Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to our beautiful headquarters here at 31 Bly Street for this special event with Martin Indyk. I'm Michael Fullylove, the Executive Director of the Institute. Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the Institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present. Ladies and gentlemen, looking at the world today, we're confronted with a host of problems where nearly 600 days into Russia's shocking and brutal invasion of Ukraine, geopolitical risk is rising and it's moving from the margins of the international economy to the center. And the recent heat waves, wildfires and storms across Europe and North America demonstrate the existential danger posed by unchecked climate change. It does today feel in particular like the world is on fire, although we know that's because of back burning. So the problems, we see very significant problems and yet we also see effective statecraft responding to many of these problems. After four years of President Trump, for example, the Biden administration, I would argue, has demonstrated great skill in assembling and leading a coalition of like-minded nations to support Ukraine. And in Asia, the administration has created a situation of strength in the last couple of years, consolidating key Asian alliances, bringing Japan and South Korea closer together, quickening US relations with Vietnam and India, standing up orcus and convening the Quad, even as it stabilizes the US-China relationship. So those are just two examples of how diplomacy matters and diplomacy makes a difference. Smart diplomats can solve some of the problems that we face. And today we have the opportunity to hear from an accomplished diplomat, a practitioner of diplomacy and a scholar of diplomacy, as well as a founding board member of the Lowy Institute, Martin Indyk. One of the missions that Frank Lowy gave to the Institute 20 years ago when he established the Institute was to project Australian voices abroad. And in a way, that is a description of Martin's life. Martin is a Sydney boy, born, grew up in Castle Crag, just over the bridge, studied at the University of Sydney and ANU before moving to Washington to enter the think tank world. He was talent spotted by Bill Clinton. He took US citizenship and Martin became the President's key advisor on the Middle East. He twice served as US Ambassador to Israel as well as serving in important positions in the Department of State. And later he returned to government to serve as President Obama's special envoy for Middle East peace. He is also hugely experienced in the think tank world, serving at Brookings for nearly two decades and helping to run the Brookings Institution through a purple patch in its history and now serving as a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Martin is also the author of several important books, including his memoir Innocent Abroad and most recently, Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East diplomacy. So there is literally no one in the world better qualified to address today the topic, what would Kissinger do? Please join me in welcoming Martin Indyk to the lectern. Good afternoon, everybody. It's great to be back at the Lower Institute. I've been at this podium. I've had the honor of being at this podium on several other occasions, but it's been a long time between COVID and everything else that's delayed our return to Australia. So I'm very glad to be here with my wife, Gail. And I'm honored that so many friends are here, too. I'm particularly honored with the presence of Prime Minister John Howard. Thank you, sir, for coming today. Michael Fully Love is someone whom I met at the, I don't even remember now how long ago it was. It must be 21 years ago, when Frank Lowey first came to Washington to scout out the idea of setting up a international relations think tank in Australia. And he came to see me. I was there at the Brookings Institution, which is the oldest think tank in the world. And he came with this young man named Michael Fully Love, whom I'd never met before. And Michael was responsible for kind of writing the prospectus, the paper, for this institution. And it's a legend now that I took Frank into this room at the front of the Brookings Institution, which is a replica of the place where the scholars first met at the turn of the century when Brookings was first established. And I pointed out to him that every wall had wood paneling on it.  You need wood paneling to make it look like it's an old institute. And lo and behold, he comes back and the first thing he does is buy this building. So I feel like not only was I present at the creation, but I have some responsibility for the fact that we are here in this beautiful building today. Michael, in the meantime, rose from being a scholar to running the Lowy Institute. And I have to say that he has taken it well beyond anything that I, or speaking for Frank, imagined was possible. And Michael, you deserve a great deal of credit for the way in which the Lowy Institute has really become such a force not only in debating international relations in this country, but so respected abroad. Tomorrow, September the 13th, you probably don't realize it, but it's the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the South Lawn of the White House back in 1993. October the 5th, a couple of weeks later, will be the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. And I wanted to talk about those two anniversaries today in my opening remarks. 20 years apart, the first was a war that led to peace, and the second was a peace that led to war. And the distinction between the two is important when thinking about peacemaking diplomacy in general, but in particular, peacemaking diplomacy in the Middle East. I was involved in the second effort as a US diplomat, a member of Bill Clinton's peace team, his ambassador to Israel. And for eight years, we fought hard to try to turn the Oslo agreement into a lasting peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and we failed. Then I was given another opportunity, a second chance, when President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in relaunching the final status negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians in 2013. And they asked me to be the special envoy for those negotiations on behalf of the United States, and we failed again. At the end of that exercise in 2014, which by the way was the last time there's been any Israeli-Palestinian negotiations up to this date, I decided that I, instead of writing a book about why we failed, I would go back and look at why the diplomacy of peacemaking after the 1973 Yom Kippur War succeeded. And in particular, to look at the American diplomat who was responsible for that success, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is remembered for a lot of things, most of them controversial. He's not usually remembered for his peacemaking in the Middle East. But in fact, after the 1973 war, he crafted a diplomatic effort, a peace process, that led to three Arab-Israeli agreements. One between Israel and Egypt that disengaged the forces. A second one with a deeper Israeli withdrawal into the Sinai gave up the strategic passes to Egypt, and Egypt took control of the Suez Canal. And the third agreement was between Israel and Syria, known as the Golan Heights Disengagement Agreement of 1974. The Israel-Egypt agreement produced a peace between Israel and Egypt one year after Kissinger left office. Jimmy Carter at Camp David 1 produced that. But without Kissinger's diplomacy, that would have never happened. The Golan Heights Disengagement Agreement to this day governs relations between Israel and Syria and has been maintained by both sides, even as Syria descended into civil war, and has essentially made the Golan Heights the quietest of Israel's borders, save the Israel-Egypt border, which was a peace border, since then. So in looking back, you could say that Kissinger's diplomacy was highly successful. What was the secret source, as we say in America? I decided to go back and try to understand this. Even though Kissinger's written a great deal, his memoirs run to thousands of pages, you cannot find an explanation of what he's thinking was about peacemaking. There's a lot of detail about the peacemaking. But as I went through the protocols of his negotiations, which are now all open in the archives, I discovered something which I found quite curious, that every time his Arab or Israeli interlocutors would say, we're ready for peace, would tell him we're ready for the big step, we're ready to reconcile and make peace, he would back them off and say, no, no, that's too risky, that's too dangerous, we've got to go for something less. And as I look back at his writings and I came to understand something that's fundamental to his success and our subsequent failure, and that is a deep skepticism about the potential for actually ending conflict between states and people. And I believe that what was more important than peace treaties that ended conflicts was an order that maintained the peace, prevented the outbreak of war, that ameliorated conflict, and that it would eventually, if that order was maintained, lead the sides to reconcile. But that it was wrong to assume that just because leaders said they wanted to make peace, that you could actually resolve these deep-seated conflicts in one fell swoop, and that it was therefore much more important to introduce an incremental approach, a cautious, conservative incrementalism. And that's what he did when he had the opportunity to make peace between the Israelis and the Arabs. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he introduced what he called step-by-step diplomacy, one step on the Egyptian side, one step on the Syrian side, another step on the Egyptian side, but smaller steps, always eschewing the idea that you could achieve a comprehensive peace. His bosses didn't agree with him. Both Nixon and Ford wanted to go for the big deal, wanted to go for the whole enchiladas, we say, wanted to grasp the brass ring of peacemaking in the Middle East. And he always found a way to back them off, to slow them down, to convince them that it was safer and more productive to go for the smaller steps. It's not always an ideal approach. He could have, for instance, achieved an Israel-Egypt peace treaty before he left office if he had taken a more ambitious, less risk-averse approach. Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, who was Prime Minister of Israel at the time, were ready for that as the protocols show. But he wasn't, and he wasn't prepared to risk it. And that approach found resonance with Rabin. 20 years later, when Rabin decided to make peace with the Palestinians, with the PLO. As Rabin was fond of saying in those days, you make peace with your enemies, not with your friends. And the big challenge for him, recognizing that Israel had to find a way to make peace with the Palestinians, was how to move from a period of intense conflict and war to a state of peace. And so what did he do? He took a page out of Kissinger's book and introduced a step-by-step process, an incremental process called the Oslo Accords. Few people today remember what's in the Oslo Accords, so I'll tell you. There was nothing about a Palestinian state. There was nothing about Jerusalem. There was nothing about refugees. There was nothing about borders. All there was in the Oslo Accords was mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO and an incremental process of Israeli army withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza in phases. And in return, the Palestinians taking control of their own affairs through the Palestinian authority that was set up by the Oslo Accords. And that incremental approach was pursued while Rabin was alive. And it resulted in two implementation agreements. Some of you may remember Arafat coming back to Gaza and taking control of Jericho and then taking control of 27 percent of the West Bank, which happened to contain 90 percent of the Palestinian population on which the Palestinian authority was established and all of Gaza. And it was, that was in fact the high point of the Oslo process when Rabin and Arafat signed that agreement in 1995, in September of 1995. And I guess Arafat started to take control of the people, downstanding people in the West Bank and Gaza and a decent part of the territory, a third of the territory. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated two months later. And as a result, not only did his wingman, Shimon Peres, lose the next elections to BB Netanyahu, who ran against Oslo, but also the approach that Rabin had brought to building trust with the Palestinians, with Arafat in particular, also went out the window. Instead, you had Netanyahu approaching the Oslo process in a very negative way, doing his best to try to drag the process out and avoid the commitments that the previous government, the Rabin Peres government, had made. Bill Clinton and his team spent a year and a half cajoling Netanyahu to do the next phase of the Oslo process, which eventually he did in the wire agreement of 1998, and another 13% of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank came under Palestinian control to a total of 40%. And then Netanyahu's government collapsed as a result of giving up that territory. And the lesson BB took from that was never give up territory again, because you'll lose your government. And in effect, that was the last deal, the 1998 deal, there hasn't been any other agreement. But what happened then, and I'll try to collapse this quickly because we don't have enough time, is that Netanyahu lost his government and Barack became Prime Minister with a mandate to pursue Rabin's legacy, except he went to Clinton and he said, let's finish it. Let's go for an end of conflict, end of claims deal. The very opposite of what Kissinger had warned about. Barack said, I don't have enough support to do another phase, let's end it. And that's what we tried to do at Camp David in July of 2000. And we failed. Arafat told us before we went there that he wasn't ready. He was honest enough to tell us he wasn't ready to end the conflict. But Clinton didn't listen under pressure from Barack, and the two of them tried to press him, made him a generous deal, but not a deal that he could accept. And the rest essentially is history. What happened from that point on was that the intifada broke out, violence from Palestinians and Israeli retaliation for that destroyed the whole framework of peace and the trust between the people and the leaders. And try as presidents might, since then, and every one of them has tried in one way or another to do the opposite of what Kissinger wanted to try to end the conflict, including President Trump, including President Obama, each one of them has failed. And that, I think, underscores the wisdom today in a situation where the Israelis and Palestinians are mired in conflict, the wisdom of trying again an incremental approach, a much more cautious step-by-step process of trying to rebuild trust on the basis of Israeli territorial withdrawals from the West Bank in phases. Sounds far-fetched? Well, that's exactly what the United States and the Biden administration and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia are trying to do today as part of the Israeli-Saudi peace deal that you may have read about that they are now trying to negotiate. So Kissinger is not yet dead, he's 100 years old, still going strong, and perhaps it's time to revive Kissingerian approach to Middle East diplomacy. Thank you. Martin, thanks for kicking us off in such a thought-provoking way and for finishing on that point on the Saudi-Israel normalization, but just before I ask you about that, let me ask you this, what is it about Henry? You literally wrote the book on Henry Kissinger and his Middle East diplomacy, and you've talked about his caution and his incrementalist approach, but more broadly, why reflect, I know you know Henry Kissinger very well, reflect a little bit more on Kissinger as a figure in US politics and in diplomacy, why is he such a storied figure, what was beyond that particular approach, what was it about him that made him a master of the game? So I think that Kissinger stands out together with Big Brzezinski. As Europeans, I mean they were born in Europe, they grew up in Europe, they had a European understanding of history, and in particular Kissinger's understanding of history was informed by his study of order in Europe in the 19th century, when Castle Ray and Metternich, the foreign ministers of the Great Britain and Austria, put together an order after the vast destruction of the Napoleonic Wars, which incorporated post-Napoleonic France into the order and maintained the peace without formal peace treaties for almost 100 years, until it broke down in the First World War. And so Kissinger's whole approach to American foreign policy was informed by that very European experience, very different from any of the secretaries of a state that came after him. And because he had that sense of history, when he came to power, he advanced an approach which was focused on maintaining order, and order was to be maintained by producing a balance of power in favor of the status quo, in favor of the United States, of course, but this was the height of the Cold War. And that was the essence, the simple essence of his approach. It was a strategic approach based on the balance of power to produce an equilibrium that would maintain the status quo in America's favor. And that's the policy that he pursued. Of course, it was overlaid by the Soviet Union, the openings of China, but all of that was in the service of this order that he was trying to build on the model of the European order of the 19th century. And so that I think made him unique. Why he's such a storied figure at this point is partly because he's still alive, but partly because notwithstanding some of the egregious things that he did, the maintenance of that order worked very well for the United States, and particularly the openings China created a strategic environment that was very favorable to the United States for decades after. I described you earlier as both a practitioner and a scholar of diplomacy. And you had this unusual experience with Kissinger that you'd known him for many years, known him personally. And yet then you decided to write a book on him. And you went back into the archives and you were suddenly coming at Kissinger, not as a colleague or a fellow practitioner, but as a scholar. What surprised you in the archives?  Well, you know, Henry, because he was a student of history, as well as a historical actor, he kept, he documented every conversation that he ever had. So in the archives, his conversation with Liza Minnelli and his other celebrity associates. But there's also great detail on all of his negotiations and every negotiation is documented there. And about 95% of those documents have now been declassified. Today, you would never be able to go back to the archives. Imagine 30 years from now you went to the archives, the Biden administration, you wouldn't find any of that. It's all done by text, it's kept out of the documents. There's all sorts of reasons why they now avoid this or destroy the emails. So it's a unique situation where he has revealed himself in all of these documents. But Kissinger is a very complicated figure. In particular, when it came to the Middle East, he was operating in an anti-Semitic White House and an anti-Israel State Department at the time. And so he obfuscated what he was doing. He always tried to convince everybody he was dealing with that in fact he was doing their bidding when in fact he was doing the exact opposite. And it's only through the protocols that you have the negotiations that you discover what he was really up to. And he would regularly flaunt Nixon's instructions, just ignore them or say that he didn't receive them. And he was subsequent when I talked to him about this. He'd say, Nixon understood that there were things that he never really intended me to implement. He said, like bombing the Brookings Institution, which was one of the things that Nixon ordered him to do. But Kissinger basically took it upon himself, especially in the days of Watergate when Nixon was really no longer in control and drunk a lot of the time, to run foreign policy for the United States. And he did that in a way that he did not want to reveal even in his memoirs. But it's there in the documents. Well, I definitely sympathize with Kissinger's instincts in not bombing a think tank. I think that was wise. Let me ask you, I interviewed Dr. Kissinger, you'll recall for the director's chair, my podcast in last December. And one of the subjects that I talked to him about was the role of individuals in making history, as opposed to vast in personal forces. And when you look back on your career in Middle East diplomacy, how much of the really crucial decisions were driven by the individual preferences of individuals versus forces over which they didn't have much control? I mean, you mentioned Arafat, for example, in Camp David. How much was that? Could Arafat have made a deal or was it beyond him? Obviously, individuals make decisions in the context of big impersonal forces. But how important in the Middle East did you find the role of individual leaders? So, Kissinger certainly puts a great deal of emphasis on the role of leaders. In fact, his last book called Leadership profiled the leaders that he most respected, like Lee Kuan Yew and Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, of course. And he put Anwar Siddharth in there. He says it was after reading my book, but in fact, I came to understand that it was because he had to have a person of color in there these days. And I tend to take the same view that one can see in people like Siddharth and Rubin and King Hussein of Jordan. And for that matter, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, these big personalities who really took control and shaped events for better or worse. So that's obviously important. But as they say, leaders make history, but not as they please. And that's the other reality that I came across all the time, which was that so much is shaped by circumstance as well. Leadership is critically important, but the opportunity has to be there. There has to be a ripeness. Edward Barak wanted to make peace. But he, not only did he do it in, I think, the wrong way, but he didn't have partners to work with in a way that Bagan had with Saddam or Rubin had with King Hussein. And he didn't have the moment, the opportunity there was different, was missing. And my colleague, Richard House, the Council on Formulations, has introduced this concept of ripeness, that when conflicts are ripe to be settled, that's the moment in which individuals and leaders can actually make a difference. But if they're not ripe, and you can look at the Israeli-Palestinian situation today and say, it's clearly not ripe for some kind of major initiative, but it wouldn't matter if you had a leader in Israel and a leader on the Palestinian side that had the support of their people, which you don't. But if you did, it wouldn't matter in circumstances in