of course. So if you'll indulge me a little bit, we might have to go over just a few minutes because of how we're a bit behind here, but I promise that you'll be so enthralled with apocalypse now that you won't want to leave. I promise you that. So we sort of transition and we draw on what Robert gave us a really good outline with the heart of darkness. And so basically what I don't have time to do is really talk too much about the connections between the two texts, between the film and the book, and I would argue in many ways we need to watch the film not in terms of thinking about heart of darkness but in thinking about the film itself and how it is as a film in its moment in film history. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about filmmaking in the 1970s and how that led to a film like this and then how the film itself really represents that era of filmmaking and creates sort of its own heart of darkness, its own apocalypse now in that particular period. So a quick history of this film, the book, the novella heart of darkness has not been remade very much and you wonder why. Part of it is it's very expensive to remake this. You have to film on location.  You have to have many locations in which you're filming. Very expensive. Not many students wanted to undertake this. One first attempt was Orson Welles in 1938. He did a radio play. It was the first sort of remake of the novella and he ended up writing a screenplay and was prepared to make a film about it in 1939. He dropped it and ended up doing Citizen Kane which is now, of course, one of the most famous films in film history.  In 1958 there was a television adaptation with Boris Karlov. In 1969 there was a script written called The Psychedelic Soldier by John Milius and Coppola commissioned this screenplay, gave him $15,000 to write it and $10,000 if it was green lighted. It never got made for many reasons.  And then in 1975 Coppola sort of takes this up and decides that it's finally time to make the film about this novella. But in many ways, again, like I said, I want to keep thinking out. It's really not about this particular story. But I wanted to give you at least the film history so we know. And then in 1993 there was a remake with Tim Roth and John Malkovich. Not great. FYI. All right. And then, so is this a remake or is it not? Well, obviously it's a remake. I mean, I'd be absurd to say it's not a remake. But again, it's really not a remake of the novella. The attempt to the film, Coppola's attempt is not to retell the story of this and just do it through cinematic means. But the type of cinema that's being done in this period is all about retelling its own story and not through narrative, but even through film form and how the form of filmmaking is its own story. And that's what Apocalypse Now perhaps is considered one of the greatest films ever made. Some argue the greatest, some argue vehemently. Not the greatest, but it's in that conversation. So there are a lot of innovations occurring within that film that even allow us to start talking about it in that way. So it does it a great disservice to think of it as a remake or an adaptation because it's a secondary. It's not a primary. And story, again, is less of the focus, although it seems like it should be the focus, right? So kind of keep that in mind as we work through this. And I just have some quick things here. I'll send this around so you guys after so you can get the slides that I'm not really addressing in depth here. And some of the video clips that I won't really get to will be on here so you can get to it. But essentially, there's a lot of inaccuracies with the script about in connection to Heart of Darkness. So Coppola doesn't even, for example, credit Conrad in the film. So he himself is admitting to the fact that this isn't the remake, right? On many levels. Okay. So quickly about Coppola and then I want to talk about really how he fits in the pantheon of American filmmaking and why that's so important to talk about, why film theory is important to talk about in order to really get this film. And then we'll talk a little bit about the film. So those are the two parts of what we're doing today. So Coppola was born in Detroit in 1939. He studied University at Hofstra in New York. And then he ended up going on to study film, film, graduate film school at UCLA in 1960. And he's a writer, director and producer, which is significant that he has all those things because that's a big piece in the new wave of Hollywood filmmakers that he's a part of that we're going to talk about in a minute. In 1969 he tried to start his own production company called Zotope. That's also significant because a lot of the new wave filmmakers were trying to disassociate themselves from larger production companies so they had more artistic license. So part of that was starting their own small film companies. He's a winner of five Academy Awards personally as his part in it. His films have won more Academy Awards. And his filmography there are some of his well-known films are in the list you can look out later. Take note that most of his well-known films are in the 70s. They're in this period of film making. And before he was 40 by 1975 when he started making Apocalypse Now he'd won five of those Oscars. So he had tremendous success between 70 and 74. So that leads us to the new Hollywood the American New Wave also called the American New Wave of filmmakers that he was a part of which will end with. But we have to actually start with what they're responding to. And what they're responding to is really what's called the classic Hollywood era the golden age of Hollywood between 1927 and 1963. Some argue it starts in 1950 1915 with Griffin's Birth of a Nation. But the first talking film was the Jazz Singer in 27. So some start it there. And then it ends in 63 with Cleopatra which was kind of a disaster film. And that's sort of where they mark the two that long era. So this is this is an era that's based upon a style where the film remains divorced from the formal structure. Form doesn't matter. What matters is the audience. The audience has to experience watching a film without thinking it's a film. So they don't we don't want them to know there's formal innovations happening. We want smooth transitions between time and space. What's what's called invisible style continuity of editing is another term that's oftentimes used with classic Hollywood Hollywood filmmaking. Excuse me. So directors were considered employees not artists right. Coppola being a director that's a big distinction. They were a part of a large company that made films. They had a job. They weren't supposed to put too much artistic focus on things. Stars on the other hand the actors who played the stars they were the draw the film. So all former formal technique of camera angle close ups were always about the stars face how the star looks. And that's what draws people to a film. Perhaps a lot like it is now when we watch film right. It's about who's in the film all the close ups quick edits to faces try to get that that focus in a film. So the technique is not what's important. The story is also important. The narrative a narrative in a star is what makes a Hollywood film. So you need a good story. You need good writing by a writer who's not the director who's not in charge of those formal aspects. And and then you know films were were supposed to look similar. All films are supposed to look similar in style and structure right. You kind of knew when you watch the Hollywood film class called film. They'd all look similar in a way. You didn't question that there'd be differences depending on who directed it. Who wrote it and so forth. And then there are the major eight studios in the classic Hollywood era that really dominated and controlled and owned everybody. You would sign a director for five year contract and you would have that person direct as many films as they could or an actor. So it was it was very different than how how filmmaking in the studio system later became. All right. So that's sort of a very quick sense of the model that the the new wave was responding to in part. However the new wave built on another model called Autourism or Autua theory which came out in France in the 1950s and 60s or it became people were a tourist before this period. This is a period that kind of defined it heavily. Does anyone have any film people out here that have any sense of what Autour theory is or what Autour is by chance. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean Autour is just you know author for French in French. So the ideas directors were principle principle creative forces. Right. But they didn't just direct. They controlled a lot in the film. They were producers. They were writers and so forth. So yeah. And the this period where it became quite popularized to consider the idea of an Autour in as a filmmaker occurred in that French New Wave period in the 1950s and 1960s where there was a journal called the Cayet du Cinema which was edited by Andre Bazin among some other people. But he's sort of the famous name associated. It started in 1951 and this journal really wrote a lot about how film theory and how filmmakers work as artists rather than as commercial interests for bigger companies. Thinking again of a filmmaker as a novelist and that's the distinction. You're not a director.  