Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for sticking around because we have another great speaker for the afternoon session. It's my distinct honor to introduce our second speaker today, Peter Mandeville. Dr. Peter Mandeville is Professor of Government and Politics in the Sharr School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He's also a non-resident senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution next door, a junk scholar at the Rand Corporation. Between 2015 and 2016, he was a senior advisor in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the U.S. State Department. Previous government experience includes serving as a member of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff in 2011 and 2012, where he helped shape the U.S. response to the Arab Spring. Peter was previously the Founding Director of the Center for Global Studies and also Director of the Ali Wurlak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. His previous visiting affiliations have included American University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Pew Research Center. His research focuses on the comparative study of religious authority and social movements in the Muslim world, with an emphasis on youth groups, transnational networks, and new media. Peter is the author of among other titles, Islam in Politics with Multiple Editions, which is a broad global overview of Islamic social and political movements. Global Political Islam with Two Editions and Transnational Muslim Politics Reimagining the Ummah, which is a study of Muslim communities in the United Kingdom. He also is a co-editor of several volumes of essays in the fields of international relations and Islamic studies, including Politics from afar, Transnational Diasporas, and Networks from Columbia University Press. Peter holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews and the University of Kent and has studied at the American University in Cairo. We're honored to have him here. Please welcome Peter Mendeville. Thank you very much, Kadir, for the kind introduction, and I'm also very grateful to you for the invitation to address this conference, which is on a topic that has been of abiding interest to me for many years, and I just want to mention up front how important that I think the research that you've done with this project is and the sorts of gaps that it helps to begin to fill. In the time that I have this afternoon, there's essentially three things that I want to do. There was originally only one thing that I was going to do, but the hazard of going at the end is that you've sat through all the other presentations and you get ideas and there's things you want to respond to. So I will kind of deliver my official remarks, which is going to be something of a retrospective evaluation of where and how Islam has figured in U.S. foreign policymaking over the years. Certainly, towards the end of the remarks, getting into some of the more practical and tactical questions with respect to governmental engagement with religious authority, you heard from my former colleague, Sean Casey, this morning about the work, some of the work that we did in the Office of Religion and Global Affairs at the State Department, and I do want to kind of drill down in a little bit more detail on some of the points and questions that he raised in that context. The two other things that I want to do briefly are, because the question of Saudi Arabia and the ongoing discussion and processing of what Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could possibly have meant when he said that Saudi Arabia is going to return to moderate Islam and having like Anel just returned last night from Saudi Arabia myself, I can't resist kind of saying my little piece on that whole question. And then finally, in the vein of, again, hopefully encouraging our good friends at the Loose Foundation to continue to support this work, I wanted to talk a little bit about some opportunities and avenues for future research, things that we know that we don't know to hopefully kind of sketch out some ideas about what a future research agenda in this area looks like. I think it's fairly conventional to say that Islam became a subject of U.S. foreign policy in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And by subject I mean that was the moment at which Islam appeared to be a thing that U.S. foreign policy had to contend with in a systematic fashion. It is, of course, not in any sense the first time that Islam and considerations of Islam have figured in U.S. foreign policy making. It's possible, for example, to, you know, if you go back through declassified State Department cable traffic dating back to the 1930s and 40s, you can see the U.S. Embassy in Egypt trying to kind of figure out what this thing, the Muslim Brotherhood that Tadeg Masud talked about, what is it, how should the United States think about it. Certainly, and this is, I think, the untold story, at least untold in a systematic fashion, where Islam fit into U.S. Cold War geopolitics. It is certainly the case that the United States, during much of the Cold War, actually viewed Islam as a usable and useful thing, as a counterbalance, a countervailing force to the spread of global communism. In that sense, you know, we talk a lot about Saudi Arabia's support for the export of Wahhabism around the world from the 1960s onwards. Much of that activity was undertaken with the firm support, encouragement, and in some cases direct collaboration with the U.S. government, including some of its kind of covert arms. So, for example, the Muslim World League, one of the kind of leading peristatal organizations responsible for Saudi Fundedawa over the last half century, this is an organization that amongst its many activities supported the publications of Islamic magazines around the world, including in countries where Socialists and Communist parties and groups were trying to make headway, and the U.S. government, I think, viewed those publications as a sort of very useful accessory in its own broader Cold War policies. And so I think that's absolutely kind of something that we need to study and understand more about. 1979, as a year, is going to kind of figure quite prominently in my remarks. For those of us who studied the intersection of Islam and politics, 1979 is of course one of the kind of watershed years, right? It's the year of Iran's Islamic revolution, of course. It's the year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and just kind of telegraphing ahead somewhere that I'm going to go in a moment when we circle back to Saudi Arabia is of course the year of the Grand Mosque seizure. And I think 1979 is useful because it precisely allows us to get a sense of this rather ambivalent Janus-faced approach that the United States took to Islam in its foreign policy. Because more or less simultaneously in the early 1980s, we have the United States viewing Brandeit al-Homeini and the political Islam that he represents as this enormous threat to U.S. interests and national security equities. At the same time, as the United States is beginning to fully and enthusiastically support a wide range of Islamic forces and causes that are converging on Afghanistan in order to push the Soviets out of that country. So we have this sort of simultaneous, almost schizophrenic, political Islam is something bad and dangerous, and political Islam is something useful and usable. And I would contend that in various ways that tension has continued to be present and to persist in U.S. foreign policy even if the specific forms of it have changed. Really, it's the post-911 period that I want to kind of leap to now. There's interesting detours that we can take and I'm happy to kind of talk about it if you want later in the period that we have for open discussion of the evolution of U.S. policy towards Islamist movements, I think there are kind of more mainstream Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood because policy thinking that regard has evolved enormously over the years, that's a whole session or several unto itself. But because so many of our presentations this morning, I think, did and Sean Casey's remarks did kind of engage with the specific problematics posed to U.S. foreign policy by the aftermath of 9-11, that's where I want to kind of concentrate the next section of my remarks. It's very clear that the aftermath of 9-11 initiated this kind of new phase of sort of politics of good Islam and bad Islam to use the framing of Mahmoud Mandani's book. The idea and a sort of bifurcation in U.S. geopolitical thinking of the idea that there are out there somewhere in the world bad Muslims, you know, broadly understood amongst those who kind of, you know, those with more detailed and accurate information as a very specific limited range of sasa Salafi jihadi movements, although in U.S. foreign policy discourse at the time, this is the sort of GW Bush administration, there are any number of groups that were working very hard, there's already enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy thinking to kind of convince American policy makers that Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood are essentially the same thing. That any form of politicized Islam is something that inexorably leads to a worldview and behaviors that we had come to identify with Al Qaeda and later ISIS, because we've seen a return to that dynamic around the rise of the Bash. And of course, the flip side of that was the idea that, well, maybe, and this is where we do start to get to questions of religious authority. It's their idea that there's these bad Muslims out there pumping bad Islamic messages around the world through tendrils and networks and narratives. And so, you know, we need to identify the good Muslims that can sort of, you know, provide a counterbalance to that. And that, you know, that work was well underway, I think, most clearly embodied by the now rather infamous 2005 RAN Corporation report, Building Moderate Muslim Networks, which was essentially a sort of full-throat endorsement of the idea that Sufis are cuddly and kind and peaceful. And if we were to undertake a robust effort to fund them and amplify their voices, these Sufis are the ones that would be able to defeat the Salafi jihadis. Again, you know, for those of you who are versed in religion and Islam and these issues, you realize immediately how ridiculous of a proposition that is. But, you know, these are the kinds of ideas that we're actually getting some level of traction in policymaking circles at the time. This is also mid-2000s when we had the beginning of what I now like to refer to as declaration culture. This is a series of efforts, sometimes with, often with strong governmental support behind them to convene religious scholars to issue grand statements that affirm the moderate nature of Islam and reject the views and the motivations and agendas of the radical groups. You know, so we have the Aman message, we have the, you know, a common word, you know, and we've had a whole series of these kind of statements since that continue up to this present day. And I mention them because this sort of, this, the persistence of this declaration culture and this sort of tolerance symmetry phenomenon, you know, where we see every few months somewhere in the Gulf religious leaders convene to kind of issue some statement about how there should be peace in the world. And the governments that then sponsor that use that to kind of show off their credentials as, you know, supporters of pluralistic, moderate, progressive approaches to religion, even as they continue to bomb hospitals in Yemen. So we have this sort of idea that there is hearts and minds and a war of ideas going on, you know, at the time of the Georgia W. Bush administration, the sort of search for these moderate Muslims. And then comes the Obama administration, the one that I served in. And, you know, you'll remember the sort of signature hallmark moment here being Obama's much-vaunted speech in Cairo in the summer of 2009, subtitled A New Beginning with Global Muslim Communities. This was the sort of Muslim world version of the reset button. The United States was going to declare a new way of engaging with Islam in its conduct around the world. You know, very deliberately and distinctly understood by those who were the makers of this approach to be a direct kind of polar opposite to the previous George W. Bush. And I think the sort of chief direction, orientation of this pivot, if you will, is not found primarily in the Cairo speech itself. The Cairo speech is its most sort of detailed statement, but the kind of best encapsulation of it comes in a speech that Obama gives in Ankara, actually, to the Turkish National Assembly in the spring of 2009, which is mainly a speech about the importance of the U.S.