which the parties were not ready to move, the circumstances weren't ripe, the balance of power wasn't ripe. So I think it is a combination of circumstance and leadership that can produce breakthroughs. And staying on this theme of leaders, you mentioned in your remarks some pretty significant figures, Prime Minister Rubin, King Hussein and others. Of the leaders in the Middle East that you dealt with personally in your career, was there one whose personal quality is really, really impressed you? Did you have a favourite, if I can put it that way? Yeah, actually it was Saddam. Subsequently it was Rubin, but Saddam originally. Because Saddam had a vision of peace, had the ability to lead his people to support this idea and the courage to do it and the ingenuity, I mean to go to war in order to make peace because he had to disrupt the status quo. And the way that he negotiated with Kissinger was total surprise to Kissinger and Kissinger was the first to admit he could never have succeeded without Saddam because Kissinger came in and said, let's do it this way, we can argue about a few miles here and a few miles there or you can go with me, let's do this deal and then we'll move on to the next one. And Saddam said, okay, I'll follow my friend Henry and was ready to trust in him and not to get bogged down in the details that all of his advisors were insisting upon. He did the same with Jimmy Carter at Camp David and it was that kind of statesmanship which he was prepared to take risks for the peace that he was so determined to achieve for his people. Rubin was very similar in that regard, in the end, was courageous in the way that he was prepared to take calculated risks and to break the mold, particularly by dealing with this arch-terrorist Yassar Arafa in order to try to achieve a peace. And both of them, not coincidentally, lost their lives to assassins who were opposed to peace. You mentioned that when you reflected on your own attempts to contribute to peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, that the presidents wanted to go for the whole enchilada. They wanted the big ambitious achievement and that perhaps they should have followed a more cautious, Kissingerian approach. But you've also introduced the idea of ripeness. Do you think when you look back on Camp David and then your later service with John Kerry for Obama's presidency, was the ripeness there? I mean, even if you had pursued a different approach, was it ripe for resolution? So the ripeness was certainly there after the 1973 war and after the first Gulf War. If you remember that George H. W. Bush and James Baker took advantage of that war to bring all of Israel's Arab neighbors and the Palestinians into a negotiation. She was launched at the Madrid Peace Conference immediately after that war. And that tells you something about the correlation between wars which disrupt the status quo and create a plasticity that diplomats can then seize on and drive towards a negotiation in the case of Bush 41. So the opportunity was there. The Soviet Union collapsed. Rabin was then elected with a mandate to make peace. The Arabs had no choice because they had no Soviet patron anymore but to make peace. Salam Hussein's army had been destroyed. And so that was clearly a ripe moment for peacemaking. That's when Clinton and I came into office. Subsequently after Camp David II and the collapse of the peace process, it really lost all its potential because the whole framework of peace was just destroyed by violence. And it's one thing to make peace. You see this in Northern Ireland to make peace agreements and to kind of struggle to implement, but both sides kind of implement and they eventually build trust and the conflict subsides and the agreement survives. But it's another thing entirely when the two sides commit themselves to peace, observe their commitments in the breach as the Palestinians did when it came to violence and terrorism and the Israelis did when it came to settlements. And then go back to conflict. So once you've gone back to conflict, neither side is going to believe in the commitments of the other side. So you simply can't put it together again. It's rotten. It's not ripe. And that's been the real challenge. And unfortunately, and I was part of this, instead of saying, wait a minute, we got to step back and try to rebuild, try to create a ripening process. We said, let's go for the whole thing, time and time again. And it was impossible to do. All right, let me talk about, let me come to where you finished your prepared remarks. The situation at the moment, and there's a little bit of plasticity, perhaps in the region. It's clear that the Biden administration is ambitious to conclude a normalization of links between Saudi Arabia and Israel, which would involve a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty and a civilian nuclear program for the Saudis. And that would also have implications for the Palestinians. So tell us a little bit about that. Tell us what the state of play is, what the chances of success are, and what implications it would have for the region. So I don't know, but I guess this probably hasn't received a lot of attention in the Australian press. It's getting a little bit of attention in the American press. But what's actually going on is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has told President Biden that he's ready for a peace deal with Israel to formally recognize Israel and have full, normal relations with Israel. Now Saudi Arabia has never been in a war with Israel, or it's not the same as what I was describing between Israel and Egypt, Israel, Syria, or Israel and Palestinians for that matter. But because Saudi Arabia, the king of Saudi Arabia is the custodian of the two holy mosques of Mecca and Medina, because essentially Saudi Arabia leads the Muslim world. And because in the Arab world where leadership is usually contested, the others have fallen away, whether it's Egypt or Syria or Iraq, they're all in trouble. And Saudi Arabia has emerged as this very wealthy economic powerhouse with these Muslim credentials, so that a peace deal with Israel would be, as President Biden likes to call it, a BFD. New Australians know the F part of that. And it would be. Strategically it would provide the United States with two anchors in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia, Israel the most powerful military state in the region and Saudi Arabia the most powerful economic state, and would enable the offshore balancing role that the United States wants to and needs to play because we don't have the resources to deal with three regions simultaneously. We've got to deal with a war in Ukraine and an aggressive Russia. We've got to deal with the rise of China in your region and its assertiveness. And for too long, we've been tied down in the Middle East with the longest wars in American history. So we have to find a way, it's called the pivot, it's been going on for some time, but essentially it is to reprioritize the American foreign policy towards China in particular and Russia, of course, and to lower the Middle East as a priority. And yet we still have strong interests there. We have to find a way to protect them by doing more with less. And this would give us the strategic platform to do that. So from the United States point of view, it's worthwhile. But it's an extremely complicated deal. First of all, the Crown Prince has his price. And the price is not from Israel, it's from the United States, as Michael said. It involves an Article 5 NATO-like defense treaty, not like the ANSAS treaty, but like the NATO treaty in which an attack on Saudi Arabia would be treated as an attack on the United States. Such a defense treaty needs two thirds of the Senate to endorse it, 67 votes. You know, Biden at best controls 51. So he's going to have to get Republican votes. The danger actually is that he'll get the Republican votes because the Republicans like the Saudis. But he'll have trouble getting the Democratic votes because they don't. They don't like MBS, they don't like his human rights policies and they don't like his war in Yemen and they don't like his oil policy. And they've got a long list of problems. So that's number one. I won't go into all the details, but there are a couple of other things he wants. And one of them is particularly problematic from another point of view. He wants a nuclear enrichment capability for his nuclear fuel cycle in Saudi Arabia. He wants the United States to provide that. He'll pay for it. And if we don't do it, he'll get it from the Chinese under lesser safeguards. So that has a potential for proliferation in the region with other countries around Saudi Arabia saying we want our own enrichment as well. And then we could face very serious problems. So third one is just he wants to buy some arms and we're happy to sell them to him. So that's part of the complication. The second part of the complication is with Israel because Netanyahu feels that he doesn't have to pay anything for this peace. He's quite happy for the United States to do it, but in his view it's peace for peace. He'll give Saudi Arabia peace and he'll take their peace. In particular he says when it comes to the Palestinians for this deal all we have to do is check the box. And in terms of his conversations that he had with the Crown Prince, Crown Prince has basically said yeah, checking the box is okay with us too. And the Saudis are engaged in talks with the Palestinian authority in which they're basically talking about buying them off, buying their consent to this agreement. But that doesn't work for Biden because he can't get the Democrats on board unless it's something substantial for the Palestinians. And that's why I said at the end of my talk we come back to the question of what does it make sense to do if there has to be a Palestinian component to this peace deal. And I would argue that without it it won't be sustainable. That if the Palestinians are left on the sidelines yet again it'll blow up and the Saudis won't be able to fulfill their commitments and we'll be the suckers having committed to all these things that they want. So the United States has a clear present interest in finding a way to build a Palestinian component into this. But what is it? Is it a commitment to go back to a comprehensive peace negotiation? No. Thankfully nobody really thinks that's worth doing. Instead there's this idea of an incremental step involving handing over territory from Israeli-controlled, Israel-controlled 60% of the West Bank to Palestinian-controlled, as I said they control 40% even at up 50-50. But it would be a signal to the Palestinian people that it's not hopeless, that it is possible over time to build a viable Palestinian state on territory in the West Bank and Gaza. And that could do a lot to jumpstart an incremental process. The problem with it is and some would say the advantage of it is that the Israeli government is presently constituted which is a government of ultra-religious and ultra-nationalists, far-right extremists in that government will not accept giving any territory to the Palestinians. They want to bring the Palestinian authority down and take over all of the West Bank. They want a Jewish state from the river Jordan River to the sea. And so Netanyahu is going to have great difficulty delivering on this demand that has already been leveled by the Biden administration. He's coming I think to see the president in a couple of weeks. That's when they'll have this discussion. But if the president insists and the president has the means to make this deal or break the deal, if the president says I can't