 80 years, where at the very close of life, the wisdom teeth have come up. So the problem probably wasn't caused by women's teeth. So what went wrong? And the answer is, we don't know. Could have been anything. Maybe the woman he checked had missing teeth, maybe someone just miscounted, maybe he just made some strange copying error. Why didn't he double check and correct it? Well, obviously he just didn't think it was terribly important and had better things to do with his time. So while Aristotle was wrong, this was not because he failed to make observations, as Russell claimed, but because he did make observations and something went wrong. So Aristotle wrote thousands of pages in which he recorded huge numbers of observations, and of course the odd mistake crept in. The widespread idea that he didn't do experiments and just made things up is just nonsense.


It doesn't really matter who you are. It doesn't really matter about these skills, that these natural abilities that you might have. If you've got the will to make it happen, you can make it happen. Now, of course, there's some people that don't have the physical aptitude to get through the training. That happens, and a lot of it is injuries. You can't take the daily beating of the training. You get stress fractures. You break your leg. You get pneumonia. You get high C for a lot of people.


What if a kid enters the back room somehow? Take this kid for example, this 11 year old named Billy. Do you think Billy could survive the infinite labyrinth that we all know and love? This is a question that a lot of people have been asking those back room shorts YouTubers and all of them give terrible answers. If a kid enters the back rooms, three positive things will happen. Firstly, most of the levels will be really safe. They say that the back rooms will be easier or the entities will be nicer. So I'm here to explain what actually would happen if a kid did get sent to the back rooms. For this video, I'm gonna be sending Billy to four different popular back rooms levels and I'll be going over his chances of survival and the benefits and the downfalls of being a small child in the back rooms. So if you think you'll enjoy this analysis, drop a like. I'm not sugarcoating things like all those shorts people do. Let's get into it, shall we? So glitching into the back rooms is never a fun thing to do or think about, right? Most of the time when people think about no clipping, they imagine I guess like older teenagers or adults no clipping. But if people those ages can glitch into this place, you know, what's stopping children from doing so as well. For the sake of this video, I'm gonna go over what I think would happen to Billy if he got sent to level zero, level 11, the pool rooms and level fun. And I picked these levels because most of y'all know everything about him and you'd understand the analysis more that way. All right, so let's get into this hypothetical situation, shall we? Before I do, let me know in the comments if you think Billy's surviving or not. So if Billy got sent to back rooms level zero, here's what I think would happen. Billy would start off extremely confused and probably would freak out and start crying a little bit as 11 year olds do. They'd be horrified that they have no one that they know with them. Their mom, their dad, their siblings, nobody's there. I'd say they'd be this way for around 30 minutes to an hour. They'd be freaking out and hyperventilated and stuff. But after that, I think Billy would start to walk around and try to see where his surroundings are, try to gauge where he's at. While walking around the labyrinth of level zero, Billy might stumble upon an entity. Now if Billy did run into an entity, a few different things could occur. Now if we're assuming the average 11 year old boy is around 4.6 feet tall or 143 centimeters, then they'd be a much smaller target for entities in the back rooms. And they'd actually be too small to even be considered prey. As well as they'd probably just be able to run right under the eye line of the entities that are here so they might not even be able to see Billy. A lot of these people that upload the shorts about this say that the level would be easier for them or somehow the entities would be less dangerous or the environment would be easier. But as I've said before in this video, that's just not true, man. That doesn't make any sense. The level would be the same as it is for everyone. But the kid would have the advantage of being smaller and unassuming and less hostile looking. So being small is good for entity attacks but it's also good for stealthy walking and exploring because entities would be way less likely to hear a little kid running around than a full grown loud adult. And if the entity did somehow see Billy running around the back rooms, he would be able to hide in smaller little crevices and go through smaller doorways and go through smaller corridors that entities and adults might not be able to fit in. But there also would be several disadvantages of Billy being in level zero. One bad thing is that there's no way Billy is as strong as an adult or as fast which means they run slower and they couldn't fight anything off if it jumped on them. And that is the main disadvantage of being a kid in level zero. You can't really run that fast. You can't climb as tall because you're not as tall yourself. Like I said, on the other hand, it would be easier for Billy to slip into cracks between walls or small holes or small doorways or crawl through something to evade entities and other dangers. So do I think 11 year old Billy could survive and make it out of level zero onto level one? I think they could. I think Billy's got this. I think at the end of the day, he could probably survive