-Turkish bilateral relationship. Towards the end of the speech Obama decides if he's going to say something broader about Islam and the Muslim world. And he essentially says that from this moment forward, U.S. engagement with Islam and Muslims will cease to be about primarily terrorism and security, and will instead be about partnership. The idea that Muslims and Americans should be working together to achieve great things in the realm of human development. So a lot of focus on the empowerment of women and education and research and entrepreneurship. All wonderful good things shall flow from this. And so then Obama gives the Cairo speech later, in which he says in the first half of the speech some really ambitious and quite revolutionary things with respect to U.S. foreign policy around the question of Iran, support for democracy in the Middle East, peace between Palestine and Israel that really got a lot of people excited. You recall he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, arguably essentially for that speech. And I began to worry shortly after this speech was given about something that gave me a little bit of disquiet and the whole way that something called global Muslim communities were being framed and talked about as something that U.S. foreign policy was suddenly becoming very interested in, even if the sort of intentionality behind it, even if the kind of normative valence of this new American approach was positive, was about reaching out and embracing and hugging this global Muslim for collaboration and partnership. What gave me disquiet was the fact that for the first time the United States was essentially constituting an entire world religion as an object of its foreign policymaking. So one of the things that the U.S. government did later that same year in 2009 is to create at the State Department a new position called the Special Representative to Muslim Communities. This is weird. This is bizarre. This is the first time in the history of U.S. foreign policy that the U.S. has appeared to appoint something like an ambassador to an entire world religion. And consider for a moment what message is being sent by that gesture. The United States government is saying that at some level there is a sense in which 1.7 billion people in the world are to be viewed, are to be engaged, are to be thought of primarily in relation to their religious identity, that it is somehow their religion that defines them. This is essentially the U.S. government projecting Muslim-ness of some sort onto a billion plus people who, yes, if asked about their religious affiliation might identify as Muslim, but where the U.S. government is telling them, for all intents and purposes in our policymaking and programmatic initiatives, you are a Muslim first and foremost. And I think what worried me about this is that the internal policy discussion of it was very much about trying to repair the damage of the Bush administration. And I sort of talked about is we need to normalize U.S. relations with Muslims. To my mind, if you want to normalize relations with a particular community or group of people that feel that they've been stigmatized or singled out for a period of time, you normalize relations by treating them the way you treat everyone else. And the way the U.S. usually treats non-U.S. persons around the world is to regard them first and foremost through their citizenship of a particular nation-state. But no, in this sort of new approach, Senegalese, Indonesians, Turkish people, Jordanians have all become Muslim. They've been turned into Muslims in the U.S. foreign policy gaze. And so what worried me about this is that even though, again, even though the intention behind it was to reach out, befriend, enable partnership and collaboration, there was a weird sense in which the Obama administration's Muslim engagement efforts served to, I think, reproduce a version of the same exceptionalism that had characterized the Bush administration's approach to Islam, i.e. the idea that there's something about Muslims, as distinct from other religious groups around the world, that mean that they need their own special representative. They need their own Muslim-specific programming lines. And so this sort of persistence to continually exceptionalize Islam and Muslims, which I think continues in various forms to this day, is very worrying to me. A lot of these programs funded by the Obama administration's global Muslim engagement efforts, as I mentioned, focused on things like entrepreneurship, educational development, in a sense. My concerns that I had with it, and I should add in full disclosure that my concerns by this point were rather practical and operational in that one of the tasks I was handed upon entering onto duty at the State Department in January 2011 was to kind of oversee that whole basket of global Muslim engagement programs, which I looked at with utter horror and did everything I could to shut down. Writing what I thought were incredibly erudite policy memos about what was wrong with this and the sort of problems with projecting essentialized identities onto people. And this is the steep learning curve of an academic entering government that the reduction of some essentialism and the projecting of identities onto people isn't terminology that works well in governmental circles. So I needed to kind of find other ways of trying to kind of explain what was wrong with this. And I think there were other ways that you could talk about what was wrong with it. One thing that was wrong with it, I thought, actually, was that there is a sense in which the U.S. government's embrace of a global Muslim engagement world view actually at some level validated the narrative and world view of Al Qaeda. And Osama bin Laden. Because it would be very much the Al Qaeda line and later the ISIS line that, yes, these people are not primarily Senegalese or Jordanian or Indonesian. They are first and foremost Muslim. They need to regard themselves as part of an umma and they need to be engaged with and connected with the global struggles of their co-religionists. And at some level, the United States in this approach was helping to enable that omatic identity, if you will, by kind of engaging in a new sort of global Muslim outreach effort. But I think from policy point of view, what was wrong with it can be best encapsulated by the conversation I had with the former colleague at the United States Agency for International Development. And he was going on and on about how we have these great Muslim engagement programs that are focused on fostering entrepreneurship in Turkey and Indonesia and Jordan. It's amazing work. And I said, let me ask you something. We, the U.S. government, we fund and run small business development programs in Ecuador, right? He said, yeah, yeah, we absolutely do that. All right, I said to him, wouldn't it be weird if we called that work Christian engagement? After all, the population of Ecuador is 98% Christian. And he said, of course that would be weird. Christianity has nothing to do with religion. I said, well, why is it any less weird when we call those same programs Muslim engagement when we happen to run them in Muslim engagement? Muslim majority countries, right? But what's the unspoken assumption that's being made in that entire leap? So having told you what's wrong with the Bush administration's approach and told you what's wrong with the approach that the government I served in, the administration I served in, let me begin to kind of wind things down by talking a little bit about my own experience of how U.S. foreign policymaking thought about figures of religious authority in Muslim world in more recent years. My second stint at the State Department coincided directly with and indeed I was brought to work in government precisely on the religious dimensions of the U.S. approach to the rise of ISIS. And I think it's fair to say, and I also think I should say for the benefit of my governmental colleagues, it was fully understandable. But in their mind, the idea is that we need to figure out how these religious leaders can be partnered with in order to discredit the religious messages and the religious interpretations being promoted by ISIS. And it was very clear that in the minds of most of my colleagues in government, religious authority figures were relevant insofar as they might be able to provide something akin to theological antidotes to Salafi jihadism. And again, we're kind of back to a version of the Bush administration's good Islam, bad Islam. That there is these bad ISIS messages being put out there about things that are supposedly in the Quran and hadith that justify the extreme acts of violence and gratuitous murder and genocide, frankly, in northern Iraq that ISIS engages in. And so we need religious leaders who can clarify that those understandings of Islam are wrong. And so one of the things, the first things our office was asked to do, and I think Sean was a little bit more obliquely alluding to this, was to say, all right, we need a list from you, this new religion office. You guys are the religion experts that tell us the religious leaders that we should engage and partner with who will be able to explain why ISIS is bad and incorrect and wrong.  And we were very wary of doing so for many reasons. There were, in short, very good substantive political and legal reasons why the U.S. government needed to keep some distance from appearing to support or endorse particular interpretations of Islam, not least of all this thing called the U.S. Constitution, where the first amendment, establishment clause of the first amendment specifically forbids the U.S. government from taking positions on matters of religion. We can't endorse any particular interpretation of religion. And there were odd ways, I think, that we got close to doing so unwittingly at points. And this is where our office did, on a couple occasions, kind of operate in high gear. I may recall that there were a couple of occasions at the height of the U.S. counter-ISIL strategy where former Secretary of State Kerry referred to ISIS as apostates. And we had to pull them aside a couple times and say, Mr. Secretary, you can't use that kind of language. Why not? Well, because for the U.S. government to label someone as an apostate suggests that the U.S. government has a position on what constitutes the boundaries of Islam that we know who's in and who's out. That is effectively taking a position on a matter of religion, so we can't do that. And I think there was some frustration because our office was very worried that we were being looked at, we were being looked toward to give names, and then these people on the list that we gave them would be funded, would be flown around, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There was already a lot of this going on. There were certain figures that had stepped up in a big way to appear at U.S.