get 67 votes without this, then Netanyahu is going to have to decide between his far-right government and a peace deal with Saudi Arabia that could transform Israel and make him again the great peacemaker. Oh I shouldn't say again for the first time, the great peacemaker. And so that is what we're facing now. I can't tell you exactly how it's going to work out, but I can tell you, going back to our discussion about leadership and ripeness, this particular deal is ripe because the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel all want to do this deal just like Sadat and Bagan and Carter. And when you have that in circumstances where the Saudis are driven by strategic concerns and the Israelis too, and the United States as well as I explained, you shouldn't write it off. It's possible that it will come about. And it will come about, if it does, within the next six months. All right. We have about 10 or 15 minutes for questions from the audience. I'm going to ask you to put your hand up, catch my eye. I'm going to ask people to ask a very short question if possible, just so we can fit as many in and please state your name and any affiliation before you do so. I see a number of hands. I'll take this lady here, madam. Thank you. Yelena Park, I'm the head of Australia for development pathways, global development consultancy. Ambassador, thank you very much for your remarks. I had a privilege of working with Dr. Kissinger for quite a number of years at the Atlantic Council. And to be honest, I didn't know about Kissinger's legacy in the Middle East, so that was a special treat. Thank you. My question is mainly about if we can take Kissinger's magic and wisdom and apply it to a slightly different context and specifically about the war in Ukraine. President Zelensky has made several statements about sort of replicating the Israeli-Palestinian model to some peace negotiation in Ukraine. Obviously, diplomacy has failed significantly, as you know. And Dr. Kissinger has made lots of comments about the conflict. I'm curious about your personal perspective as a statesman, scholar, and diplomat. What can we learn from Kissinger's approach to the Middle East? And maybe we can bring successful diplomacy back to resolve that conflict. Thank you. Thank you. Since you asked about my views, I won't go into detail about Kissinger's views, which are more interesting, actually, but maybe somebody else will ask about that. But I do think that this Kissingerian incrementalism could have some application to the settlement of the war in Ukraine. Now, of course, you've got a situation where Putin is not interested in ending the conflict. And that's very different to circumstances that Kissinger had. Kissinger moved very quickly in the 1973 war and would have moved very quickly in this war to find a way to put the pressure, in that case on Siddharth, in this case on Putin, to agree to a ceasefire. But that hasn't happened. So it's until and unless he's ready to ceasefire. It's hard for diplomats to be effective in these circumstances. Why you haven't, despite no lack of volunteers, you haven't had any serious diplomacy to try to end this conflict. Once the two sides are ready, and Ukraine will be ready when Putin's ready, if not because Zelensky's ready to end the war, but because the United States will be when Putin is ready. Which was the case with the United States and Israel back in 1973, by the way. Israel wasn't ready, but the United States said you need to stop. And at that point, but only at that point, I think there are a number of things that can be brought. First of all, this concept of incrementalism. So it's impossible for me to conceive of a situation in which Putin has withdrawn from all of the territory occupied by Russia, both in 2014 and in the recent conflict. And so what's needed is a commitment to withdraw and a phased process of withdrawal. And there's actually a very useful resolution passed by the United Nations, endorsed repeatedly. It was first introduced by the Soviet Union and the United States. Excuse me. Now, and subsequently endorsed by Russia, which is resolution 242, excuse me. And that has as a principle the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. So say something the Soviet Union introduced and the Russians have endorsed ever since. It is the basis of all Arab-Israeli diplomacy resolution 242. And that principle needs to be accepted by Putin and by Zelensky if there's to be a successful negotiation. In other words, Putin has to concede that eventually he will withdraw from all Ukrainian occupied territory. But that it will be done in phases in return for mutual recognition, security arrangements and the like, that would ensure the peace. So I do think that it will be necessary to approach it in this way. I don't see, unless there's total collapse, Putin is overthrown. There's a different leadership in Russia. I don't see circumstances in which it will be possible to get there from here. So the same problem will exist. And as long as there's a commitment to withdrawal and a phased process of withdrawal, that should be acceptable to the Ukrainians, even though it will be difficult because what's the alternative at that point to continue fighting with the great cost of the Ukrainian people? I'll take two questions at once. I'll take this gentleman here and this gentleman there. So if you can keep your questions brief and I'll ask Martin to answer both questions at once. John Roth, I'm not sure what my affiliation is other than I've known Martin since we were about something like that. In terms of rightness of the Saudi Arabia piece at the moment, you referred to the interrelationship between the three leaders, the crown prince, Biden, and Netanyahu. Isn't there a requirement for communication? And I thought, if you read the press, that there's zero communication between Netanyahu and Biden. Is that a smoke screen? And is there communication going on behind the scenes? Kyler Cronmiller, USA department. I served in the consulate general in Jerusalem under Bush and Obama administrations. Given the U.S. pivot away from the Middle East in the not too distant past, but then a little bit of the reversal that we've seen with the U.S. becoming reengaged more in regional defense issues there, I'd like to ask you if we fail to achieve a Saudi Israel deal, do you consider it worth it or possible for the U.S. to try to convince Middle Eastern leaders and the global audience of continuing U.S. commitment to the stability of the Middle East as a region and to the defense of U.S. allies in that region? Okay, thank you, John. Your point is a good one. How can Biden pull this deal together when he clearly can't stand MBS, the Saudi crown prince, and he's not talking to Netanyahu. I mean, the deal's complicated enough without those two problems. The short answer is yes, there is a lot of communication going on at a lower level. Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor and his Middle East person, Brett McGurk, moving between Israel and Saudi Arabia and Netanyahu and MBS' people are coming to Washington, so there's been a lot of intensive engagement at the lower level. But in the end, it's going to have to be decided by the leaders and the difficult decisions that are outlined are going to have to be made by them. So I do think that Biden will meet with Netanyahu in the next couple of weeks, probably in New York, that he is not meeting with Netanyahu not because of this deal or lack of it. It's because as you know, there's a major confrontation going on within Israel over its democratic future with the efforts of Netanyahu's government to curb the independence of the Supreme Court and the protest that that has generated hundreds of thousands of people in the streets. And Obama has made clear he's on the side of the Biden has made clear that he's on the side of the demonstrators, that he cares about Israel's democracy. And basically his message to Netanyahu is fix it, back off, find a way to have a consensus before you proceed. And I'm not going to meet you until you do it. So the two are in conflict. There's a great tension between his need to meet with Netanyahu to do the deal that he wants to do and his need to keep pressure on Netanyahu to get him back off from these judicial reforms. So it'll get, I mean, they will meet in September, but it's part of the complication of the deal that if he does the peace deal with this existing government in Israel and no significant Palestinian component, it will be a turbo boost to the far right in Israel. And he will have betrayed the democratic protest movement in Israel as a result. And that's playing on his mind as he considers what to do here. In terms of the question about what the United States should do in the region, you know, it kind of reminded me is not exactly an answer to your question, but something I wanted to get in before we finish, is that there is an alternative to the big enchilada, to this Israel-Saudi peace deal, which is an incremental deal, something less, less than a full defence treaty, a security framework agreement, less than full normalisation, exchange of economic offices in the two capitals, and less of an ask for the Palestinians. But the catch here is, and I should have said this earlier, you can't go from trying to make the big deal and failing to then try to put together the smaller deal. That's what we discovered at Camp David, too, when we tried for the whole deal, couldn't get it, tried for something less, but it was too late at that point. So you have to basically Biden has to make the decision now, after speaking to Devan Yahu, can he get this deal, or should he go for something less? And you can see from where I'm coming from, a bit of caution is in order in my view, but that's certainly not the view coming from the White House at the moment. Look, the United States is developing a broader strategy for the region. This doesn't depend entirely on whether there's peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia. They are working together in any case. Israel is now part of CENTCOM. Israeli armed forces are exercising with the Arab armies and air forces and navies. There's a lot going on at the strategic level under U.S. sponsorship to, on the one hand, make clear that the United States is not leaving, but on the other hand, to make clear that we need our allies in the region to step up and do more. And that is already underway. And that is not going to be affected. That's not going to change as a result of whether we get this deal or not. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. I apologize to those who wanted to ask a question and didn't have a chance to do so. You had a taste today. If you want the full course, rather than the appetizer, this is the thing to purchase, Master of the Game Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy. It's a fabulous book. I commend it to you. The book is called Master of the Game. Today, Martin, we had a master class in explaining complicated topics. Martin told us about the wisdom of prudence and pragmatism and gave us a tour of some of the characters in the book and in his life from Sadat to Rabin to Liza Minnelli, the first time that Ms. Minnelli's name has been mentioned here at the Institute. So I want to thank you and Gail for visiting us again at the Institute and thank you, Martin, for your contribution to the Institute, your continuing contribution to the Institute over many years, including to our wood paneling. So thank you very much, Martin Nindik. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for this fabulous event and please join me in thanking Martin.