That's just a function of the larger aspect of the job. Some famous New Wave directors you might have heard of Jean-Luc Godard France Francois Truffaut Eric Romer. And the list goes on. So some of the stylistic features to the Autour type of type of film which is important again to start logging these in as we think about apocalypse now. And actually I should break in here. So I was going to ask you at the beginning of this lecture. I know that there's a film showing later today apparently. But how many of you actually have seen the film yet. I'm assuming not many. Yes. Not many. But I assume some some have. Right. So what I'm saying today sort of log this in as you watch the film and actually will be beneficial to watch the film thinking of what we're talking about today because I think a lot more will become would come present as you're as you're viewing it. So some stylistic features of the of Autourism is sort of an excessive or pretentious erratic Maison Sen. So how the visual is arranged Maison Sen and drama is just a way of staging a play and how you talk about that staging. Same thing with a film. How do you talk about how film is staged or you know how are sets designed. How are techniques being used. Again opposing characters characters that are creating tension with each other not stars that are the main attraction are a stylistic feature innovative camera angles lighting and editing. Again you know it's a film now you know the form is happening because you're not lost in this imaginative story like you would have been in the classical era. And then a lot of Autour films are really interested in not so much remaking but adapting literary work. So drawing from other so called experts in the artistic field in order to say we're paying homages to some of these people who have previously been recognized for their artistic credibility. And again that's a response to the idea of artistic versus commercial. That's the whole sort of enterprise behind this. And so you and even even with even with technical aspects they would pay homages to other previous directors like a famous shot in a Hitchcock film might be redone by more contemporary director in order to sort of see if people recognize these little these little gems throughout. So if you think of if you think of it as an author plus a subject equals the work whereas the classic Hollywood model would be much more about the subject equals the work and there's no author. There's no one person that's that has a personality or a stake on this. So there's another way there's three easy steps to think about this and this came out this came from an essay by Andre Saris called Notes on the Outdoor Theory in 1962. And this is still widely widely based on a way in which we view film and how we can sort of understand an auteur film is that an auteur has technical expertise. So the director the filmmaker understands all aspects of the technique of making a film knows all levels of what's happening on a film again not a singular expertise but a larger one. The auteur's personality permeates the film style and becomes a signature. If we watch an Alfred Hitchcock film we know it's an Alfred Hitchcock film. And that's the whole idea of it right just like if we read a Conrad novel we should know that it's a Conrad novel based on style narrative how in a film how things are typically lighted. Coppola has a style again that we can recognize if we watch The Godfather and then we watch Apocalypse Now. We can see a lot of similarities in how these films are made right and how scenes are elongated. Coppola loves long scenes. The opening of The Godfather is a wedding scene that lasts 50 minutes and the film's like two and a half hours. So it's a significant amount of time to put on a wedding scene that's all dialogue and character introduction but that's Coppola right introducing you to the Maison Saint of that film right. So an auteur's film exhibits tension between the auteur's personality and the material. So the material may be for example in Apocalypse Now's case the Vietnam War right that may be the so-called material that he's working with but there's still a conflict with the personality of the filmmaker and that material. In that the filmmaker's not satisfied in letting that material tell the story. But the filmmaker also has to use that material in order to make the film. So there's a conflict. There's a conflict in how things are being represented. How are narrative forms being being played out on the film. How is linear. Is a film linear or does it jump around in temporal sequence right. All these types of things that you sort of play out. A lot of juxtapositions in other words not smooth again smooth is classical Hollywood. Tour films are never very smooth. They're never very comfortable. Okay and then that takes us to the new wave of Hollywood the post classical era. Which ranges between 1967 and early 80s. Some people say 82 some people say 80. I like to think of it ending in 1980 with raging bull Martin Scorsese raging bull predominantly because this was sort of a change in in a political landscape change in 1980. In the US of course Reagan became president. There's a major shift in policies and how how companies were run and how funding happened. So no longer were studios really interested in dumping tons of money in artistic projects. Right. They wanted to make films that made money with as little with as little difficulty as possible. Not having to deal with artistic anything if possible. So but it started with 1967 with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. And so the idea of this of this period is that of course it's responding to the French wave the tour theory that we just talked about. It's also responding to the fact that television dominated filmmaking or that that period of 1950s and 1960s in the US and American filmmaking. So films didn't do very well. They weren't being very funded. Studios didn't know what to do. And so they're trying to recreate some sort of popularity and they did this by drawing on the counterculture that was happening in the period and young filmmakers who are part of that counterculture who could speak to a younger population because of course that was the population that they needed to get. They needed to track young people so that they wouldn't you know keep watching TV. So they'd have more of a sense about going to cinema again or you know being interested in that. And the third part is they wanted to draw on young people counterculture who were also studying film right. They weren't self taught like a lot of people were in the 30s and 40s 20s 30s and 40s. A lot of the people for the from the new wave of Hollywood in like Coppola went to film school graduate film school UCLA. He studied theater at Hofstra for his BA. Like he had that background he had that technical expertise. So that kind of plays into the to the the tour as well. And we talked about tour theories don't go there. And of course they're they're they do draw on classical Hollywood film but they also draw on what was quite popular also in the 60s which was that sort of Asian avant garde and European avant garde if you talked about but certainly in Asia and Japan specifically there is there is a sort of renaissance of film as well. So they were they were looking at not only previous American models but non American models. And again this use of extravagant or self indulgent styles. I mean as apocalypse now extravagant and self indulgent. Those of you seen it right entirely. I mean as I'm going to talk about like this might be one of the most extravagant self indulgent films ever which doesn't mean it's devalued necessarily but that's just a product of that that type of filmmaking and this is sort of the apotheosis of that of that situation. So again the making of the film is the story as much as the story or the narrative of the film is it is as well. So we have to think of how these films are made that plays into the story of the film. In fact that in many ways over shadows and has more control over than the actual story. Hence the whole idea of remake or not. And of course discomfort or shock. New wave directors wanted like the o tours like all sort of avant garde cinema. They want to shock you. They want they want you to be uncomfortable. This is not enjoyment which is of course classic Hollywood. You want to enjoy a film. Go have a nice evening. You don't usually go watch apocalypse now on a date. Right. Probably not the best thing to do. I mean you know maybe right. Test your date. See how you know see what they're like. See if they like the darkness. Right. Hearts of darkness. Yes. Exactly. This is a good one. Consider. It's true. It's true. And you know Woody Allen films he famously went to sorrow in the pity which is you know horribly depressing film about the Holocaust and he would take dates. Yeah. So there is a history of this that goes and film but but anyway part of it is in doing so they create a realism. That's the idea. Right. It's not so much that they're trying to shock because this doesn't exist. They're trying to shock like heart of darkness that the novella because this does exist and people need to know about it. So there's a way of bringing people to that very close and so they use technical technical aspects to do that like long takes not having cuts showing actors for very long periods without a cut which means actors have to act actually instead of having you know two second cuts all the time like we see now where you know you just look pretty and usually does the job. So so therefore many people who were actors in this new way period were called you know drew from the school of method acting and anyone want to. I'm sure you guys some of you guys know about method acting. Anyone have a good definition of it or want to take a stab at it. Sure. Yeah. Good. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So what that means is we draw on our own internal trauma in many ways to create character. So we become a character but through our own emotional depths. So oftentimes very disturbing as an actor to be a method actor because throughout the filming you are constantly at yourself drawing on an inside turmoil of your own being. But then you're also embodying this character that you have to be within that and you never stop being that character right in a filming. You are that character. You don't you know stop shooting and go have dinner near yourself. The idea is you keep embodying it. Right. So so that's a key piece to creating that realism and that shock. Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen who are of course in the film are both well known method actors. So that's why I'm bringing this up because we we see these scenes and we have a sense of how this is really being played out formal level. OK. So that was sort of our quick breeze through of 1970s filmmaking and where that situates Coppola where that situates this film. Again this film came out 1979 but it was started in 1975 right at the heart of this period and which I'll get to actually in a minute about filmmaking and production. So this idea of decadence. I mean this type of filmmaking is decadent. It really is. But it draws on that decadence because you know simultaneously it's quite disturbing. Right. Even though they have exorbitant budgets and they they have huge productions. The ideas again this is supposed to be real. This is supposed to be quite disturbing. So the historical and the cultural context. Right. Heart of Darkness of course takes place in Congo and Poclop's now takes place in Vietnam. However the film itself is filmed in the Philippines and we'll get to that in a minute. They wanted the film in Vietnam in 1969 when they originally wrote the script during the war because they wanted that sort of realism. Probably good they didn't but you know the studios had would have nothing we wouldn't know louder anyway. So the Vietnam War we could spend the whole hour and a half on the Vietnam War. I'm not going to get too much into it except bring up what's the important element of it. I think that does connect with Conrad's. That's important to think for the next week when you're in seminar as well as think about your essays. But also sort of the aspects of war that this film is responding to that relates to counterculture. Right. So Vietnam War 1964 to 1973 as you guys probably know U.S. forces were actually in Vietnam is really 1955 and they were they were quite busy but the official war started in 64 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and that's when you know Congress declared and they moved in and it was all official even though it's been happening kind of like empire and what is official what is an official how's this stuff working out but it's based on this idea at the time in the fifties and sixties called U.S. U.S. interventionism or what's called the domino effect what they called the domino effect of the domino theory anyone anyone know their U.S. history well enough to talk about the domino theory yeah yeah exactly well said well well said and Korea was a very similar situation as well right yeah good yeah exactly I mean though I think both explanations are really good and understanding how you know the metaphor the domino works but it's the idea of one country falls right to communism another country's going to fall a communism so if if South Vietnam becomes communist due to the pressures from the north then the Philippines are going to become communist then you know and it goes on and on and on so similar to the arms race in the 80s is this idea of how is communism and capitalism going to sort of wage the war globe and who's going to own the most very you know called interventionism but of course that sounds very resonant to what was happening with Conrad with European colonization you know that's something obviously to work out your seminars and discuss that more but clearly parallels but what's also important about the war is the historical part of course and of course there's a map of you know Southeast Asia that sort of thing to kind of contextualize where the dominoes might have fallen you know had the south been taken over which of course it was is that the this was a very absurd war right this was a war that had a lot of problems it was one of the first wars that was probably the first war that had so much media coverage so there was the war that was happening there was the war that people were seeing through media there was the war that people imagined based on what they saw through media based on what they heard so there's all these different wars happening based on what sources they were getting their information from and nobody really knew what was actually happening even the people fighting the war had no idea what was actually happening and during the war in this period so that was sort of the reason right and the rules were the line the lines about the rules and war were being obscured right and this is a very contentious period in that way especially after coming off the Second World War where you know there seemed to be some momentum as though we knew what we knew what war was we knew how war should be fought a kind of thing so anyway that was the reason right the response is counter culture and the counterculture at the time was responding significantly to the war and that created other things that that came off of that and of course the counterculture is is is sort of the response to mainstream dominant culture right that says this is good we should be going to war communism is bad you know all that kind of dominant culture in the 60s counter culture was saying well hey I don't know about all this what why what's asking what's going on so of course this led to a lot of protests to the war civil rights happened the 60s women's rights we talked about a little bit this is the second way of feminism with the Bavar but it was also a revolution and a renaissance for arts because the arts were a way to communicate counterculture so of course we have music I was playing the doors the beginnings that's fundamental to this film that was a huge part of counterculture we'll get to artists politicians or politics education this these were all being redefined and re-questioned in this period so of course this plays out significantly in the film this is the background in which all these people come in the film who are actors the characters in the film and sort of their motivations and how they respond and then of course drugs and psychedelics how do you cope with this going on well a big coping mechanism at this period was escaping from reality how do you escape from reality well through through drugs and psychedelics as well as through art and the two together are all even better right that's the whole idea was the whole idea so this is like a form of enlightenment was assumed and in fact the film was often called acid apocalypse because of so many of the actors in the film were dropping acid during filming and the film crews while they were filming were dropping acid all the time but this was a commentary on the war that same thing was happening with actual soldiers during the war right it was a way of coping and sort of seeing a different reality because the reality they were seeing wasn't certainly one you know they wanted to see all right so that's a quick quick historical context I don't have enough time to do it but I want to call your attention to a quick scene when you're watching the film if you haven't already there's one huge hugely famous scene in the film of course which is when the helicopters are coming in to bomb a beach in the north and the Richard Wagner's ride of the Valkyries is playing you know it's really loud you know they're coming in and they just they just bomb this beach completely right total destruction total decadence total extravagance from a filmmaker standpoint too because it seems very hard to make huge explosions huge orchestrations getting these helicopters all that but also from just if you didn't think of it as a film and you saw this happening huge decadence scene but after that scene after all that destruction happens Kilgore Captain Kilgore was played by Robert Duvall talks about he's talking about surfing he's a huge surfer he's interested in serving he cares in some ways it's like he's two things he's all about war and surfing and it's this odd juxtaposition but it really characterized sort of the absurdity of what's happened and how people have coped with it and how counterculture