-sponsored countering violent extremism summits, religious scholars of some considerable standing in contemporary Islamic jurisprudence who had seemed to sign on big time to the emerging counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism bandwagon gathering ahead of steam in Washington, D.C. in 2015 and 2016. And I think that our offices, I think, well considered in the eyes of some failure to deliver on handing over the list of the right scholars to engage, had some impact on how we were perceived, because this was seen to be the foreign policy challenge of the day, and dammit, why aren't you religion experts telling us the Islamic leaders who will provide the antidote, which is why, and here I think I'll echo something that Sean alluded to this morning, this idea that, you know, I'm actually very glad that this research was not published while I was in government because I would have then had to engage in sort of, you know, the inside the State Department policy equivalent of street fighting messaging with my colleagues in the counter-terrorism and the counter-messaging and the kind of public diplomacy and communications bureaus about, no, no, no, no, no, no, this does not mean that we should, you know, form a firm partnership with the Grand Cheikh of Al-Azhar, even though his numbers seem to be pretty good in order to defeat ISIS. But this is research that shows that, and here are these lists, and, you know, our line of view, it doesn't work that way, that's not how it works. And in that sense, I'm glad that this research didn't come out during the time that I was in government. That said, I think this is incredibly important work for helping us to understand with greater specificity, you know, some of the more precise dimensions of what personalized religious authority looks like in the Muslim world, because it's a conversation certainly in the policy space that tends to take place in very, very abstract fashion. And this idea of sort of counter-narrative and counter-messaging and the idea that if we have these messaging centers and there's religious scholars whose views are being amplified by these messaging centers, that you kind of create a communication and dispersive environment in the Muslim world that will dilute the appeal and render more inert the effectiveness of ISIS-type stories and messages. And I have to say that I am very skeptical that religious authority operates in that way. And so this is where I'm going to put aside the kind of, the Mohammed bin Salman returned to moderate Islam stuff and you know, happy to get into it if you want to do so during Q&A. And instead I want to turn to by way of conclusion now to talk a little bit about where our scholarship and research around these issues might want to go in the future. You know, when one kind of gets at religious authority through a list of names, what it doesn't tell us a lot about is the uses of religious authority. And I think we need to rather than to assume that because someone carries the title of alim or sheikh or mufti that they are in an authoritative position to determine how a particular individual understands and makes sense of his or her religious beliefs. I think asking who questions about religious authority is an important step forward and that's why I think this project has broken some important new ground. Going forward I'd love to better understand for example questions around when is religious authority relevant. What are the circumstances under which the utterance of someone carrying one of these august eminent titles actually has an impact in the world? I had this phenomenal opportunity in 2006 when the good folks at the Pew Research Center that were doing a lot of polling in the Muslim world at that point called me up and said hey, a question has just dropped out of our poll and the last minute for our next wave of global attitude survey in 44 countries including 20 some Muslim majority countries, we have the opportunity to insert a new question that will be asked and we'd like you to tell us what question you think should be asked. This is like a social scientist fantasy, the juggernaut of the Pew Research Center of Global Polling Machinery being offered to you to insert a question in. I said you know what, I would love to know something about these Muslims that you're polling. When they want guidance in matters of religion, where do they turn? We don't know anything about that. So we inserted in the 2006 Pew Global Attitude Survey, you can find it, the reports are available online. We inserted a question that asked people in Muslim majority questions and it just so happened that in that year Pew was doing an oversample of Muslims in Europe so we asked the question in some Muslim minority context as well which produces interesting comparison. We asked people, when you are seeking guidance in matters of religion, where do you turn? And we didn't name names. We gave people, we referenced certain kinds of spaces, certain types of sources. So the options I think we gave people were your friends and family, religious leaders in your local mosque or religious institution, national religious leaders affiliated with the state, so that's the official ulama that we've talked so much about today, or finally international figures that you access through satellite television or the internet. So I waited, you know, kid on Christmas for the results of this to come back. And there's one very clear pattern that occurred globally because these are questions being asked in South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Muslim majority sub-Saharan Africa. It was very clear that the vast majority of people when seeking guidance in matters of religion in 2006 turned to friends and family or religious leaders in their local institutions. National and official level religious leaders scored very poorly and that's why some of the findings that came out of this study surprised me to some extent. And I have to say, and I think this is a very relevant finding that the study offers that does directly contravene some of the policy guidance that the religion office was offering our colleagues in government at that time, which was this idea that, oh, we need to steer clear of these figures of official Islam who are simply viewed as mouthpieces of the government. They would never be credible voices, you know, for delivering the kinds of messages that the U.S. government would want. Although the findings of this research would suggest that maybe we need to revisit that. I don't know. I'm still haunted at some level by this idea that... I don't know. I just, I don't think that most Egyptians when wanting to understand their religion turned first and foremost the likes of Shauki Alam or Ahmed Al Tayyib as the person who sort of helps to steer them through their religious life. So it's not to say that those figures aren't relevant and the fact that people endorse them does tell us something important and how they were endorsed and where those endorsements feature in relation to other sorts of figures, that is relevant information to have. And I guess what I'm saying is that as we go forward, I think we want to know more about what the sort of, the uses of religious authority in the realm of everyday life looks like. Are people shaped by religious authority? Or are religious authority figures shaped by people? To what extent do the figures we call religious authority figures in the Muslim world and frankly in the Christian world, to what extent are they responding to market forces? Knowing that there are trends at work and if they want to remain relevant and want to maintain some sense of legitimacy or popularity, they need to to some extent reflect where the markets at in the way that they talk and do religion. And finally as a sort of trend that I noticed and I, there was at least one of those speakers this morning that alluded to it. I think it was, buddy I'm actually talking about Iran, that I've noticed this trend as I kind of done compared to research around the Muslim world, particularly among young people. And this is connected to the kind of proliferation of social media and the wide range of sources that one has access to has meant that, you know, there's been this, I think, fragmentation. Frankly, if such a thing ever even did exist there was a sort of single pathway approach to religious authority where one, you know, takes a single religious scholar or a single trend or mother hub if you want to get into questions of jurisprudence and follows it, but rather a trend towards religious eclecticism. I want a little bit of this and a little bit of that. I like this scholar for this, I like, I think that person's chronic recitation is fantastic. And I like this person on questions of social justice and what he has to say about that. And it's this sort of curation of a personalized religious experience that draws on a wide range of sources and a wide range of disparate sources. Some of them perhaps traditionally and classically trained Islamic scholars but some of them figures like the sort of the kind of Muslim Joel Austin, Amr Khaled that Tarek referred to. And, you know, you can talk about Aagim in Indonesia as the sort of, and I'm not sure if Amr Khaled is the Aagim of Egypt or if Aagim is the Amr Khaled of Indonesia, but their mode of operation is essentially the same. A combination of self-help, 12-step programs and pop psychology, so popular around the world with Islamic flavors and popular culture mixed into it, right? And so you get people combining in their religious experience, their day-to-day religious experience, a wide range of quote-unquote religious authority sources, some of whom, in theory, are not supposed to work together very well, right? So I like this Sufi figure for that thing, I like this Salafi figure for this other thing, I like this Muslim Brotherhood person about foreign policy and it's all kind of mixed and matched and kind of it's this composite mosaic. And it's engaged within a sort of pragmatic fashion and I think that's sort of the trend and if that's where we're going in religious life, and again, this is not limited to the Muslim world, I think you could make a similar kind of comparison analysis with Christianity today. I think that has profound implications for how we think about and engage with questions of religious authority and how we understand it. I've already spoken longer than I intended to, so I will wrap up now and very much look forward to your thoughts and reactions and questions, but thank you very much. Peter Harpreet, Intel analyst and a former diplomat. I honestly think you're a little bit out to launch on this. By your logic, we should close down the embassy to the Vatican tomorrow morning, for example. I imagine that the Mithraits have a huge resurgence in the eastern Mediterranean and the Mithraits, they don't believe in collecting interest on loans and they're really pretty hard on women and if you ask a Mithrait what he is, the first thing he'll say is I'm a Mithrait. He won't say I'm a Roman Mithrait or a Turkish Mithrait or a Scythian Mithrait. He'll say I'm a Mithrait. So if you want to establish policy that makes sense toward the Mithrait community, it would be nice to have somebody who's the Mithrait ambassador who knows these issues inside out and backwards so he doesn't try to do something stupid like establishing a micro-landing institution in Mithrait communities or send women preferentially to represent US issues with the Mithrait community unless you have those sensitivities in one individual who can counsel the rest of the State Department. I think you're really out to launch. No, I actually think you're in a roundabout way completely endorsing the position that I offered for the following reason. I would be the last person to suggest that we should shut down our diplomatic mission to the Holy See, not least of all because it's very conventional diplomacy. The Vatican is a sovereign state, and it's consistent with the US tradition of having diplomatic representation of all sovereign entities. And obviously as someone who enthusiastically leapt at the opportunity to join an office focused on trying to help American diplomats better understand the role of religion in world affairs, I'm absolutely someone who believes that religion does matter. What worried me is when I began to see particular religions and followers of particular religions reduced to a little more than their religious identity and how US foreign policy thinks about and engages with them. So for example, when we were running the Muslim engagement programs, one of the first set of confirmations of the uneasiness that I began to feel is when those