Welcome, everyone, to the Learning Loop podcast, your best source for educational insights and trends. I'm Chris, your host, and today's special guest is Ben. He's a newly published author and a Seesaw superstar. Ben currently teaches kindergarten and he is the founder of Kinder Rock. Ben, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I really am excited to be here. As you know, I love Seesaw and we're ready to rock. Absolutely. Before we start, can you just tell us a little bit about this book that you and Jen Dean just published? Yeah, we just published a book. It's called, it's the Edu Protocols Field Guide, primary edition. If you're not familiar with Edu Protocols, Edu Protocols are lesson frames and basically you take your content and then you can put it inside the lesson frame, just like a picture frame, right? You can take out the picture, put different pictures in and we built these Edu Protocols, which had been previously built out, but really tailored them for K through two. And of course, we love Seesaw, Jen and I, and so these are kind of, a lot of these Edu Protocols are done on paper but are also kind of done in Seesaw with our blended learning model. And so it gives you kind of five Edu Protocols that you can use in your classroom and of course a bunch of startup and we even have a few chapters on Seesaw and how to get started with it. So it was really exciting to finally get that out there after a two year journey. Yeah, amazing for sure. After two years, you're ready for it to be out in the world and now it is. So it's super, super exciting for you guys. We'll kick off with kind of a basic question here. What inspired you to start to use Seesaw as a digital portfolio in your classroom? Well, I don't know, I'll give you maybe the best shortest long answer I can. It started really kind of in the beginning. I used to be an ed tech coach and I don't know, seven or eight years ago and we were looking for a tool that we could really utilize in our starting with our lower grades, although it's kind of matriculated up. And so we looked at a few different tools and we just kind of happened upon Seesaw and started using it and this was in the very beginning and I remember going to Isti and Seesaw was so small. They didn't even have a booth. Literally it was just Carl, one of the founders, right? And Angela, one of the original kind of community members and they just had some donuts in kind of the lobby and maybe about 10 people showed up to say hi to them, maybe more, but I got my Seesaw, my first Seesaw shirt and ever since then, you know, going from coaching and showing how to have people use Seesaw and I think maybe eight years and then the last five, six years in the kindergarten classroom, I've really just been using it to enhance my instruction. Yeah, amazing. You've literally seen every version of Seesaw that's out there from start to finish and that's so good that you continue to rely on that as a core tool in your classroom. Well, jumping to our next one, how has Seesaw really helped to provide you with information that you might not have gotten paper pencil, like what has Seesaw done to just elevate your knowledge as an educator and as a teacher? Well, it has to do with what I think throwing a question back to you, Chris, the most magical feature on your computer, do you know what the most magical tool on your computer is? Like the recording, the microphone tools? You got it, right? The microphone and the camera I think are just amazing and you're really able to capture every student's learning and not only just kind of like, even with paper and pencil, right? We can do some writing in class and then they go in Seesaw, they take a picture and they're recording what they're reading. And so, A, it kind of gives me an idea as a teacher if they're able to read, right? Are they, they wrote it? Are they able to read what they wrote? I'm able also to kind of check in with every student if I need to, right? Every student is engaged, every student when they record, they're sharing their thinking and with paper and pencil I might not, I can look at it all and see every student's but I get a little bit more, I think, information. But not even just me as the teacher getting more information, it's also, I feel the students get more practice and repetition by being able to kind of use that record feature, the camera and the microphone. And so, overall, you just get a lot more information as a teacher and students get more practice. Yeah, and the more information you have as a teacher, the better decisions you can make for their education moving forward. Definitely. Can you describe a situation where Seesaw has really helped to benefit a specific student that you might have had, maybe there was a trouble spot that they had, maybe there was just one tool that really just helped them to blossom as a learner. Do you have any specific situations that you've run across? It's hard to just pick one. Sure. I mean, a lot of my years, it's been several years where I have kids that either do the language or other issues maybe going on that they wouldn't chat with their partner, turned your partner in share and they wouldn't always turn to their partner in share but it was amazing how some of these kids that didn't like to talk, they would go in, open their computer and record in Seesaw. And so, it's been almost every year I've had like one or two of those cases where kids maybe wouldn't want to partner share, wouldn't want to talk a lot, but they'd open their computer and they would record in Seesaw and share their learning and get to practice their language. And then of course, one more example, had a little boy who was autistic and he struggled a lot with kind of showing what he knew with paper and pencil, but you know, when I could put some words in there and he could drag things and he could record things, he was actually able to demonstrate that he knew a lot more than he actually was able to produce just with pen and paper. And so, it's really kind of helped, I think give kids other opportunities to demonstrate their learning. So. Amazing. More opportunities, removing more barriers and really just allowing them to express what they know so that you as a teacher, like you said, you have that information that you know where they are and what to give them next. What types of activities have you found to be most effective in your classroom? It can be any subject or anything. Can you just share some perspective on like, what have you found that's really just resonated with your students? Well, and we're specifically, I think specifically thinking about seesaw. I just love, I love, I got to say kind of creating my own, it's in the beginning, it's a lot of work but creating my own activities because in seesaw, because for example, the other day we were playing the game, we're practicing addition and we're practicing addition with dice and the students get out a piece of paper and they roll the dice and they kind of record both numbers and their practice they're adding. Then the next day, the same activity but instead of doing it with dice on paper, now we're doing it with dice and seesaw. And the fact that these two activities, I feel like really compliment each other, they're able to kind of practice the same skill but they're able to practice in a different way. And of course, one bonus of having it in seesaw is the fact that they get to record. And so I really love kind of, maybe marrying activities. I like to call it like using digital and analog, right? We'll do the lesson one way on paper maybe and then we might reinforce it the next day in seesaw or even sometimes we'll do it in the day. We'll do it one way on with manipulatives and then jump in right into seesaw. Even just, you know, when we're talking about adding we turn on our microphone, we get our Unifix cubes and we say, we can hold up our Unifix cubes and we can say, well, this is the number five and this is how I made the number five. So it just really kind of using that tool to kind of support the analog components, if you will, with that digital components and kind of matching those up with each other is one of my favorite ways in some of my favorite activities, whether it's in language arts or poor math and you know, the any subject. Absolutely. And it sounds to like, you're really having your ear to around like what keeps students engaged and how to make sure that they're engaged in that content and they're learning all the time versus potentially doing something that they might be sick of doing and they might be bored through it. You're really finding seesaw to be that perfect combo to really help you have those kind of activities that students stay engaged with as they learn. Definitely. I'm gonna jump into a question that reflects back on what you were talking about earlier. How have you seen seesaw really support students who might be multilingual? Maybe they're exploring new languages, they're learning new languages but different than what they have at home. How have you seen seesaw to really benefit students who are multilingual? Well, I love just the fact that you can record your audio inside of the lesson, right? And so whether it's kind of recording your instructions, again, you know, you demonstrate your instructions with the whole class, but that's not always enough. So you can attach your instructions as an example video with audio, right? So students can listen to it again. I love kind of putting the instructions, especially for our pre-readers, you know, you can add an item in there, like a lot of times I'll put an emoji ear on there because they need to listen and I'll just record some audio on the emoji ear and kind of go over the instructions again or give them a sentence frames. I love to how especially thinking about the seesaw lessons, how a lot of the seesaw lessons in the lesson library are both in English and in Spanish. So some of my students that maybe they saw it in English, maybe they want to hear it again in Spanish, they can click on that little icon and hear the instructions again. And the other tool kind of, the other reason kind of going back, the other tool too that I like is just again that the fact that the record button, some kids are really nervous to practice maybe their language in front of other people, but they're a lot more willing sometimes to record inside seesaw. And so it just kind of helps those students have another chance to practice their oral language. They can get some audio and visual support. And so I feel like it's not just a great tool for like multilingual learners. It's a great tool I feel like for all types of learners that really supports learning in different ways. Yeah, for sure. And it allows them to express the learning in the way that fits them best. Like you said, whether they're speaking in a different language, whether they're just trying to articulate their thoughts in a different way, they have all the tools there to be able to express that. We're gonna jump into our loopy question. This is a question we ask every guest here since it's the Learning Loop podcast. We ask a loopy or a silly question here.  You know, that's definitely a difficult question. My original answer would be, you know, a dog because I love dogs, but I think it would be fun if I could be an animal for a day, maybe to be a kangaroo because you just, you know, I get to, you can jump pretty far. You know, there's lots of beautiful land in Australia. So I think it would be fun to try being a kangaroo for a day, hop around a little bit. That sounds awesome. And you have a little pouch too to carry snacks or whatever you need to built right in. It's all perfect. That's right. Awesome. Final question here. We always try to end our episode with some advice for people listening. Maybe there is a teacher here who's new to Seesaw, maybe they're just new to technology in general. What are like two or three things that you would tell this educator that they can start with to be able to get to the point that you are now Ben to be just pro Seesaw user, somebody who's really meeting the needs of other students and keeping them engaged as they're learning. I think sometimes it's funny because, you know, I think about certain teachers like I myself was very scared of like watercolor paints when I first went to kindergarten or even played on like, how is this going to go? It's going to be like crazy. Like, you know, but you get the things out, you teach the kids the expectations and then you're good to go. And I feel like it's the same with a computer with any tool, right? You get the tool out, you practice it, you know, little by little, you kind of layer on the tools, layer on what you're going to use, right? Just like with watercolor, I'm not going to have them paint a masterpiece in the beginning, but I will kind of show them the things that they need. And I feel like it's the same thing with Seesaw. And again, just kind of jump in there, give it a try. And I think a lot of times you're going to be surprised. The other thing is to realize that whenever you're using technology, it's things are going to go wrong, right? And so you always just kind of have to keep that in your mind and it's okay. Whether it's saying today, hey, the internet's not working, we're going to give it a go tomorrow. Whether it's like certain students, you know, having some technology helpers in your class to help you out, but just understanding that things are going to go wrong when you use technology. With that being said, the first time is always going to be the hardest, right? The first time students are going to log in, it's always the most chaotic. The first time they're kind of using new tools, it's going to be a little bit more chaotic, but I think kind of really just kind of giving it a try, keep on pushing, realizing there's going to be some hiccups, but I think really the benefits outweigh the negatives and just really think about it. You know, a lot of times we think about technology as like a replacement, right? Technology really shouldn't be seen as a replacement, it should be seen as an enhancement, right? So we don't want to just say, hey, we're not going to do our paper lesson, we're just going to do our technology lesson on the same time, we're not just going to do everything on the computer, right? Like I talked about, how can we really thinking about using it as a piece of our instructions? And that instruction, that's one of the things I love about seesaw is because it's not just like a program where kids are going in and pushing buttons, right? It's really something I can use to enhance my instruction, right? Do the lesson one way in this capacity, do the lesson the next day in this capacity. And when you think about that again, it's a part of your lesson, right? It's a part of your instruction. It's not just something extra. It's a really thinking about, it's a tool to enhance learning. It's a tool to support learning. It's not just a supplement, right? It's really thinking about how it's going like this. And again, that's one of the reasons I love seesaw because it really can be paired with kind of any curriculum that you're using to enhance that curriculum, so. Absolutely. And you using it also in kindergarten can be accessed by all students as well. Love those tips, being persistent, starting small, making sure it's supplementing and also making sure it's enhancing everything you're doing. Such, such powerful advice spoken from a true sage in this realm. Ben, we're in time. I just want to say thank you so much for being here. Thanks for taking time out of your day. And thank you for sharing such amazing insights with everybody. We gleaned so many amazing things off of it. So thank you so much for being here. Well, thanks for having me. And I feel free if you're out there and you're listening and I've always loved connecting with other seesaw users. And so whether it's in the seesaw and activity library or on some other social media platforms, a lot of times you can find me at Cogswell, C-O-G-S-W-E-L-L underscore Ben. And I would love to connect with you and see how just like Chris and I met online, love to connect with you and see how you're learning seesaw and get some great ideas. Yeah, sure. Thank you so much, Ben. Bye-bye.