is sort of infused in the war in many ways and so one at Lance one of the the boat the one of the soldiers on the boat is a well known Southern Californian surfer Kilgore's from Southern California he surfs and that's all he wants to talk about so they bombed this beach there's you know there's war fare going on around them and he has the soldiers go surf he says you can either fight or surf right and so that juxtaposition sort of characteristic of what this film tries to do to to show Sony keep an eye on those clips they're they're very important for for the film and there's someone surfing but we're not gonna get there okay so I'll end with filmmaking and production and then quickly at the very end just talk about how it connects to the counterculture but I'll be able to do that with this a little bit so Coppola famously said this film is not my film is not a movie my film is not about Vietnam it is Vietnam it's what it's what it was really like it was crazy we were in the jungle there were too many of us we had access to too much money too much equipment and little by little we went insane so the reason this happened from for many of I would say many many reasons this happened but one of the reasons this happened was because of the again the type of filmmaking that was happening at that time allowed for this sort of thing to happen right there weren't typically strong rules about budgets there weren't typically strong rules about how long something took to film because again it was an artistically driven decade right that the filmmakers got to sort of have a lot of say in what happened and so art did what art does and oftentimes goes off schedule right so if we think about that we think about some of the problems with production the budget this film was budgeted to be thirteen million to excuse me thirteen million dollars to make right it ended up costing thirty one million dollars now at the time that's an exorbitant some is probably them I think it was one of the most the highest most expensive films at that point that had been made now the studio gave Coppola another ten million on top of the thirteen and he was happy of course but he needed still way more money so he risked so this was about seventy six seventy seven and he'd come off of winning all these Academy Awards he made a lot of money in the early seventies he bought a number of vineyards in Napa Valley he bought a house he had millions at this moment which again in the seventies was was a fair bit especially for a filmmaker and he basically put all of that on the line his own money to finish this film he was that committed to this film and he knew he might lose everything there's a lot of transcripts that shows that he thought this is a terrible film when he was shooting it he was really concerned he didn't think this would be great at all he knew he was going to be ruined and he thought well but I just have to finish this there's nothing compelling him right but that's the a tour he's not driven by the commercial he's driven by the artistic and that's the idea where you're living it as much as you're talking about it right so that's the budget the problem with the cast and the actors is significant as well because the the film originally slaughtered have Harvey Keitel act as as Willard captain Willard and the problem of they filmed for actually a week and the problem is hopefully realize Harvey Keitel is not the right actor for this film because he needed somebody much more introspective much more observant Willard doesn't speak much at all right most of Willard's camera time is him saying nothing it's non-verbal it's him acting of course but he's not saying much of course the narration on top is him but that's obviously separate done in a studio so anyway Harvey Keitel was too much too much of a character too forward too front if you guys know Harvey Keitel it makes sense whereas so they ended up getting a sheen because he had much more of that drawn-back characteristic Martin sheen had a major heart attack in the middle of shooting almost died he was only 36 at the time but he was smoking three packs a day for a decade and not in the greatest shape and you know finally and he drew he was an alcoholic and he drank huge amounts and so anyway all that and the filming and everything got to him and he had this major heart attack and Coppola didn't know what he's going to do but he kind of apparently convinced the doctor to let him keep working on the film because you know he he had all his money invested and he had to do something so he ended up having a lot of the end scenes that you see and the film was actually filmed sequentially up the river not all film not that's quite rare with films right usually it's not filmed sequentially but he did film it as he went up the river so some of those end shots of the boat was with with Willard's character on the boat is just a double it's somebody's back whereas you know Martin Sheen was relaxing some are trying to recover and then they later shot in some of his faces into those shots when they when they when they would edit and show up show the face so anyway so there's some like catastrophes that went on with that and then Marlon Brando who was sort of the major attraction this film and that's Marlon there of course you know obviously very well known actor he demanded three he demanded a million dollars per week to do this film now in 1975 when they were talking about this a million dollars per week was insane right it'd be like demanding now 50 million for a week for an actor I mean it is that that much money but of course Coppola agreed I don't know why probably because you know he wanted he wanted Brando and he thought Brando would play the perfect course well Brando shows up finally and and Coppola realizes that he hadn't read the book he doesn't even know the story right and not only that he shows up very heavy right and course is a very thin guy right I'm not supposed to be this large large person but but brand and brand was very shy about it and clearly Coppola didn't know what to do right because he thought maybe I'll just film him as this extravagant Kurtz you know eating mangoes all the time but but Brandon didn't want that because that would draw attention to the fact that he was heavy so inevitably inevitably what he did is that's why the the ending is all in darkness with Brando every shot is in shadows because that was the way he could cover his body right he if you see if you watch the film you only see shots of Brando's face and this was you know again a filmmaker's way of using technique around problem right around around difficulty the other thing is none of the lines in the end of the film are written they're all in probably they're all improvised and part of that is Coppola improvised as he went it was based on a script loosely but he kept going and another part of that is that Brando had no lines he wouldn't memorize the lines he's a method actor he just wanted to feel the character so he arrived in the first two weeks they talked about the character and of course you know after three weeks it's starting to do a million so this is a lot of pressure and so anyway the whole filming of Brando which is interesting to see when you're watching the film is basically Coppola holding up cards that saying like feel this do this say this you know read T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men and there's a whole on YouTube you can see him reading the whole Hollow Men whereas in the film you'll only get a quick little stanza of it and it's beautiful by the way it's extraordinary and so it's interesting to see that everything that Brando was doing essentially method acting this character and Coppola shot you know dozens and dozens of hours of this and in the end edit it down to the five minutes that we see Brando of things that he could use right so it was again that's the whole idea though where there's not a formal plan there's that sense of spontaneity improvisation that this whole film really is about well really the war was seemingly about right and this whole kind of era was about so you see that on multiple levels there was a monsoon that happened in the middle of this all the sets were destroyed part of the cost and the delays it was supposed to go I think it's supposed to be 13 weeks and it ended up going 35 which is over two years and so that's insane right for a film to go that long on location filming and what's interesting maybe the parallel between between the the the novella and the film as that while they're filling the filming in the Philippines there's the Philippine Civil War going on 10 miles away and helicopters they're using in those scenes where the Philippine Army's helicopters so they kept needing their helicopters to go fight the rebels and then they would bring them back and then they would take the helicopters to quickly make their film scenes about the war in Vietnam and then the army would take the helicopters again so this odd irony that they're filming a war about Vietnam well there's an actual war just like Vietnam happening south of them at the time yeah exactly so that's that's the idea right this film format device it's defies a typical narrative film there's not a formal rise and fall it's a slow burn right there's no resolution like