entrepreneurship programs that were running in places like Indonesia and Turkey, the participants in those programs began to come up to the State Department people on the sidelines of the events and said, look, we really like the substance of this program because we are business people here in central Anatolia and we're trying to connect to small and medium enterprises elsewhere in the region in the world and these are useful skills, but do we have to be labeled Muslims before we can come into this space? Why can't we just do this as entrepreneurship? And people were absolutely pushing back against this tendency on the part of the US government to approach them through, label them by and seemingly define them in relation to their religious identity because they didn't. I mean, if you ask them, hey, what's your religion? They would say I'm Muslim, but my point is that their religion was irrelevant to that particular activity. They would identify themselves as a Turkish businessman, I would guess, would be their first label. I'm not saying that there aren't particular groups whose religious identity has been politicized in a way that would lead them first and foremost to identify themselves primarily in relation to that and we saw that certainly around ISIS in northern Iraq and it is absolutely vitally important for us and we did think about and engage the circumstances around that in that. I'm just saying that I'm pushing back against the idea that it's helpful to approach 1.7 billion people around the world as if their Muslim-ness is the most relevant way to understand who they are and the things that motivate and drive their behavior. I agree with a lot of what you said. Given though that you did say all that, I am kind of surprised you did write that survey question. In other words, what answer were you thinking you were going to get and what kind of policy would you wanted to... Let's say, for example, the answer you got was that I turned to my official state person or what kind of policy did you want to build on that question because then it does seem that you're endorsing the basic enterprise of this project. Yeah, no, I have a very ambivalent orientation towards this project because on the one hand I'm like, I love it, this is awesome, this is my stuff. And then I'm like, oh, but I'm not sure that a list of particular individuals is the best way to understand. We're really going to put Erdogan and Sheikh Hamoza on that list. Are they really religious authority figures? Aren't you just creating a popularity contest that you do it that way? I didn't have in mind a particular policy outcome from that. I wasn't engaged as a policymaker at that point. I wasn't leaping at that opportunity with a policy use in mind. I was leaping at it as a social scientist who, I don't remember how you put it. These models are great to use, just don't believe in them. So when we got the data back, I knew there were enormous limitations. If you have to reduce the possible sources of religious guidance to four choices on a multiple choice question, you're going to be losing a lot of context and nuance. But that's part of the game that we play as social scientists. This was before the rise of social media. Because one finding from that that I didn't relate for the purpose of brevity was that the one global setting where there was clear variation related to Muslim minorities in Europe where accessing figures internationally through internet and television was huge particularly compared to local religious institutions and local religious leaders quite simply understandably because there weren't as many as the setting where Islam is not the ambient religion, there isn't as ready access to mosques and local imams as there is in a Muslim majority country. So I would love to be able to do that again now and see. And I would probably, I mean, on the one hand, I'd be tempted to ask the question exactly the same way to have that longitudinal piece but I think there are more nuanced ways that the choices could even be offered at present. I built pretty much Montgomery College. I'm also, excuse me, a former Foreign Service Officer. But I think this whole conference underscored the importance of understanding the impact of religious leaders and the need to understand the dynamics of religion and society and in politics. I came away from your presentation with kind of the feeling that well, there's really nothing we can do as a government or as a foreign policy to influence these leaders. It becomes counterproductive. I mean, based on your experience, what would you recommend in terms of engagement that would have some kind of influence but not in a counterproductive way? So there are two or three elements in my mind to what a better approach and policy to these questions would be. One is to focus, some of it is, one of them is data-driven finding based on that moment I had with Pew back in 2006 which would, which still, and I persist in still believing that, you know, officially sanctioned, state sanctioned religious institutions and leaders are not the best place to start when you're trying to understand how something like the quote unquote average Muslim understands her, his religion and the implications of religion for conduct in everyday life and that getting a better understanding of what religious authority at the local, district, provincial level looks like is important and at that family level. And this is where the question of women comes in very, very importantly. Yes, just as in most major world religions in Islam, it's generally not women who hold formal religious titles or hold positions in something like clerical hierarchies but women in many Muslim majority societies around the world are very influential shapers of how people engage with and understand religion even though they're not officially, you know, generally counted as religious leaders and I think there's a whole world to that that we're only beginning to explore but even if we are staying within the realm of people that hold something akin to formal religious titles in Islam it's different in Islam, right, because there isn't sort of a central, at least in Sunni Islam there is no centralized religious hierarchy but to get a better sense of what kind of local, provincial and frankly dissident national level religious leadership looks like not because the U.S. government should then throw money at those people or amplify their voices I can't, you know, what better way to spoil whatever legitimacy they might have than for the U.S. government to hold them up and say wow, this is great Islam, we need more of this kind of Islam. Obviously that's not the way to do it. That doesn't mean non-engagement, that doesn't mean U.S. abandonment of this space or these questions it means that we use the leverage we have, use the diplomatic leverage we have in different ways and so to my mind that would mean for example in a bilateral military intelligence to military intelligence channel with the Egyptians say to them, you know, you might want to lay off this person that you have a tendency to crack down on and oppress because even though you perceive that person as a threat to you, that person is actually playing, having a useful effect in terms of holding off groups that would be even more destabilizing, right? So it's a diplomatic overture that is about trying to make space for certain voices and groups to be more influential without having to fund them and hold them up and give speeches about how amazing they are. It's a very subtle form of operation that U.S. foreign policy which tends to either want to throw money or bombs things that it finds in the world that we're not always very good at but it's also something that our seasoned diplomats do know how to do very well and it's not easy and it means sometimes having very difficult conversations but I think it would be a more effective way than just trying to come up with a who's who list and funding or endorsing particularly religious leaders officially. Thank you very much, Benjamin, to another diplomat. As opposed to the policy that the Obama administration, the Bush administration before did of picking and choosing our policy, I think your suggestion and I would agree with, is talking to everyone and trying to understand and getting information and not picking winners and losers. Covertly, we might do a little bit more to advance our interest but for the most part we would be noncommittal simply talking to everybody including everybody and one aspect of our policy that hasn't been touched on or diplomatic practice is the explaining our society and our values and how we respect everybody's route Jews, they respect whether they are believers or not believers, Muslims, Christians and so on and so forth and the second aspect would be exchanges, personnel exchanges which we do a lot of inviting people here to understand our society meet with people of different communities and so on and so forth plus the Fulbright program sending people overseas to better understand these societies. Thank you. I mean I am a huge fan of our public diplomacy programs and our international exchange programs. I think they continue to be just thinking purely as an economist like which I'm not with respect to return on investment. I think what we get from those programs is of enormous value over time and so I think they're very valuable. I think the idea of engaging with everyone is much to learn and at times to express points of disagreement rather than saying I'm not going to talk to this group is the way forward and in that sort of engaging with everyone kind of approach Sean referenced Bill Burns already the keeper of this institution and one of my most valuable lessons as an amateur new diplomat I learned from him. He was Under Secretary for Political Affairs at the time that I started and one of the things my main work when I worked on for Secretary Clinton's policy planning staff was to kind of come up with a new post 2011 post revolution approach to US policy towards the Muslim brother. Basically that was the bread and butter of my work and an opportunity appeared for the US government to become part of a dialogue stream that had been going on for some years whereby representatives of various European foreign ministries in a sort of academic low profile environment had been meeting with representatives of Islamist movements. And so a particular government that was involved in that came to us and said would be in light of what's going on in the region would the US now like to join this dialogue. And I sort of thought this would be a great idea. Yes, of course, it's clear in this new political landscape that's emerging in the Arab world that the Muslim brotherhood is going to be a major player. We have had very little opportunity to meet with people like that despite the best efforts of people like Nathan who even when that was impossible found ways of creating environments where some engagement with Islamist could take place. I was all for it. And Bill Burns, you know, when I recommended this said no, we're not going to do it. And my default gut reaction that was, oh, this guy, he doesn't understand. He thinks, you know, he thinks we couldn't be meeting with people like that. And when he explained it to me, I, you know, this was like, oh God, you know, who am I to think that I understand what's going on. He said, no, look, we have to assume that any meeting like that will appear on the front page of the New York Times and anything in this sensitive environment in the Middle East right now where the main thing we want to emphasize in US foreign policy is that it is the people of the region who will decide their political futures. Any meeting where it looks like the US government has already decided that it needs to have a summit with the Islamists will look like the US has decided that this is the group that is going to win and we want to work with them. You know, and so his point was what we need is an approach to that kind of dialogue and a policy informing it that basically says the US will meet with any group, regardless of its political stripe, regardless of what label is attached