Don't forget to click on the bell icon. You will always be the first to know when I upload a new video. Thank you so much for coming back to this channel. And if you're new, please consider subscribing to this channel. Support this channel by subscribing to this channel. Remember, we are still talking about the new law that will come into effect in the UAE in 2022. We are trying to see what benefit of this law does the employee have? What are the benefits that the employee will accru from this new law that will come into effect in February 2022? That's what we call the new UAE. In this video, we are trying to break down the small segments that you need to understand clearly. If you're going to work in the UAE, if you're planning to go to UAE for any form of work, you need to understand what benefits do you have in the new law. When you try to break the small segments, where do you fall and what are your entitlements, what are your benefits as you the employee? That's what we are trying to look at in these videos. That's why I decided to break all the small segments such that you can clearly understand and understand where you fall, where the benefits are coming from, where you benefit from and what actually you need to have or what did you need to access and what you need to have at a given period of time. In today's video, we are going to look at the other segments. Remember we talked about the segment in that gratitude where you are benefiting from. We talked about the parental and maternity leave of those mothers, the breastfeeding mothers and the pregnant ladies. We are aware of that benefits they have in the new law that will come into effect in the body 2022. Let's go straight into this video. We want to try to look at for those that have babies with disabilities where to benefit from and for those that get to lose, oh, you get to lose your loved one, your spouse, your grandmother, your father, your family member. Next of kin, do you have any privilege in the new law coming? Do you have any entitlement in the new law coming? Because we are all very anxious and very happy with the new law but these are small things that we need to understand and clearly know where we are supposed to have our benefits from. So let us look at in these segments. When you lose your loved one, what does the law say about that? If you have a baby with disability, what does the law say about that? So I get straight into some of the breakdowns and I read to you what it means and what are your entitlement. For scenario one, if you have a baby with disabilities, what does the law say? I want you to listen carefully. Employees with babies who have disabilities may be entitled to an additional six days leave on a full pay. If you have a baby with disability, there is no qualifying requirement for that but as per your company, you will be entitled to a 60 days leave but with a full payment of the salary. That is quite very interesting. So for people who have been employed and you have the baby, you have lived hard with the disability, you are worried every time you go to work, you are worried how the baby will be, how the baby will get to go along with other people, definitely this is the lucky time that we have. You will be entitled to 60 days leave but with a full salary payment. Let us try to go to Tusenario 2 where you have lost a compassionate. We call it compassionate love. You have lost someone that you feel has been part of you. What does the law say? Many of us we get to go to these workplaces.  But we get to lose people that we cannot even go back in that immediate time to go take on what you call the barrio issues in one word the other because of the nature of the work that we get to do. Right now, with this amendment let's see what does the law say. Employees will be entitled to a five days paid leave for death of their spouse and a three days paid leave for death of a parent, child, sibling, grandchild, grandparent, remember? All this there is no meaning for any of those categories are mentioned. If you get to lose any of the loved ones in that category you will be entitled to rational five days leave to three days leave and all those days will be fully a full salary payment as per the law come. Thank you so much for tuning in to this channel. Thank you so much. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to press on the bell icon notification bell. It's the only way you'll be alerted when we upload a new video. We are still trying to break her down and try to look at the small segments that are being discussed that will be discussed in the new law that will come into effect in the UAE in Fribuwadi 2020. Thank you so much. See you again in the next video. This makes from the makes creation TV.


All right, so let's start. Welcome to my presentation. So today we'd like to talk about how we help one of the largest German automotive company to build a scalable cloud-native architecture, so with the help of Cloud Foundry. And of course, what the title says, how it actually saved human lives with this. Let me introduce myself first. So my name is Datron, and I'm a senior data scientist at Pivotal Labs. I'm based in the Berlin office, and my job is actually to help clients making full use of the data. And if you would like to connect to me, so this is my Twitter handler. Let me start my presentation first with some facts that you may or may not know. So did you know that actually 1.2 million people die in road crashes each year, with many people becoming more injured or disabled? And basically, road traffic crashes are actually a leading course for death globally for young people. And this is even before suicide and even HIV. And of course, if you compare it to other means of transportation, for example, like air travel or trains, it is actually the most dangerous one amongst them. So what is the problem actually?  Well, one of the major part of this problem is actually, as you can see on the slide, so worse road traffic conditions, for example, like class for us. Of course, there are other conditions. For example, after a huge rain, the streets getting wet and something like this. Nevertheless, in all those cases, people still tend to drive very fast. For example, I know myself when I drive in a car, so I was in October first this week and was driving very fast, despite the fact that sometimes the weather was not so good. And basically, one of the reasons is there aren't very good smart warning systems. So from what we've seen, however, most traffic conditions are actually predictable somehow and preventable. So for example, we could use weather data or data from other cars to warn drivers. For example, I took the car from my dad. He has a BMW. And the cool thing is they have this head-up display. I really, really like it. So you could just integrate a system in this and then integrate it into the head-up display. And our goal was therefore actually to help this client to see if it's possible to predict road conditions, basically, in Germany, based on weather data. So, yeah. In this talk, I actually, on the one-hand, want to focus on the technology side that we're used to solve the client's problem. But from this slide, I know it's a very marketing synthesis. But from this slide, apart from the right technology, the process that how to build the software is also a key component during our project. And we actually believe that you actually need both component for a successful project. And therefore, I will also shortly talk about the process and also about the data science involved during this project. So let's first start with their technology part. When we started with this engagement, the client actually came to us and said, hey, I want you to solve our problem, but we don't have the technology foundation for this and possible for low money. And please, I need it in 10 weeks, because I have a board meeting. I need to show it to someone. And I guess some of you probably would know it if you, for example, from a consultancy business. So we were actually faced with a very, I don't know, situation where we had no computing power, no software, so basically nothing we can work on. For some people, that would probably be scary, because like, oh, you don't have anything. But we were like, yes, finally, it's a super situation where we can actually build something on scratch and we can use anything that we want, right? So we can use the right technology for the right problem. And as you already can guess, we were using the cloud. So this cloud thing to build everything. And yeah, so basically this is how our architecture looks like for this project. As you can see, this is the very famous Lamer architecture. What we did here is we were streaming data with Spring XD from cars and also weather data to two layers. So one goes to the batch layer. The other one goes to the read time layer. And everything is, of course, we did everything on AWS. What we did here was we, on the batch layer, we were streaming the data in a structured form. So basically the data wasn't structured. It wasn't a very weird former. We structured this former through Spring XD. Then we stored it on S3. And then from S3, what we did there is we spin up Spark. We spin up an EMR cluster with Spark basically to pre-process the features to reduce the dimension of the data. And then what we did afterwards is we were spinning up a GPU cluster on Amazon and then using a deep learning network to train this model. Afterwards, what we did there, we stored this model on Redis. Redis is, as you know, an Emory cache layer. What we did there, we stored the model there. We used the other stream basically and tapped it onto Redis queue. And then this model was basically doing just prediction with one of the services that we created. So the predictive VPI. And afterwards, we enriched this probability with more data like GPS data from the car. And at the end of the day, what we did for this project is we plotted this on a dashboard. So as I said, we're using Spring XD and the reason why we're using Spring XD is because of the domain-specific language. So it was really, really easy to use this for this engagement. And also one of the main reason is actually the shell script. So as a data scientist, we're not very good at Java or some of the other programming languages. So we are using a lot of Python and shell. And basically in Spring, it was really, really easy to integrate it. And of course, it also had a very easy connection to S3, which helped us pretty a lot to store the data. And of course, you have all the other advantages, right? So it's really easy to scale. And in the future, we probably wouldn't use Spring XD anymore because probably we would use Spring Cloud Dataflow. But at this time, when we started with this project, actually, Spring Cloud Dataflow was still too immature for this kind of use case. So in the batch layer, as I said, we started the data in S3. And then afterwards, we spin up an EMR cluster. Specifically, in this case, we were using PySpark because we love Python in the data science area. And afterwards, what we did there is, as I said, we spin up the GPU cluster. Here, we are using Keras, which is basically a Python abstraction layer on top of Theano and TensorFlow. And then also in the Lex block, you can see that we were using Luigi, which is actually a project by Spotify to create analytical pipelines. So in the real-time layer, as we said, we're using Redis for storing and caching the model. And basically what happened was already described before is the data which we got from Spring XD is queued into Redis. And then we created a couple of microservices. So like the predictive API, which basically constantly just give probably from the queue. And then afterwards, we're just outputting it to the JSON file, enriching the data, and then at the end, creating a dashboard on top of this. And everything basically ran on Cloud Foundry. So Pivotal Cloud Foundry. And the main advantage in this case for us was that we had different blowpacks, especially as a data scientist. As I said, we mainly use Python. But for example, for other words, like the dashboard, basically our sub-engineers from our team basically use JavaScript and Ruby to do this. And so basically the teams could focus on what they're good at. And of course, the other advantage is what you have with Cloud Foundry is, of course, right? So you could easily scale different instances, have load balancing and all the stuff. So yeah. The next important part I want to talk about is actually the data science part, which was also a core of this project. And the main goal was, as I already mentioned again, was to predict road conditions based on weather data. Who have you know what deep learning and machine learning and all the stuff is? Or like, OK. So I mean, I will give you a short introduction into deep learning because I think it's a huge buzzword nowadays. So as I said, our problem is to predict road conditions with weather data. And this can be quite complex, especially if you think about the data that you have, right? The input data because the dimension is huge. It's because of three-dimension data, like you have value in each time step, right? So the time is also important and also the location because we're looking at roads within Germany. And to solve such a problem, actually, deep