we're talking about the the absurdity the banality of the modernist the modernist fiction it has a sense that there's no resolution right we live in the world of hollow men we live in this world where where the horse and yeah if you guys do need to go to class then of course go I'm just going to take a couple more minutes to finish out here so in order to maybe to end this I'll show the one clip and then we'll finish it but this clip is important because it kind of encapsulates the whole film in one minute and shows the decadence shows the spontaneity of acting shows method acting shows the fact that that amidst this war even the film was engaging in chaos and overlaying the top of it is the song by the doors the end which is a form of narration in the film that needs to be paid attention to not only the lyrics but how the end was the the end was a song that was very long every time it was performed it got longer the lyrics always changed it was sort of a mythical rock rock mythology about this song and how it's done in this song starts the film ends the film is in the scene very very important aspect which I don't have time to get to it's on the slides so you guys can see it when I send it around so anyway if you need to go you need to go but let's end with with this clip it's minute and a half it's worth seeing but what's what I wanted to end with this clip specifically is this scene was not planned Martin Sheen was very very drunk and Coppola was running the shots kind of just like do whatever you do right and so this whole scene was sheen just going crazy essentially but he had said he had a sort of personal breakdown in a scene this was personal as well it was acting and you know he felt like he lived the scene as a not as an actor but this is actually him he hit the mirror that was actually him that's his blood all that happened because he was just in you know spontaneously combusting essentially on this scene but you know this is a scene that happens in the hotel room and it really demonstrates him being a longtime soldier the instabilities of of his character


To introduce the moderator for the next panel, the moderator is Dr. Asim Pidella, who is the director both of the program of medicine and religion and also the Divinity Schools Initiative on Islam and Medicine here at the university. Dr. Pidella is an associate professor of medicine in the section of emergency medicine and a faculty member at the McLean Center. Dr. Pidella's work as a clinical researcher and a bioethicist has focused on improving healthcare outcomes and experiences in the American Muslim community. He's developed methods for designing community-based healthcare interventions and hospital policy accommodations. Additionally, Dr. Pidella has collaborated with Islamic study scholars and with institutes worldwide to analyze how moral reasoning and scientific data concerning modern biomedicine interact with traditional Islamic frameworks. Today, Dr. Pidella will be the panel's moderator and he will be, we're changing the order a little bit. He will be the first speaker on the panel and the topic that he will talk about is Muslim conception of motherhood, gestational surrogacy and uterine transplantation at issue. Please join me in giving a warm welcome. Dr. Asim Pidella. Thank you so much, Mark, for that kind of reduction. It's really an honor every year to be here amongst the faculty, amongst what I think is a community of scholars who you have to respond. So again, thank you, Mark, for giving us this opportunity. So as you heard of my title, I'm going to talk about this, but to set that up, I wanna talk a little bit about what I've been doing for many years, right? And in this conversation of how religion is part or not part of bioethics discourse. And so this has been a perennial conversation. You all know about this. I've presented it many times around this. This is just one special issue. I have a journal that myself and others in the audience actually are on the editorial board for. And so we talk about these issues of how religion belongs or doesn't belong. And most recently, there was an editorial about whether or not we should publish religiously derived opinion pieces on ethical issues. This is from the Developing World of Bioethics Journal because the question was whether this is part or parcel of public reason-based dialogue or not. Obviously, as any scholar, my mentee and postdoc was also part of this presentation. Rosie and I wrote this article and rebuttal to that thinking about, well, why not? I set that up because I'm gonna share with you a model of thinking about why I'm gonna talk about from the lens of Muslim patient ideas as well as from Islamist scholars thinking about motherhood. When me as ethicist think about morally assessing biotechnology, we do these things more or less. We think about the implications and ramifications of the technology, largely the harms and benefits to individuals and societies in many different ways. We think about the biomedical science involved. Often we think about the origin of that, the implications of that are outside, but what's the origin? So for example, a classic example would be about data on hypothermia from Nazi Germany. So we think about the origin in some ways of the biomedical science or the technology, where does it come from? And we also sometimes, less often, think about the nature and essence of the object acted upon by biotechnology, right? And this, I mean, the ontologies of what that thing is, the values attributed to that thing, or that person, or that being, or that intervention by society, by individuals, and the meanings it has, right? This is how we think about, or analyze biotechnology from an ethical perspective. Now there's no reason, I think, and I'll argue, that religious frameworks can't be part of that conversation. So here, religious frameworks help us think about ontologies to provide values and meanings to things, right? And particularly in this case, and what I'm gonna present, how Islamic scholars and texts from that tradition think about the value, meaning, and the ontology of motherhood. On the other end, there's no reason why Muslim or religious communities should not offer a sense of how harms and risks are weighed for their community, right? How religious values are under attack or not under attack, or their identity is at issue or not. So in the work that I do, I think about, okay, the ontologies and the religious values from religious lens, just so for a way of us thinking about bioethical issues. So for me, it's not a question whether religion is part of bioethical discourse, I think they're together. They have to be. If we're going to do justice to the society and the people that we live around. So in any case today, I'm going to present some empirical data on attitudes towards assistive reproductive technologies and motherhood, largely drawn from mass space samples in Chicago and DC. This is work that I've been doing for several years. Then I'm going to detail Islamic bioethical judgments on specifically urine transplantation and sargassi. And yes, I'll give you a closure. There's a selected Fatwa hunting where I only present views from the swimming world in these journalical academies that bring together physicians and scholars for certain reasons. In Q and A, you can ask me why I selected those only. And then I want to share with you some of the dominant scriptural understandings of why or why not certain things are permissible or not permissible. In the end, I hope that sort of case example will help us think about and critically analyze the constructions of motherhood. What bonds are privileged when we think about producing parenthood and how do scientific and social imaginaries interact in that production of motherhood or parenthood by biomedicine? So what's the challenge? And I think you all know this that fertility rates are dropping everywhere in the world. It's not just a phenomenon in the developed world or the developing world everywhere. And there are many causes for that. Some are lifestyle choices, smoking is a big contributor to infertility in both men and women. We know that there are issues of spermatility challenges that affect men. There are issues with uterine abnormalities that affect women. So there are other causes as well. But this is a multifactorial issue which has led to fertility decline across the world. Now for the Muslim community, this is also led to some interventions. That's kind of the way I got into this work. This is a mentee of mine at Drexel. She's doing a psychosocial spiritual intervention around depression in women who have not been able to have a child as a way of improving fertility rates. That's the work that she's doing. And the other way, this is across the pond. There's ideas, for example, Lebanon, this is Marsha Inhorn's work around what fatherhood means. So if you're not able to have a child, is fatherhood under attack? Or when you're thinking about getting married, given the way that fertility rates are declining, should you also have some funds to allow for IVF in that society as part of your marriage sort of contract? So the masculinity is under challenged in certain ways as well and across the pond. In any case, to solve all of these problems, buy them as it comes in, right? And