to it, you know, we did put some, there were certain parameters that we put on it, you know, that groups, you know, the group in question need to reject violence as a tool of achieving social change. They need to respect the, you know, the full rights of all citizens, including women and religious minorities, but other than that, we'll meet with anyone and with good reason because in terms of US engagement with the Middle East with the Arab world, we had up to that point, those of you who have worked in Middle East diplomacy will know that most of our engagement with the region tended to occur almost exclusively with political, business and military elites. We had very little contact with broader society and in this new environment that appeared to be emerging, so hopefully in 2011, it suddenly looked as if a whole range of new groups and ideological orientations were going to be relevant. Yes, the US needed to meet with the Ikhwan, with the Muslim Brotherhood, and with Salafis, but we also needed to meet with leftists and social democrats and workers movements that we also had neglected in our previous diplomacy. Yes, to learn from them how they see the country's future, and in some cases, including with some of the Islamists, as an opportunity to explain to them what concerns, what frank concerns we have about them. I absolutely agree with that kind of broad framing of the challenge that we were faced with. Thank you. John Anderson, Independent Analyst, OK, Full Disclosure, XFSO also, any rate, sort of in the aftermath of what became known in Egypt and the US about our contacts, diplomatic, et cetera, with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, both prior to the election of Mohammed Morsi and in that period when he set on the throne for that period of time. Elaborate theories, conspiracy theories, hey, sprung up, and they're still out there.  Some of us think that that's quite often regime-sponsored in the current context. We could talk about that, but in any case, what then is our role in terms of engagement? How do we engage with our own intelligence, for example, in terms of knowing who's saying what and counting that? What are the possible avenues of approach? Can we get on talk shows where crazy stuff is going on? And in fact, through not ourselves and our own spokespersons, State Department and others, but locals that actually are quite interested in countering those kinds of statements, conspiracy theories and others. I mean, what would be our level of engagement and type after that? And just one last thought, thanks very much for your whole speech and characterization of what a lot of us have felt that is that profound discomfort in terms of some of the things we've said and places we've tried to go. Thanks. I mean, with respect to a country like Egypt and, frankly, US policy in the Middle East more broadly, I think the United States just has to have a really, in its frank conversation with itself about what the north stars of its longer term engagement with the region should be. Obviously guided by some assessment of US national interest. And what I would contend is that the previous north stars that have been the guiding principles of US diplomacy in the Middle East over the last 50 years have largely fallen away. And part of the turbulence that we're going through right now is that we're not entirely sure what our interests are. And I think one of the products of this is a knee-jerk reaction to scramble our way back to comfortable ways of doing business. And there's a number of other countries in the region that are feeling the exact same thing. Saudi Arabia and Israel, perhaps chief among them. And this is why there's been this odd, you know, some people have kind of remarked about why it suddenly seems like Riyadh and Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Jerusalem are such close buddy buddies these days. How is that possible? It's because they are experiencing a version of the same form of post-2011 shock. Both of those countries had become very comfortable with a staid fashion of US engagement in business with the region. But the correlates of US geopolitical conduct in the Middle East have fallen away as the realities of the region have evolved. And to me, what this means going forward is that, you know, before we think about, you know, engaging in popular culture and ways to try and have certain kinds of influences, we need to have a clearer sense of, you know, what we're trying to achieve. And, you know, I do agree as someone who occasionally wears the hat of a conventional policymaker that security and stability is absolutely essential. But I believe that the way you achieve that, the way you get that is to engage seriously in the long, difficult one-step-forward, seven-step-back process of starting to take something like genuine political reform and participatory politics seriously. And you can give a democracy and human rights justification for doing that. That's fine. It's a good reason. But you can also give a damn good security and stability argument for doing so with the idea that these societies will only be secure and stable over the long term if you make progress in franchising their populations and citizens. Right? What we're seeing in Algeria literally as we speak, you know, is, I think, confirmation of something that many of us who monitor the region have been saying for years when things started to go bad after 2011, you know, and as some of our closest allies in the region, you know, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates double down on certain kinds of policy, you know, positions, ones that this administration has been only too happy to enable. And I think it thinks itself to be in control of things that it's not in control of. I mean, the Trump administration, I think the Trump administration is being played by the Emiratis and the Saudis just, you know, to no end. And so, you know, what's happening in Algeria is a confirmation of this idea that, look, given where we've ended up, it's only a finite amount of time before the forces that produced 2011 come back again because the same basic social contradictions that produced those events are still present, you know. And if so, if we're going to go through this again ever so often and if there's diminishing returns on it, meaning that the state has to use ever greater amounts of regulation, enforcement, and violence, we're just going to create a cycle of instability and insecurity. And so, you know, this is why I think it's time for a broader strategic re-evaluation. Of course, you know, I'd say, in a sense, this is a cop-out because I don't have good answers for the, you know, what should we be doing now in terms of the day-to-day influencing of popular opinion. But I think we shouldn't be doing that until we get a better sense of where we think things need to be going in a more strategic fashion. Thank you, everyone. Thanks for being here all day. I want to thank Carnegie Endowment, Nathan, Sarah, and other staff for hosting us here. And have a good day. Thank you.


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Oh, Camel Lake.  Oh no. I'm gonna have to leave Camel. Bellatrix, do you remember any dreams you had last night? Maybe? I dreamt. Bears on an airplane, actually. Stop it. Mmm, babies smell the best. Don't babies smell the best? Do babies smell the best to you guys or is it only if you have your own babies? Oh, he smells so good. Man, I'm laying right on a crack. Three legs out. Any balance? Alright choppers. Can I go do some digging now? Alright. Yeah, we gotta go to the store first, don't we? Then they'll go do some digging. Alright.


Hi, this is Gichu. Welcome to ASMR Math.  And I've mentioned this before, I guess, I think the first place that I heard this was through Robert Anton Wilson, who was quoting someone else mentioning that you know, some people say it's easier to talk about the concept of relativity, relativity in quantum mechanics in Swahili than it is in English, because Swahili has certain words that really can't be translated well into English that are suited to talk about quantum mechanics, quantum physics, right? Now, I don't know if that's true or not, because I don't speak Swahili, and I don't know anyone who does, so I haven't come across anyone that does, that I can ask them this question if that's true or not. But I know that to be the case through, you know, a couple other languages that I speak and through people that have talked about, and through mathematics. Now, what I want to do in this video is share with you a certain perspective that math gave me on a problem or a life situation that I've always wanted to figure out why this was the case, but I was never able to do that until I looked at it through the lens of mathematics, and all of a sudden it just sort of It was one of those wow moments where I sort of went, you know, did a double take and I looked at it and it was extremely simple, but it blew me away anyway, okay?  Now, this this problem, this situation that has always, or for as long as I can remember, intrigued me, was time, basically trying to get a handle on what time is, and if you've watched one of the previous videos I put out, and we're talking about the speed of light and why we can't travel, the speed of light, and we talked about Einstein's paper of general relativity on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, I guess. I mentioned this, I think towards the end when I guess the credit part was coming off or something like this, where I've been really curious about time, and one thing if you're, you know, I'm not sure how old you are, if you're, you know, in your teen years or if you're much older, this is something that everybody experiences, but everybody, as far as I know, only experiences it during a certain period in life, and the sensation that really triggered this for me, the first place that I remember wanting, you know, trying, wanting to understand this, was when I was in my teens, and in general, when I was sitting in a classroom, because if you're sitting in a classroom, if you're, you know, when you're growing up as a kid, maybe it was preteen, I guess, elementary school, that's when it was really dominant, I believe, in my life, is basically when you're growing up, when you're going to school, as far as I know, everybody's experienced this, where, you know, you're sitting in a classroom and you're looking at the clock and you're bored out of your mind, and five minutes seems like that is taking forever, right? Really, like even now, when I think about those moments, and I remember sitting there going, just watching the seconds tick by, and you're, you're just an awe that five minutes could take so long, right? And as I grew older, what happened was, that experience became less and less, and something associated with that experience is procrastination, where in general for me, anyway, I used to procrastinate a lot when I was younger, because I believe time was moving slower, right? The experience, the sensation of time was slower, hence procrastination. As I, you know, got older, and getting older, hopefully getting a lot older, much, much older, that sensation has diminished, has reduced, has dampened down to a level now that I rarely ever experienced that sensation, where time is moving very, very slow, or or I'm procrastinating, and in general, I don't really procrastinate anymore, right? So the perspective that, that sort of a mathematical perspective that I took towards this, trying to wrap my head around this, okay, was using ratios to look at that time difference, the sensations that I've had when I was younger as compared to the sensations I'm having with time as you know, as of right now, and I'm not sure what it's going to be in the future, but I'm curious to find out, right? And what I did was look at it through the mathematical lens, mathematical perspective, and I used ratios and what I'm about to talk to you about, this is you know, something that's been with me, part of my toolbox of teaching mathematics to almost anyone, right? I usually bring this concept up because it's it's intriguing, it's a wow