learning is very good at doing this. And basically, what is deep learning? So deep learning is actually a subclass of machine learning techniques, which actually uses algorithm that mimics the human brain. As I said, it's everywhere now in the press. So everyone is talking about this. I think every startup that you're doing right now or every startup that's just started, that has an AI or machine learning or neural networks in the name, is not going to succeed. And on this slide, what we are actually doing is we're predicting the moods of babies. So it's a multi-class problem. So you have three classes, which is positive, neutral, and negative. And here in this case, the input feature is images of babies. And what it does is, OK, we're inserting it in the input layer. And then basically, the network learns the edges, the contours of the faces, and then also the facial expression. So it comes, binds them together in the hidden layer. And the reason why this is called deep learning is because it has many hidden layers. So if you're just talking about one layer, so if you have one hidden layer, it's just a neural network. But if you're talking about deep learning, it means that you have more than one layer. And specifically for our problem, we have more than two layers, of course, because if you have only two layers, you won't go too deep into layers and learn less of the complexity that you get from it. And also, considering our problem, we don't have a multi-class problem. But everything that we did was kind of a binary class problem. So at the end of the day, in the input layer, for example, you either have wet or not wet or slippery or not slippery as a target variable. Concerning neural networks, actually, there are many types of networks. But generally, we can summarize it into two types of networks. So you have feedforward networks or you could have recurrent neural networks. In this case, a feed neural network is basically as we already saw before. So you're actually inputting data into the input layer, right? And then the input layer goes one direction. So it can only go one direction. And basically, this neural network is very optimal for solving functional mapping problems. So functional mapping problems, actually, you can approximate any function that you like to. And typical architectures that we already, for example, saw before is called a multilayer perceptron or CNNs. I think some of you might have heard of CNNs, right? So convolutional neural networks. For example, Google is, you know, there was a contest from Google that we're using this kind of networks and it really performed quite well. And basically, the feedforward neural network is used in many, many applications. Whereas in the other site, we have the recurrent neural network. So the main difference between a recurrent neural network and a feedforward neural network is that you have a feedback loop included. So for the feedforward neural network, you can only go one direction. For the recurrent neural network, you can actually basically jump between two directions, right? So you can go in the past or in the future. So the network is learning in terms of the whole time series structure. And that's why it's very good to basically model dynamic temporal behaviors. And also for this kind of network, you have many variations. So for example, you have LSTM, so long short-term memory. You have GROs, so it's gated recurrent units. And then you also have B-directional recurrent neural networks. The application concerning application, it's very successful and it's mostly used in handwriting and speech recognition. I think a lot of you have smart apps and there are many applications that basically use a recurrent network to give the smartness for this kind of application. In terms of recurrent neural networks, there are also many ways, actually, to construct the network, right? So for example, you have one to one, one to many, many to one. In this talk, I will not go through deep into all of them. So if you want to know more, you just can Google this blog post here and try entry Kapathy. He's doing his PhD in Stanford. Of course, I will also provide the presentation afterwards, so you can look it up. And in our case, actually the many to one is the most appropriate one. So basically, as you're already aware, we're dealing with weather data, right? So weather data has this time series component. So you have sequences of values over time for each time step. And the output at the end of the day, what we had was either a wet or not wet, a slippery or not slippery. So it was a one to zero decision, right? So it was a binary classification. And basically, this resembles actually a very famous time machine learning problem, which is called the sum problem. So what are key learnings from this project? As I said, we were actually trying to predict road conditions in Germany. And in terms of whether it rained or it snows, you know that in Germany it doesn't rain all the time, right? Or it doesn't snow all the time. So we're not like in London or somewhere else where you have 70% of your time, it's just raining. So one of the problems that we faced, we had actually a very overbalanced problem. So overbalanced problem means that 80% of the time it didn't rain at all. And you only have like 20% of the time it rained. And in terms of this, this is actually a very difficult problem for machine learning model, right? To learn this kind of situation. But of course in this case we use, for example, different evaluation metrics. So for example, instead of accuracy, we're using precision recall, or we use different machine learning techniques actually, to for example, either increase the unbalanced class, right? To make it a balance. And yeah. And also as I said, there are many variants for recall and neural networks like ST, LSTM, or GRUs. And for our case, we actually decided to go with simple RNNs because they gave us a better performance in terms of evaluation and also computational complexity. Moreover, also when we started with this project actually we thought like, oh, the dataset is still quite nice. So we can use CPU. So we thought like, okay, that's still possible. But then after our first one, we were like, shit, that takes hours. So not a good idea. So we did this, okay, let's switch to GPU. And that was a really good decision. So it was 10 times faster with GPUs. A good idea for this. And also on this project, especially in neural networks, you basically waste a lot of time basically just to find the optimal network. So there's actually no, no methodmatic foundation behind us to find the optimal network. It's basically art, right? So you need to experiment a lot. So for example, you need to experiment with the number of APOCs, the activation function that you're going to use, the number of hidden layers and how you actually construct the network. Of course, I mean, in many university projects, we already have like pre-trained networks that you can use. That's what we already did as well. But then also, of course, we need to experiment a lot actually to fit this network to our problem. And also one of the key points was that we actually needed a lot of data actually to train the network. Sometimes we didn't have much enough data so that the network can converge because basically what the neural network does is it's optimizing weights within a global network, right? And then certain looks for their optimal global minimum. And in some cases, it didn't converge at all. So as I said, apart from the right technology, the right process also played a critical point in this project. Yes, I think some, I think everyone of us already attended the keynote talk today with Michael, Andres Nolte and Rob Mead. So he actually pointed out some of the practices that we have. So for example, pair programming. So at PIVLAST, we do a lot of pair programming, which means you have two people pairing, solving one problem. And also we have test room development, which ensures basically that our code is always production ready. In this talk, actually, I will not go through all of them into more detail, but only on API first. So, yeah. So what is actually API first? This is actually an image that I took from Mikro's Brown's new post. So what is hardcore data science in practice? So he published it last week. So it was really good that he did last week for me. Basically what it is is API first is actually thinking to ensure that you think about how to interact between data science parts. So the data science model to the sub engineers. So how do you basically make it production ready? Because I don't know if you see it in your companies. So maybe you might start data science initiatives. You might hire a data science team and start a data science team. But at the end of the day, sometimes it's just going nowhere because they are doing a lot of R and D, right? Because most data scientists don't have a software engineering background. So it's really hard for them. And basically what we are doing or we are trying to do is, okay, let's pair data science with the sub engineer, right? To think very early how you could basically put this into production. And our core is at the end of the day, if you look at the box between the data science part and the engineering part is basically to create an API which offers a very clean contract to the sub engineers and other people, I would say, to interact with the model, right? Yeah, here are actually additional links if you want to know more about API first idea. So this is one of the blog posts that was written by me and my colleague Alicia. It was actually released two months ago. So I was ahead of Mika's blog post that the blog post from Mika was also pretty good. So it's a very good read. I would definitely check it out. And he's talking into other areas more detailed than me because I was giving an example and he was using it more from a very teamish point talking about this. Also from, if you attended today's keynote with Dr. Nolte, he actually also mentioned that at Allianz they had this very old waterfall culture and actually they had to create their own digital garage, right, and send people there instead of having them within the company to make sure that they don't get influenced by the line managers. And this basically was the case for our project as well. So when we actually started with this project actually, so our client told us that when they signed the contract their procurement department and legal team asked, hey guys, are you really reassured you wanna work with them? Because it says the contract, you have to come to the Berlin, you have to go to the office and you have to work with them, right?  So that was a complete new experience for them. Another important point that was also mentioned today at Allianz is usually the release cycle it can take months or even years and what we did actually, we managed it to pull it off within seven weeks. So the release cycle was much shorter and basically at the end of the day they could give feedback and they could actually test it, right? And another important point was basically what also was mentioned today, this monolith waterfall approach which is very still in many German companies and for our projects, of course, what we did is we separated it into different microservices. So, and that was a good decision because the data science team could actually focus on what they're good at because we're not good at Java or creating code or in scholar or something. Some of us might do this, but for this short time of a short amount of time it was really hard, right? And the summer engineers, they're very good at creating dashboards in JavaScript and Ruby and all the other languages they use for this, right? So everyone could focus on what they're doing, right? Instead of like, hey, you have to learn this and within a short of time and it's not even very good code when they're doing that afterwards. And then the best advantage was we could actually develop and also deploy it independently at the end of the day. So, what are key takeaways from this project? So, our takeaway is using the API first, thinking. So, bring your models as fast as possible into production because clients can test it. So, your client could, it's not even what we understand from a consultancy business, right? Because your client could be also an internal client, right? The other departments or something like this. So, release it, get feedback, right? So, we have a very user-centric approach. The user is in the center of our application. You will get very fast return investment from this because you always deploy early. And, of course, for this project, we use Cloud Foundry, which basically enables us to reliably expose the models as an API, which is one of the main advantages when you try to create smart apps, right? And, of course, the main advantages which I already told, whatever I said, is basically teams could focus on what they're good at, right? So, you don't actually force someone to do something else that he doesn't want to, right? So, yeah. So, this was my presentation. Thank you for coming and I'm open to questions. No questions? Pardon? Yeah, so basically, I cannot go too much into detail. But it's card data and weather data. So, the details are confidential. Cool. Thanks for being here. Okay. Thank you.