there are many ways that we can solve or clinical infertility at least, perhaps, by producing what I call parenthood links, right? And these can be from genetic parenthood links through the artificial insemination, IVF, right? Through all the way through social bonds, right? We can kind of think about how gestational surrogate works or doesn't work. And there are some ideas around whether or not adoption or fostering is part of parcel of intervening upon the social determinants of health for the issue of clinical infertility, right? So in any case, this is how we produce parenthood or some ways. Now, coming down the pike, you've heard about this in biotech terms as well. The ideas about human reproduction through cloning, right? We only do that for dogs and movie stars in Hollywood. There's no reason why we can't necessarily do that, right? In the coming years for humans at the University of Chicago, perhaps. And the other ideas about creating synthetic gametes, right? For couples who are not able to reproduce quote-unquote naturally, perhaps we can de-iniculate sperm and put it in a donor ova, and therefore you can now have a same-sex couple having a child through synthetic gamete production. Again, the science is not too far off. So these are things that are coming down the pike, but I'm not going to talk about them. I just want to spend time talking about uterus transplantation and gestational surrogacy here in this presentation. All right, so now let's kind of take a journey through how Muslim communities think about these sorts of things. I mentioned to you that I do empirical work in mosque communities. This is data from four mosques within Chicago and D.C., where we were doing emergency tailored RNRCT actually on organ donation and end-of-life care. And before being, or right at the first session, we had a survey, and that survey, there were attitudes around RERT that we included these questions on. Sure, some with you, but for the purposes of you analyzing the implications of the data, you should know this is adult, males and females, right, who have had no experience with organ donation or transplantation, and they're fluent in English. So I'll only use an English-based survey. So here is one sort of a panel of that survey asking about reproductive health.  And then we said, imagine yourself as part of a healthy, happy marriage, right, and you were afflicted with something, now you have to pursue an option of treatment, and all of these are efficacious. How do you think about IVF? Are you comfortable without egg donation, and so on and so forth? So this is what we got out of that survey. We got 158 people, there were about equivalent number of male and women participants, largely a South Asian sample, based on the must that we went to, largely individuals who were not born here, however they'd been here in the States a long time, see greater than 15 years, 82% of the sample. And there was this largest Sunni mosque, and there's a reason why, in the discussion I'll talk about why Sunni mosques and their views are different than Sunni mosques. So this is social demographics. Obviously I went to mosques, so you can imagine that the ratings of L'Adassi were very high amongst this group, so I won't go through that, but they're a very religious group. So what do they think about motherhood? This is what came out of that first question, right? So what do you think is the primary, the number one determinant of motherhood, and you see here that the responses were raising the child as perhaps the most common amongst the group, right? Number one, 30%. But sharing genetic material or the act of gestating a child was also not far behind, 20%. The idea of breastfeeding was a minority view or very few people felt this was the determinant, number one, but you should know that in Islamic tradition there's an idea of milk motherhood, right? Milk and ship. So this was something that we put into the survey. So anyway, you see that. Now thinking about the treatments that are proposed, let's talk about gestational surrogacy. So you all know, in gestational surrogacy, genetic links are maintained, right? The progenitor of the ovum and of the sperm are the married or not married, but the couple that wants to have a child, and then you involve a person to be a gestational carrier for that child. So genetics are fine, right? But it involves a third party, and so you see here the group of these participants were not very comfortable, right? Overwhelmingly not comfortable with the idea of gestational surrogacy. Now in uterus transplantation, genetics is not an issue, neither is gestation, right? You have a donor who's given a uterus, and so those are preserved, yet you see again, maybe a little less significant, but there's uncomfortability around this idea as well as a solution to not having a child. So then we said in that survey, we also asked what about this idea, right? I would choose not to have children. Not those four options, just not have a child. Then again here, people are uncomfortable with not having a child, yeah? All right, so what's the summary? So I showed you the uncomfortability data, right? Not comfortable with uterus transplantation, not comfortable with gestational surrogacy, not comfortable with not having children, by and large, and if you did predictive associations, right? I didn't share that table with you, but you would see that individuals who are not comfortable with not having children were also not comfortable with not doing, I'm sorry, with doing uterus transplantation and surrogacy. So these sort of trended together, and what was obviously interesting in the sample that's highly skewed, those are more religious, right? They were particularly not comfortable with the idea of uterus transplantation, all right, amongst all the other associations. So that's the data about meanings and values from the Muslim perspective sociologically. Let's think about how scholars, or let me present to you how scholars think about this issue as well. Okay, so first, just as a caveat, we should know that there are many things in Islam, but the importance of the family unit is really central. The idea that you are a community that is the idea of relatedness is drawn from this idea of a nuclear family, then you have rights and responsibilities there, you have extended family to then tribes, nations, peoples, communities, right? So it just goes out like that in concentric circles. And we have actually manuals that talk about the rights that your neighbor has that's seven doors away, right, upon you as a community. So it's a big important thing within Islamic tradition. Now, when you think about the higher objectives of Islamic law, the termi is maqas al-shari'ah, which takes human interests and affect them into moral ends for law, then there are also three central or essential objectives that are located, the locus of that is in the family. One is the preservation of lineage, the preservation of progeny, and even the preservation of wealth, which comes in heritage goes to family structures, and the Quran is a distributed shares for each person how closely they're related to you, these all are part of the family. Now you should know that scar say there are six total essential objectives, three of them are part and parcel of the notion of the family unit, right? So it's really, really important to think about. So let's think about options. I like the fact that John Lantus mentioned this idea of going to a spiritual healer and this idea of an ontology of healing within traditions. So I can't talk about those treatments until I talk about the idea of how healing occurs or how Muslims think or most of scholars think about healing. So you have examples about treating infertility in the Quran. One of the first verse now, I can't point all the way up there, can I? Yeah, maybe. So this first talks about the idea that for God is the dominion of the heavens and the earth, he creates whom he wills, he gives as a gift to some children, those children being men and women, and for some of them pairs, right? Men and women, male and female child. The important part of the verse is right here. And he makes some Aqeem, barren. He is all-knowing, all-capable. So this idea that there are people who are always going to be a part of the normal bell curve who are infertile and this is part of God's plan. And then you have stories in the Quran. This is of Yahya, who in English she would say is John that says he was wanting a child, an inheritor, and we responded to him how we made correct or perfect or bettered or made whole his wife who was barren. So just in response to prayer, you have this idea of divine intervention. So this then leads the idea that theology relates with law that seeking treatment for infertility is not a bigotry.  So that's the idea of infertility. So let's talk about gestational surrogacy for a second. So the ruling is, and I put the term you all know, I'm sure, Haram, impermissible by Islamic law. This is how Sunni scholars think about it and you know how gestational surrogacy works.  