moment for me, and I love sharing it, and it, you know, it really doesn't matter what level of mathematics it is that you know, okay, because this will make sense to you no matter what, so I use this concept for people who really aren't interested in mathematics, where I want to get them excited about math, okay, and I use it with people who are sort of you know, neither here nor there, and they're just doing it for, you know, the mechanic, you know, just sort of monkey-seeing, monkey-do, that's the that's the education system that we have right now, right? So they're sort of following the procedures and doing what it is that they're doing, you know, sometimes I just want to plant a seed for maybe future if they are interested in this, and I love really deep into this with students that are, you know, have a pretty good grasp of mathematics in there, they're always trying to go more complicated math, and you know, bring this up, and I sort of go, okay, you can start off with a simple concept and build on it, right? So what we're going to do right now in this video with this long-winded introduction is we're going to use ratios to understand time, to have a grasp of time, right, and basically this relates to life, death, and sort of, to me, I took it to the level where try to understand what the concept of borrowed time is, right, living on borrowed time. So let's take a look at this thing. Now, if we're, if we want to see the power of mathematics, right, let's start off with the system, the setup right now as you being a 15-year-old, me being a 45-year-old, and someone else being a 90-year-old, and let's take a look at how the perception of time, how our perception of time will vary depending on how old we are, right? So let's take, let's take, let's use purple. Let's see if the purple is okay. Oh, yeah, this is a nice color. Okay. So let's say we have three people, right, a 15-year-old, a 45-year-old, and a 90-year-old, okay? And let's take one week out of their lives, right? So what we're going to do, instead of taking a look at minutes, seconds, you know, days, right, or months or years, let's narrow our calculations now to one week, right?  Initially, I was going to do it in fraction form, but, you know, if you want to understand how to use fractions and stuff, we talked a lot about this in the language of mathematics of how to deal with fractions and what's the most important thing you need to know about fractions and stuff like this, right? And we did this in series one, and we did parts of it in future series, and we're going to continue this in series four of the language of mathematics where we're talking about units and ratios, right? And it's an incredibly powerful concept. And, you know, another, I guess, point that I'm going to mention is, coming out of high school, right, the most important thing, you need to have a really good grasp of these fractions, ratios, your units, right, functions, and functions are just an extension of ratios, right? So if you really have a really nice grasp of ratios, what ratios mean, how to deal with ratios, you're basically set for 95, 99% of the mathematics you're going to use in everyday life. Okay, so if you're only interested in math, you need to learn to be able to function in society, to be able to function in a world and almost do anything you want to do, learn your ratios, right? And this is what we're going to do right now. We've talked a lot about this in the language of mathematics already, right? So let's take one week for each one of our subjects or for us, right? So one week from 15 years, one week from 45 years, and one week from 90 years. Now what we should do, because these are in years, these are in weeks, what we should do is convert everything to the same units. That way we can get a direct comparison of things, right? So instead of putting one week here, or 15, 45, and 90 years, I'm going to convert 15, 45, and 90 to years to what they are in weeks, okay? So let's kill the weeks here, right? Because this is a week's roll. What we're going to do is we're going to convert 45, or 15 years into 15 weeks. And all we're going to do is multiply 15 by 52, because there's 52, you know, plus and minus a little bit, 52 weeks in a year, right? So 15 times 52, I did this already in the spreadsheet. So I'm just going to write them down. It's going to be 780 weeks, right? So 780 weeks, 45 years is 2,340 weeks. 2,340 weeks. And 90 years is 4,680 weeks, right? 4,680 weeks, okay? So what we're going to do right now is take one week out of each one of these people, right? So one week gone, one week gone, one week gone, right? So what we can do right now is let's take a look at how this 15-year-old perceives one week to be. Let's take a look at how this 45-year-old takes one week to be and how the 90-year-old takes one week to be, right? Relative to what they've lived, right? So one week out of 780 weeks, because that's what we're doing. We're taking one week out of 780 weeks. It's going to be one divided by 780, right? One divided by 2,340, and one divided by 4,680, okay? Those are our numbers. And all we do is just punch this into a calculator. This is a fraction. One divided by 780 comes out to .00128. So 0.00128, okay? This one comes out to .30, so 0.00043, okay? And the 90 becomes .0000021, okay? That's what one divided by 780 is. That's what one divided by 2,340 is. And that's what one divided by 4,680 is. And we can convert these to percentages, right? So all we do to convert to percent, we go boop boop, move this over to that small places, same with here. So this becomes 0.128%. And what that means is one week out of 780 weeks, one week out of 15 years is .128% of that person's life, right? What they've experienced so far. This is 0.0243%, and this one bring 2 decimal places over, 0.021%, right? So one week out of a 15 year old's life is .128% of their life. One week out of a 45 year old's life is .034% of their life. And one week out of a 90 year old's life is .021% of their life, right? And if we do a comparison between what one week feels like to a 15 year old is compared to what one week feels like to a 45 year old. Well, all we got to do is take this and divide it by this. Or the other way around, you take this and divide it by this. If you take this and divide it by this, you're going to get 3. If you take this divided by this, you're going to get .33, right? And what those numbers mean is if we take .128 divided by .03, 043, that's going to give us 3. That means one week for a 15 year old, relative to what they've lived is 3 times longer than what it feels like for a 45 year old. And it ends up being 6 times longer than what it feels like for a 90 year old, right? Because a 90 year old has lived 6 times more than a 15 year old and a 45 year old has lived twice as long or 3 times as long as a 15 year old, right? So the multiplication factor from here to here is 3, right? And for the 15 year old, it's 3. For the 45 to the 90 year old, it's 2, right? Let's be consistent with this. Let's write it out. So if we go from here to here, we multiply this by 3. If we go from 45 to 90, we multiply this by 2, right? Because it feels it's double the lifespan, right? So one week, if we take this and divide it by that, we're going to get 2. Or, yeah, we're going to get 2, right? So what that means is one week feels twice as long. Or how do we do this? This divided by that is 2. So one week is twice as long, feels like twice as much the experience for a 45 year old as it does for a 90 year old, right? And if we want to go from 15 to 90, we go 3 times 2 is 6. So 15 to 90, we multiply by 6, right? So the ratio of what one week or one amount of time, whatever the unit might be, what it feels like for 15 year olds compared to a 90 year old is 6 times the difference. A 15 year old, whatever the unit of time is right now is weeks, feels 6 times longer or contains 6 times the information of what they've lived, right? Relative to a 90 year old, right? And this should make sense, right? It's pretty intuitive because a 45 year old is 3 times older than a 15 year old, right? So one week that a 45 year old has experienced, well, a 15 year old hasn't lived that long, right? So it feels shorter than a 15 year old, contains, you know, there's more memory with a 45 year old, right? So that sort of feels intuitive, right? That's the first step towards this, right? Now, this assumes to a certain degree, if we want to expand this, that we could take this to the next step and, you know, take it to a multiple of 15, we could take it to 150, we could take it to 100, we could take it to 180, we could take it to any number we want. But us human beings, we don't live that long, right? Not as far as we know. The oldest person is, I think recorded as 120s or 30s or something like this, right? So there's a lifespan associated with us, right? So this makes sense because it's sort of a linear, multi-poligas scale, it keeps on going, right? Now, if we do this comparison, when we put a limit on how old we can be, then the picture changes, right? It becomes a little different. It becomes a little bit more intense, right? So let's erase all this, okay? Let's kill all this and add to how old we can get. Now, for the next sort of analysis, next step, you know, taking a step up in complication, trying to appreciate the power of mathematics and what ratios allows us to do. Instead of looking at the age difference between the 15-year-old, 45-year-old, 90-year-old relative to the life they've had, right? Let's look at this thing relative to the life they have left living, right? So what we're going to do, we're going to add an age limit to this, a maximum lifespan, right? And let's assume that maximum lifespan is 100 years, okay? So we're not going to measure things based on from birth this way. We're going to measure things based on death this way and not how much life they've lived, right? Right, relative from birth to how long they've lived. We're going to measure relative to how long they have left to live, right? We're going to measure it based on a 100-year time limit of how many years, or for our case because we're working in weeks, how many weeks each one of these people has left to live. How many weeks we have left to live, right? So let's take a look at the 15-year-old, 45-year-old and 90-year-old relative to the weeks they have left to live, right? So 15-year-old, they have 85-years-left to live, right? So let's convert this, first of all, 15-year-old to 85-years-left to live, right? A 45-year-old is 55-years-left to live, right? And a 90-year-old is 10-years-left to live. Now let's convert this, these, to weeks-left to live, because we're working in weeks, right? So weeks-left to live, again, I've done, you know, I'm looking at my spreadsheet. So 85-years, right, in weeks becomes 4,420 years, 4,420 weeks, right? 