What's up, everyone? It's your girl, Kenzie here from Layton Sports Guards, and I'm ripping a personal for Poyin L. We've got a 21-22 Panini, Donares, Choice basketball box. Good luck here, Poyin. Let's see who we can get you. Good assumption here. All right, Raider rookies. Davion Mitchell. Brandon Boston, Jr. Clippers. I love Optic Choice. Yeah, Evan Mobley. Nice one there for you, Poyin. Glad to see you. Bones Hyland. Okay, he's up here. JT Thor. Now get into some color. We've got red Gordon Hayward. 63 of 99. It's Forrest Longloss, brother. Instead of Forrest, grew like eight inches and got a fade. Might look a little... Might get mistaken for Gordon Hayward. Maybe put on 50 pounds. You think Forrest and Gordon Hayward will go up? A little bit. A little bit. Red Russell Westbrook, 79 of 99. And blue for the Pistons on the color match, 47 of 49. Saban Lee. Cool one there. All right, let's see what our first auto is here. Now we'll slow roll the redemption. Let's see, first round pick in the 2021 draft. Grizzly, Sasanti Adama. Nice on the red. 64 of 99. It's been playing very well with Jaw this year. Nice one there, Poyin. And redemption. Let's see what we got. Let's see, good luck. Raider rookie, Signatures Choice. Card 211. Cade cutting in. Go, Poyin. Let's go. Roll over, Cade today. We really are. Congrats on that. That's the second Cade redemption, right? I think? Yeah. And we pulled the Cade blue. And we did blue. Wow, there you go. Congrats on that one, Poyin. We'll mag this for you. Thanks so much for hopping in. Congrats on that. We'll get it right out to you.


So I'll talk a little bit about why cosets are important, and so we prove that if h is a subgroup of g, then the cosets a h and b h, they're either identical or they are disjoint. And so this suggests the following possibility. I could take any group g, and I'll find a subgroup h. And if h is not the entire group, I can find an element that is not in h, but is an element of the group, and I can find the coset a h. And if possible, I now have two sets, the set that makes up the subgroup and the coset. I might be able to find another element that's in neither, and this allows me to form another coset, and I will lather, rinse, repeat. And if I do this, eventually every element of g is going to end up in one of the cosets, and because cosets are disjoint, every element will end up in exactly one coset. And so this gives me a partition of my group. Now remember the order of a group or a subgroup is written this way, might think about that as absolute g. It's the number of elements in the group or a subgroup, and let's say I have a subgroup of g with h not equal to g. And I'll go ahead and find my coset. Now because a is not in h, what that tells me is my coset and my subgroup have to be completely disjoint. And you might want to think about why that happens. A mathematician would then ask, well, how does the size of a h, how does the number of elements in a h compare to the number of elements in h? And we can go through a couple of things.  We can't have more elements in a h than we started with. So it might be equal, or maybe it's less. Well, suppose it's less. By the pigeonhole principle, what that means is that we have to multiply a by two different elements, but get the same thing. So there has to be some pair that are equal when the h values are not. So, well, I know that a is in a group, so a inverse is also in the group. So if I have a hi equal a hj, I can multiply on the left by the inverse of a, and the terms drop out over on the left hand side of hi. On the right hand side, I have hj, and those two must be equal, except I assume that they worked. So this is a contradiction. You got on the bus that says these two are equal. We came up with something that we know isn't true, so don't get on this bus. So a hi hj have to be different for all values. And so that tells me that these two actually have to have the same size. The order of the coset must be the same as the order of the original subgroup. And this leads to a very important result known as Lagrange's theorem. So let g be a group, and let h not equal to g be some sort of subgroup of g. And what I can do is, again, if h isn't the entire thing, I can find some element that's not in my subgroup, and I can form the coset, and they are disjoint. And because a group and its coset are the same size, then I know that the size of the union of the two is just going to be twice the size of the subgroup. Now, if that union happens to be the entire group, then I know that twice the size of the subgroup is the size of the group, so two is g over h. If, on the other hand, they aren't the same size, if they don't include the entire group, then I know there's some other element in the group that's not in h and not in the coset, and so I can have a rinse repeat, and I can form another coset. All three of these are now disjoint, and their union is going to be three times the size of h. And as before, if they happen to be the whole thing, then I know that three is the size of g divided by h, otherwise I can do the same thing over and over again. And what we find here is that the order of a subgroup always divides the order of a group. If a subgroup and its coset give you the entire group, the order of the group divided by the order of the subgroup is going to be two. If the subgroup, coset, and another coset give you the entire group, then my group is three times the size of the subgroup, and so on regardless of how big or small that subgroup is. Now one term that we use for that, if h is a subgroup of g, then this quantity, size of g divided by size of h, this quantity is called the index of the subgroup, and it's usually written in some variation of this. So in this case, if my subgroup and coset give you the whole thing, then my subgroup has index two. If my subgroup, coset, and another coset give you the whole thing, then my subgroup has index three, and so on. Now it's always useful to think about what this tells us, so one of the important things that we can get out of this is suppose my group has a prime order and I have a subgroup. Well then one of two things happens because the order of the subgroup has to divide the order of the group, well the only divisors of a prime number are the prime itself, the order of the group has to be p, well that means h has p elements, g has p elements, they have to be the same thing, the subgroup has to be the whole thing. The other possibility, the other divisor of the prime number is one, so the order of the subgroup has to be one, and since every subgroup has to contain the identity element, my subgroup has to be the identity only, and what that tells us is this very nice corollary. If the order of a group is prime, then g has no proper subgroups. Every subgroup of g is going to either be just the identity or it's going to be the whole thing. So let's continue writing this bus and see what happens. Suppose the order of a group is a prime number. Well let's take any element of that group other than the identity, which wouldn't be very interesting. We know that the sequence of powers of this element g, g times g, g times g times g, and so on, the sequence is going to form an abelian subgroup of g, but because the order of g is prime, we know there's no proper subgroups, which means that this sequence has to include the entire group. This sequence of powers must be, as a subgroup, must be g itself, and what that tells us is that if p is a prime number and the order of my group is prime, then g has to be abelian, because this set is the entire group and this set is abelian. And we can in fact go one step further, because this is true for any element of g other than the identity. We also know that any element of the group other than the identity is going to be a generator of the group. Well, this raises a new question. Suppose p is a prime number, and so I'll let the order of the group be p, and I'll take g and g other than the identity, and so g is a generator and a group consists of the elements g, g squared, and so on all the way up to g to power p minus one. g to power p is going to take us back to the identity element, and let's take a different group. Let's let the order of h be the same with h and h, and h not equal to the identity, and h is completely different from g, whatever that means. Then I can pick some element to be the generator, and our group is going to consist of the elements h, h squared, h cubed, and so on all the way up to h to power p, which is going to be the same as the identity. So our group consists of these elements, which are completely different from these elements. Now, some observations we might make, g is a bilion, and any element other than e is of the form g to power k, and that element has order p. On the other hand, h is a bilion, and any element other than the identity is of the form h to power k, and that element has order p. Well, remember, if it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and flies like a duck, then it's probably a duck. But we said that h and g were completely different, so these two can't be the same even though they look an awful lot like the same thing. So maybe they are the same, but this is kind of a mystery of mathematics. Well, there really aren't any mysteries of mathematics. We'll look at this problem in some detail later on.