So as for the mother, the reason they go back, this is another verse in the Quran. It says here, I'll give you the context if you want in the Q and A, but those of you who can claim the title of mother and umma hatum illa illa yuladnahum are those who bore you and birthed you. That is the definition. The Arabic is very strong there that that is who a mother is. That's the label that you get attached to. So now in gestational surrogacy, the woman who was born and gestated a child is the mother, right, based on this verse. And then what about the father? There's a saying from the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah, that says, that the child is for the bedspread, meaning what? That when you have illicit marriage, you don't inquire about who's the father and who's the mother. It is for that if there's a legal marriage, that child is attributed to those parents. That's it. You don't inquire, stability of society is more important. That's the deal. So if there's a known marriage, you stop there. So now who would be the father? The father is the husband of the gestational carrier because there's illicit marriage, perhaps, and that would be the father. So this is gestational surrogacy, right? Where we would think genetics are preserved, but you see how scholars now are having other ideas of parenthood. Let's take Eurus' transportation example here. So just to preface, right, the idea of Eurus, of organ transportation in Islamic tradition, scholars say that if it's life-saving, it becomes obligatory, otherwise it's permissible. In some cases, it is impermissible. So when you talk about sex organs, the scholars sort of say that it's haram, it's impermissible, and the way they go about this is that they talk about the idea that it contains genes, genes pass on heredity, and then therefore you'll have confusion of lineage. So you can't donate ova and sperm or testes and tubes. Now as far as the uterus, an interesting argument comes about in the scholarly paradigm. I'm not saying this is all scholars, but there's a group that talks about this, that there's a metaphysical reality attached to the uterus. And what is that? Again, you go back to the scripts, and they sort of say, and I'm gonna kind of go through this entire verse. O mankind, fear or be conscious of your Lord that created you from one soul and created for it its mate, and mate from them, many men, right, and many women. So all of mankind comes out from that. And be mindful, fearful, be conscious of God, right, the one who you ask your rights from, and, or that haram, and the womb. So there are other things in the Prophet, the idea that the womb is gonna ask, did you cut relations off with me? Meaning you didn't talk to your parents or brothers or sisters or children in the afterlife. That will demand rights, and that you'll be sinful for not completing the rights of the womb. So they say, okay, we have some question about whether our uterus transportation's okay.  That's true, but I'm just telling you that there is another dominant view that this might not be permissible. Now to an interesting case, when I presented this in a Muslim context, people understood it, but I just want to say it's not just a Muslim context, there are many contexts where there are polygamous marriages, right, here's from the States, this is a Filipino soap opera. And so there's an interesting case presented to a fit council in 1984 and 1985 about this idea of gestational sargassi within two wives of the same husband. So I know my time's ending here. The idea here was that they first said this is permissible because there's no confusion who the father is, because it's legally embedded, right? And we will just assign the rank of a milk mother to the gestational carrier refine. Then the year after they said, no, we can't do this because the scientists came and presented data that perhaps you don't know which ova is it the, which ova is part of that embryo. It's possible that there's a miscarriage and then therefore there's actually of the mother who is gestating. So they said if there's any doubt there then we can't allow this procedure. Okay, so now close to ending and then we're gonna have a perhaps a conversation. So let's attach names to people. So you have Fatima and Mustafa as the people who want to have a child. You have Amira who is the individual who is the donor of the uterus that now Fatima has. And then you have Jannah and Barak who are the married couple that Jannah's the one who's going to have to be the sargat. So the contestations are like this, right? That the issue here with gestational sargassi is that Jannah's involved, right? That she's potentially a mother and that she potentially has a husband. Therefore we can't allow this. For the idea of two wives the issue is that perhaps Jannah is the one who gave the Ova, right? So we can't allow this. And then if you think about uterus translation then there's no problem within gestational or genetic or rearing roles but there's some issue of afterlife ramifications. Perhaps. So what do we see here when you combine the data from the community as well as from the scholars? That all groups, scholars and LATC, agree that motherhood or seamotherhood as a composite of genetic relationships, gestational relationships and rearing relationships that these have to come together to assign the notion of parenthood. And in this case I'm talking about motherhood. Yet, as you can imagine scholars want to update their sort of metaphysics and think about their law so genetic science right into Islamic law I would argue perhaps is not the best thing.  Why? Because we can't fully prove the genetic bonds as you see, right? And I mentioned I'll tell you what the Shi'a's do so the dominant tradition and the Shi'a tradition says genetics equals parents, right? So they're able to move away and so these things are permissible but then they have to work out how you deal with the ideas of who you can marry and not marry inheritance and everything else but they just take the genetic vote fully. Soon these scholars don't. Lastly, this issue, right? So now we want to use this data to counsel Wilson's. Well, Wilson's don't want to be a childless either. But there's no acceptable biomedical solution that maintains these three sort of linkages, right? And doesn't also implicate afterlife bonds. So I would say we don't yet have a solution that would meet all parties' needs. Perhaps adoption and fostering but then I said to you if we think this is a problem are we going to be interacting in those social determinants of say for example, depression? Are we or are we not as a health care system? All right, so I'll end with this slide. I mentioned to you this is the way that we think about or I think about how we assess moral assessment, how we assess biotechnology, harms and benefits. From the data presented there's an issue about the needs confusion versus having children. Benefit, harm. In terms of the origin of the biomedical science one of the things I presented to you is this issue of whether the donor of that uterus is now a parent. That uterus will ask about rights on the day of judgment. And lastly, when the scholars are talking what constitutes motherhood, what constitutes a child? So these are all things that we have to deal with as you think about interventions and policy with solutions in our society. I'll end there, thank you. Okay, one or two questions? Yes. The uterus and we're talking about the transplantation. But isn't it possible that the uterus would be transplanted and the native ovaries would be functioned? So, and it seems to be worth applying, we're applying it based on the assumption that the ovaries would also be transplanted. No, so because they dealt with that but you can't have egg donors, right? So the ovaries are an issue of well, they're eggs that are contained within ovaries and that laser genetic bonds. But when you specifically talked about the uterus itself, the thing that is just dating the child that is gonna give nourishment to the child, will it then demand rights in the afterlife that the child didn't recognize who I was? Any questions? Yeah, sorry, yeah. Nice talk, enjoyed it. So I'm curious about you surveyed people and you asked about their discomfort and the discomfort seemed to correlate with the level of religiosity. But I'm a little uncomfortable with using discomfort as a surrogate for being informed by religiosity. So, I mean, discomfort can come from a lot of different things as well, right?  Yeah, so actually, part of the reason I'm leaving today is I'm presenting this larger data to UNESCO conference in Morocco tomorrow. And the question is, are the relationships between these based on scholars thinking meaning scholars have taught communities that's why they're uncomfortable or is the idea that they're uncomfortable so now we should think about how scholars think about it. What's the relationship? So only one point was related to religiosity, that was uterus transplantation. And I interpreted that because transplantation in general is plurality within scholars. Some say you can't do it. But all the other relationships had nothing to do with the religiosity, which is my point, is there something else going on? It's not that scholars say something and then people believe, that's not how it works. So that's what I'm gonna present there. Thank you. With that, we'll end. Thank you all and I'll introduce the next speaker. So our next speaker is all known. Well, I should give this, yeah, let me give this to you.