4,420. A 45-year-old is 2860, 2860. And a 90-year-old is 10 weeks or 10 years, which is 10 times 52 is 520 weeks left to live, right? And what we're going to do now is take a look at one week, you know, take one week out of each sets of these, right? So what we're going to do, we're going to go 1 divided by 4,420, 1 divided by 2860, and 1 divided by 520, right? And what that's going to give us, again, it gives us decimals. This is going to be 0.0023, right? But what I'm going to do is I'm just going to convert it directly to percentages, right? Because we already converted decimals, right? Just to save space here because we're running out of space. So that becomes to 0.023% of a 15-year-old's life, right? So if they have, if someone has 85 years to live, if they're 15 years old, they have a lifespan of 100 years, then this person has 85 more years to live. That's a long time to live. And you got 4,420 weeks, right? That you can enjoy yourself. That's 4,420 weekends, if you want to think of it that way. And we're going to take one of those weeks out. That means 0.023% of their life is taken out. Their expected life, right? For a 45-year-old, it becomes 0.035%. Okay? And for a 90-year-old, it's 0.192%. Now, when we did it last time, we did it from birth to what they're expected to live, right? And that was, you know, a multiple of 3, a multiple of 2, and a multiple of 6 from 15 to 90. But the multiples now change, okay? Because there's a limit to how long you're going to live. So, relative to a 15-year-old, one week out of a 15-year-old's life, if we're looking at it from the death perspective, is 0.023% of their life. For a 90-year-old, it's 0.192% of their life. The ratio, the comparison between a 15-year-old and a 90-year-old, this multiple is now 8.5, right? So, it changed. So, the multiple from here to here, right, is going to be 8.5. From the 15-year-old to the 45-year-old. Oh, I can't believe I did this calculation. From a 15-year-old to a 45-year-old, the multiple is only 1.54%. Oh, sorry, 1.54. That's the multiple, right? So, this 0.023 to 0.035, this multiple here is 1.54 times, right? So, I shouldn't really put these down here, because this multiple, let's keep these numbers, these multiples, still at the ratio of birth. This was 6 before, right? This was 3, and this was 2, right? Now, the multiple from here to here is 1.54. The multiple from here to here is 8.5. Now, unfortunately on my spreadsheet, I didn't do the multiple from here to here. Should we do this? Let me check this out. Let me bring out the calculator. So, let's go 0.192 divided by 0.035. This means 5, and the multiple here from here to here becomes 5.5, really. So, the multiple here is, let me make a little bit more room here. This multiple here is 5.5. And if we want to do a check, all we got to do is multiply this times this. And that should come out to about 8.5, right? So, we can go 5.5 times 1.54. Because it wasn't really 5.5, it was a little bit more. So, I'm just rounding. So, if I'm going to round this, this one I should keep to be consistent and make this 1.5 instead of 1.54, if I'm only going to round to 1 decimal place, right? So, times 1.5, right? So, what's happened here is we've gone from a simple intuitive direct connection of just multiples of the originals to something with a limit. And now, this becomes an exponential. Because the closer you get to your age limit of 100 years, right? The growth or the decay, whichever way you're looking at it, right? The difference, the ratio, either goes up exponentially or goes down depending how much time you have left to live relative to what you've lived to vice versa, right? Because ratios, you can always look this one way or another way, right? You can go to a store if you're buying chips, for example, or if you're buying anything that's per gram, right? Some stores have it based on dollars per gram. Some stores have it based on grams per dollar, right? So, it sort of switches over and that's what we're doing right now, sort of giving you the perspective right now as a multiple of what it would be relative to a 15-year-old, right? But if we take this, 100-year-old, and I actually expanded that because we're starting to get curious on this, right? So, if we look at it to someone who has, let's say, where is it, 90-year-old, 95-year-old? If we went to a 95-year-old, a 95-year-old only has 260 weeks to live. So, relative to the amount of time they have left to live, one divided by 260 is 0.00385 and that's 0.385% of their life, right? Which is 17 times the 15-year-olds, right? So, one week for a 95-year-old is 17 times more precious than what it is for a 15-year-old, right? It's, you know, for a 45-year-old one week is only 1.5 times as precious as it is for a 15-year-old, but 8.5 times as precious for a 90-year-old relative to a 15-year-old, right? And for me, when I looked at it from this perspective, when I was trying to wrap my head around the concept of time, what time meant, why time is not absolute, to a certain degree, the way we experience time, our perception of time is not absolute.  And then there are times where the passage of time, you blink and it's gone. And if there's any bit of advice I can give anyone that I do give advice to people is, if you have friends, have friends from all walks of life and from all ages of life, right? Because as soon as you have friends that are, you know, more than just your age group, which is one of the problems we have in our education system, we're almost grouped together based on age, not based on likes or dislikes or experiences or what they want to do or what they don't want to do, right? But that's going off on a tangent, a different thing, right? But if you ever have the opportunity, right, make sure you interact with people from all walks of life, from all age groups. Because once you do that, you have a better, fuller understanding of time.  It's done, right? They can't believe that they were, you know, for a 90-year-old, 15 years, when they were 15 years old, seems like only yesterday, right? But for a 15-year-old, when you talk to them, if someone or someone younger, time is going so slow, there's so much procrastination and they could, it's very hard for them to grasp them being 45 years old or 90 years old.  And then when you turn 45, you look at 30-year-old, you're young, right? And for a 90-year-old, a 45-year-old is a baby. They're just starting their life, right? And this, to a certain degree, shows it, right? Because one week for 45-year-old, there's only one-and-a-half times the life experience left, right? One-and-a-half times more precious than a 15-year-old. But as soon as they get older, the curve actually goes exponential, right? They actually graph this thing, or printouts are in the best, they then, you know, set it up to graph it, but it's an exponential, right? And this curve here, you know, it just keeps on going like this. It becomes, you know, something like this. It just goes up and up. And we talked a little bit about this, because if we set our age, maximum age to be 100 years old, then that's sort of our asymptote, the limit that we've set. And we talked about this when we're talking about division by zero. Because when someone turns 100, right? They don't have any more life to live, right? They got zero years to live. So if you divide by zero, right? Because this would be zero. Someone at 100 years, it's a zero here. They got zero weeks to live, right? So if you're going to take one week out of their life, you got one divided by zero. You can't divide by zero. That's an asymptote, right? That's what we talked about when we talked about limits and asymptotes, right? Infinity and zero, right? They don't have any more life to live, right? That becomes an asymptote. It's an exponential curve, right? So the picture totally changes. If you look at this situation, the scenario, relative to from when you were born, how much life you've lived, as compared to relative to when you're going to die, how much life you have left to live, right? And this is for just humans, right?  And I've looked at, I printed these off. I went to Wikipedia and printed off the life expectancy charts and stuff like this, and it varies a lot. And there is no country in the world that has a life expectancy of 100 years, right? The majority of the country's best one was... The highest ranking one was... Depending on which organization's data you're looking at, some of them, Google was saying Monaco was the highest, which is 89 years old, but maybe that's because that's where a lot of people retire, right? Very, very small place in Bento Monaco, very, very small place, right? But most of the charts had Japan as the highest life expectancy for both sexes being together as 83.7 years, right? For females it was 86.8, for males it was 80.5. And this is life expectancy from birth, right? And then there's another measure in the same charts, which is health-adjusted life expectancy, which is how long are they expected to live a healthy life, right? So for both sexes, life expectancy was 83.7 for Japan, but for health-adjusted life expectancy where they expect to live a healthy life was 75. So the gap there was basically nine years, right? So nine years of an unhealthy life if you're getting older. And these numbers changed according to what country you looked at. Canada for both sexes was 82. Iceland was 82. Well, if you round up 83, Mexico was 87. If you're rounding up, China's 76. The United States was 79. Cuba was 79. The same, right? Iran was 76, right? That's sort of the high and mid ranges. What else do we have here? Brazil was 75. Armenia was 75. And you can go down to, you know, look at the lower ranges. And this one was, you know, there's a ranking of 183 countries. You know, they had Sierra Leone at 50. You know, different countries, South Africa is 63. And these numbers are sort of skewed a little bit, right? Because these are life expectancy from birth, but that data is totally skewed based on infant mortality, right? So you can take a look at this stuff. Life expectancy based on, you know, taking out infant mortality, right? So life expectancy after retaining adulthood. And these numbers get closer together. The ranges don't skew. So life expectancy isn't really the best measure, right? It's skewed by infant mortality, right? But you can take this concept and apply it to the life expectancy to any country you want to compare it to. And beyond that, you can take this same thing, the same type of data, the same ratio comparison and do a comparison based on, you know, life of a corporation, life of a country, life of a tree, of other animals, right? We live a fairly long time when it comes to mammals, right? But we don't live the longest, right? There are sea turtles that live longer than we do. There are parrots that live a very, very long time, right? There are jellyfish that are expected. You know, I believe, I didn't look into this a long time ago. There are jellyfish that scientists are taking a look at because, in essence, those jellyfish are considered to be immortal because they can continuously regenerate their cells, right? I don't know if the five of the scientists are correct or not, but they're expected to live, you know, long in a thousand years or immortal, basically. So there are scientists looking at the genetics of it, right? The traits of these jellyfish try to see what allows them to live a long time, right? So you can do the same comparison for things, you know, outside of the human sphere, right? Compare us to other species, to other cycles, I guess, right? You can compare it to the, you know, how long stars last, how long planets live, the ice age, right? Compare it to anything you want.  And it's pretty cool, right? And that's one thing I did for me anyway. When I started looking at time in this fashion, from the mathematical lens, it really answered a lot of questions for me. It really made a lot of things come to light and made me procrastinate less, right? And time really didn't grind to a halt anymore, right? It became more and more precious as I keep on getting older and older as we saw here, right? Because as soon as we had a limit, a lifespan for us, because everything has a limit, right? Everything changes. Everything has a lifespan. As soon as we had that, all of a sudden, time became more and more precious, right? So, again, procrastination less and less. And as far as how far you can take this, as far as, you know, the usefulness of this concept of ratios and stuff, this is incredibly powerful. This is really the first step we take when we do ratios on the path for us to do calculus because once we understand time, then we can start doing calculus. Because calculus for me, when people ask me, you know, what's calculus to you? For me, calculus is the introduction of time into mathematics. And as soon as you do that, you're looking at ratios, you're looking at the rate of change, right? Which is really what calculus is and what really this sort of exercise is the first introduction to it. I hope you liked. This was something that I really enjoyed doing. I really enjoyed teaching and I bring up as often as I can of a meaning to do this video for a long time. And I'm glad that we're getting it done now because, you know, some of the other videos we've touched on time a little bit and we've talked about ratios and we will continue to talk about ratios and functions at limits and asymptotes. That's it for now. I'll see you guys in the next video.