if he figured out how to no clip. As long as he wasn't crying like a little baby, then I think he'd be fine. Now on to level 11. So if 11 year old Billy made his way all the way here, a few good things would probably happen to him. I'll go over them first and they'll do the bad things. Firstly, he'd probably actually meet adults in level 11 since it's kind of populated, kind of like a hub. Yeah, but there are still adults here and people here that Billy could stay close to and travel with and be kind of like this impromptu family. You know, he wouldn't be alone then. There would be like adults looking after him. That would be a good thing. The worst part for Billy, if he got sent to level 11, would be Billy getting lost in the city of level 11. Especially since, you know, an 11 year old isn't really the best with directions and this level is an infinite sprawling city. It will be pretty easy for Billy to become overwhelmed and lose his direction and lose where he's at. Another thing that might happen to Billy is he could accidentally take one of the many exits to leave level 11 and get sent to a dangerous level. There are exits to like level run for your life, level 666 in level 11. So he's not gonna know where these exits are, which means he could easily walk into a door or something and get sent there unknowingly. So do I think Billy could survive level 11? Yes and no. I think if Billy finds people and a safe environment to stay in with those people, I think he'd be fine. I think if you drop Billy alone in the city, in a far outer rim of the city where there's nobody at and just, you know, entities, I think he would get lost in the infinite expanse of concrete. Now, what if Billy got sent even deeper into the back rooms all the way to the pool rooms level? This level is actually one that I think a kid could probably legitimately survive fairly easily. If Billy can swim, he'd probably have a really fun time here, you know, swimming around. Plus he could drink the almond water, which would sustain him for food and water forever pretty much and it's literally all over the place. He wouldn't run out. Plus there's not really any bad entities, well in the main part at least, but that does lead us to the part of the pool rooms where Billy might not be able to make it through.  Like the deep end, for example, or the purple pool rooms or the drained pool rooms. All of these sub-levels are very bad news for anybody, but especially Billy. Since he's a little kid, he would have a tough time running away from these entities or not swimming in these dangerous waters or not getting lost in a deep chasm of the pool rooms. So do I think that Billy could survive the pool rooms? Yes, in the main normal level of it, but if somehow Billy wandered too deep into the pool rooms and got sent to like a sub-level, like the purple rooms or the deep end or something like that, where there's entities or dangerous water and, you know, diseases and whatnot, I don't think Billy would make it out because I don't think he would know any better. And I think we'd lose poor Billy. So finally, what if Billy gets sent all the way to level fun? The home of the party-goer entity, human meatcakes, and just a grand old time? I'd say if Billy woke up here, he would notice the calm colors of the birthday tables and the balloons and the hats and the cakes, and he would probably actually feel comfortable more than any other level that I've talked about in this video today. And that exactly is where the problem is. Billy would start walking around, touching everything, not having a care in the world. You know, he'd be just chilling, looking at all this party stuff. In fact, it might look like an environment Billy has seen before. He might be one of his birthdays or his friend's birthdays or something, so he'd think it's a safe place to be since it looks like that. And so he saw the entities, at least I guess. So if a party-goer starts to chase Billy, he actually might be able to evade them by, again, hiding in smaller places or being too small for the party-goers to see when he's running around. Party-goers are big entities, you know, they're over seven feet tall, and Billy's only like 4.7 feet tall. So it'd be pretty easy for him to evade them.  And the more weird the sub-levels get and all that jazz. Of course, it's also level fun plus, and we both know that Billy ain't making out of that level. So could Billy survive level fun? No, absolutely not, there's literally no way. I'm sure the party-goer ended up getting him, of course. Unless Billy had Broogly there with him to help him out, you know, but if he didn't have me, he'd be toast. I mean, he'd probably turn into a cake. Not gonna sugarcoat it there. All right, that is my thoughts on if a kid could survive in the back rooms or what if a kid gots into the back rooms? Whatever you wanna call it. I think it's a pretty fair estimate. Let me know your thoughts below. If you want more videos of Billy trying to explore more levels, I could also do that. This is pretty fun to make. But I just wanted to make this video because all these shorts YouTubers, man, they just be making up stuff. I don't know why, why would the back rooms be easier? Now, yes, like I said, there are pros and cons both of a kid get his into the back rooms. They're smaller, you know, they're not as loud, they can hide in places, and then the entities might not be able to see them. But at the end of the day, they're not a strong, you know, adult, they can make good decisions. They don't have a developed brain. So, yeah, that's all blabbering, I know, that's the end of the video. Thank you so much for your support. Y'all are the best. Love and appreciate you, and I'll see you on any of my socials or my next video. Peace and love.