Γεια σας, Είσαι Βιγκή, και ευχαριστούμε για έναν άλλο καρδίκο βίντεο. Αυτό είναι part of a blog hope as we celebrate the new inkpad release by Altenew. Έτσι, έχουν ρελήσει 12 νέες κόλες, μπορείς να τα βλέπεις ως ένα set of 4, και έχω τα όβαλες sets εδώ, αλλά μπορείς να τα βλέπεις ξεπρακτικά και να τα βλέπεις σε μια φορμή του inkcubes, που είναι πολύ οικονομικά και εύκολα. Το πρώτο set είναι called Sugar Plums & Lovely Shades of Purple. Αυτό είναι το 4th harvest set in lovely warm yellows. Θα χρησιμοποιήσω αυτές τις κόλες σήμερα για να μπορείς να τα βλέπεις όλα στην αξία. Και τελικά, το πιο εύκολο μου από όλες τις κόλες είναι αυτό. Αυτό είναι το cool tranquility in lovely blue grays, που εγώ absolutely love and I will be using all these colors on my card today so you can see them in action as well. Τώρα, αυτό το βίντεο είναι part of a blog hope. There is lots of inspiration along the blog hope, and lots of giveaways, so make sure to visit my blog. You will find the link down below and under the giveaways. For my card today I will be using the new stamp set, which is called Modern Fox & The Matching Dice. And I'm going to stamp the fox as well as the tree. So I have a piece of a Nina Solar White cardstock here. I'm going to place my images on top and it doesn't matter where I'm going to place them. I will be using my dice later on to cut them out. So for the tree there is also another stamp that you stamp on top for the tree trunk. And for the fox there are a couple more stamps that you can layer on top. Now you can see I'm preparing the stamps here. These are solid stamps and I'm using them for the first time. So I like to prep them like that or you can use an eraser. This way I will get a good impression once I stamp which is not going to be splotchy. For the fox I will be using inks from the Fall Harvest Set and I'm starting with Pumpkin Pie and I'm using my misty here so that I can stamp a second time to add some shadow. So I have the first layer here and now without moving the stamp I'm going to switch to another color. This time I'm going with Yellow Ochre and this is a Touch Darker and I'm touching the impact only at the base of my fox. Just to add a touch of shadow there. You can blend it out with your finger, stamp on top and you will see that I get a lovely shadow which is not going to be as vibrant as it looks now once the inks are going to dry. So I will end up having a lovely blending there. There are two more stamps that you can layer on top one that gives the details for the nose and the eyes and the other one gives the details of the feet. So I'm stamping those with Brown Ink and that's Espresso. Now you can leave the fox as it is and it looks wonderful but I decided to go back with Black Ink this time. I'm going to touch the ink pad at the very bottom of the feet just to darken them up a little bit as well as I'm going to stamp the nose and the eyes. So I'm not inking up the whole stamp although it looks like I'm doing so. I'm being very careful to ink up only a few parts. I'm going to close the door of my misty and my fox is ready. Now we'll move on and do the stamping of the tree and as I'm going for a winter scene card I'm going to use the blue craze from the new set which is called Tranquility. Absolutely love those colors and just for a completely different look I decided to go with a lighter color for my tree which is Misty Morning and I'm going to stamp it one more time on top. I'm not switching to a darker ink pad I'm just using the same one at the very bottom just to add a touch of shadow. It's not going to be as dark as it looks now once it dries it's going to have a lovely blending. I'm going to place on top the second stamp that gives you the tree trunk and all the branches and for that I will go with the second shade which is called Cloudy Sky a lovely color again. I absolutely love the set of blues and the truth is that I didn't have any ink pads in that shade of blue. My favorite colors are blue and I didn't have any in blue grays so I'm really happy with this release. Again here I'm adding some shadows only at the base with the same ink pad again and again just to darken up a little bit the bottom of the tree. Now I'm going to use the matching dies I line them on top I will secure them with purple tape just to make sure that they are not going to move on me and run them through my die cutting machine. And I end up having two lovely focal points for my card. Now I will be using the two darker shades from the tranquility set and these are Nimbus and Dark Knight. I have a piece of cardstock here that's 4.25 x 5.5 and I'm using an ink blending tool to apply my ink. Now don't worry if it looks plotchy I'm going to make sure that I saturate the color a lot so no splotches are going to show at the end. Also once this ink dries it's going to blend nicely and evenly and it's not going to look as if it looks at the moment so don't be afraid to go ahead and ink with those ink pads. For inking I'm using my rectangle old blending tools by ranger and I'm using those just because they have a bigger area so they make my life easier and I can cover up my cardstock quicker. And you can see I ended up having a lovely background no harsh lines everything is nicely blended and I have that lovely ombre look from darker to lighter. Now this is going to be my background to the sky for my winter scene For that I will be using one of my stitched rectangle ties and I'm going to cut it to size this is going to be slightly smaller than the standard card. Now I used my embossing bag where I'm going to stamp now just to remove static electricity I'm using my embossing ink and I'm stamping the sentiment this comes from the same modern fox stamp set as the rest of my images and I'm stamping the one that says cold days warm heart I think this is a lovely winter card I will apply white embossing powder and before you do this step before you go ahead and do the embossing make sure that the ink underneath is completely dry otherwise with all that ink ink the embossing powder is going to stick all over the place Now I used a couple of ties to cut out those slopes out of white cardstock and I stacked the first one directly on top of my base by using glue at the back and for the second one I did add some foam tape at the back just to add some dimension and for the tree I'm going again completely flat with my tape at the back Now I don't know if you can tell but I have smudged there a little boo boo out of brown ink or maybe the yellow one which I need to cover up so I'm going to strategically place my fox on top of the tree to cover up that completely So I'm going to use my tape at the back of my panel and I have a standard card that's four and a quarter by five and a half I'm going to stick the panel on top and you can call this card done or if you are like me and you never stop with little details I decided to add some shiny stars I have these teeny tiny silver stars and I'm going to stick them all over the background I think with all those blue grays silver goes beautifully it completes the look that I'm going for and it definitely looks better than using gold stars So I end up having a gold winter scene which I absolutely love Down below the description area you will find a link to the giveaways as well as a list of all the supplies that I used today I hope you had fun that you got inspired Don't forget to leave me a comment, like and subscribe if you haven't done so already and I'll see you all next time