That concludes the debate on Carers Allowance Supplement Scotland Bill. It's now time to move on to the next item of business, which is consideration of motion 1211 on a financial resolution for the Carers Allowance Supplement Scotland Bill financial resolution. I call on Ben Macpherson to move the motion. Formally moved, Presiding Officer. Thank you. The question on this motion will be put at decision time. The next item of business is consideration of parliamentary bureau motion 1331 on committee membership, and I ask George Adam on behalf of the parliamentary bureau to move the motion. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I'm formally moved. Thank you. The question on this motion will be put at decision time. There are three questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first is the motion 1318 in the name of Ben Macpherson on Carers Allowance Supplement Scotland Bill be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. The motion is therefore agreed. The next question is the motion 1211 in the name of Kate Forbes on financial resolution Carers Allowance Supplement Scotland Bill be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. The motion is therefore agreed. The final question is the motion 1331 in the name of George Adam on committee membership be agreed. Are we all agreed? Yes. The motion is therefore agreed. That concludes decision time and I close this meeting.


So today I'm going to attempt to make a $5 castor rolls. So I just dropped Sarah off at preschool. I'm headed into Walmart because that's the place where I can get the cheapest groceries here where I live. So going into Walmart, we're gonna see if we can make castor rolls for just $5. Let's go. I made it back from the store and I'll be honest, I get lots of stairs when I bring my camera and I'm filming the ingredients, but I wanted to show you that you really can make cheap recipes. The total came to $16.63, so I was close to my $5 recipe. It came to like a little over $5.50 a recipe, but do you know what? Still calling it a win. Now for the fun part, let's make the recipes. So the first recipe I'm making is our cinnamon roll French bread bake. All right, the first thing that I grabbed at the store was my $1 French bread. Next up, I grabbed some eggs. Now I need eggs for a different recipe, so I actually found 18 eggs for a dollar. So we're only gonna charge ourselves 50 cents because you know, we're gonna use it for both recipes. Next, I grabbed some milk. It calls for whole milk, but you can actually use skim milk too. I have 1%, it's the same. Now I need this for two recipes, so I'm gonna only charge myself for half. Now I might have cheated because I already had brown sugar, so I'm not charging myself for brown sugar. If you need some, it might cost you an extra dollar or so. And the last thing I purchased is cream cheese frosting. Right, we're gonna start by preheating our oven to 350 degrees. All right, now you're gonna cut the French bread into half inch slices. Mine are closer to an inch, and you know, it'll still work, it's fine. Now I'm gonna take a pan and spray it with non-stick cooking spray. I like to use Pam, that's just how I work.   If you have good knives, I would love some just a suggestion, because my golly, it's time. It's time to get some good knives here. All right, in a little bowl, we're gonna crack five eggs. We're gonna add three fourths cup of milk. Now please don't be mad, there are some things I didn't add to the five dollars. So I already had vanilla, I already had cinnamon, and I already had nutmeg. So hopefully you have these in your house. So we have two teaspoons of vanilla, half a tablespoon of cinnamon. Whoa, I'm gonna add as much since I got a little out of control. And then two teaspoons of nutmeg. And we're just gonna mix this up really well, break those egg yolks. Then we're gonna pour half of the mixture onto our little French bread, French toast. That might be more than half, but that's okay. I'm gonna spread it around just a little bit. Okay, and we're just gonna add the rest of our bread on there, just going right over top. And actually you can go a different way if you want to, but I'm lazy, I'm just gonna go the same way.  I know these pieces are a little smaller, but it will still work. Okay, then we're gonna take the rest of our mixture and just pour it on top. I'm gonna try and cover as much of the bread as possible. Now for my favorite part, you're gonna take about half a cup of brown sugar, and we're just gonna sprinkle it on top. Okay, we're gonna use my fingers to sprinkle because it just makes my life a little easier. Here we go. Then if you want to, you can add a little bit of cinnamon too. I'm gonna add cinnamon because I love cinnamon toast. Now with this recipe, you don't have to let it sit overnight. You can just bake it as soon as you're done. Or if you want to have it overnight, that will work too. So either way, it doesn't matter, but we're gonna bake it at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes. All right, our French toast bake is all done cooking. Now I'm gonna take the cream cheese frosting. Yes, I know, it's canned. I actually don't mind it, but I'm gonna stick it in the microwave for about 10 seconds or so just to get it nice and soft so we can spread it on top of our French toast. And the secret is pull this out of the oven, let it sit for about a minute or two. I've kind of softened up our frosting and we're just gonna put a blob of frosting on each French toast right. This is like the good stuff. calories don't count during holidays, right? Right. Then I'm gently, gently.  Just gonna spread it across each one. It comes up a little and that's okay. Just try your hardest. My husband is gonna be so excited for breakfast tomorrow. And my husband is a little shy. He does not love to be on the camera. So maybe one day you'll see him, but for the most part, like some of my kids are also pretty shy. So you get to see Sarah. She's not my shy kid. We're Anzalee. She's not shy either. Okay. And we're just gonna let this sit and melt. All right, Anzalee's gonna try the baked French toast. Begin. That's really good. Yeah. Time's up, guys. All right, nice. So the next recipe I'm making is our ham and broccoli breakfast casserole. Now this one's a little healthier than the last one, but it's still one of my favorites. So the first ingredient you're grabbing is whole wheat English muffins. If you don't love whole wheat, you can just buy normal English muffins too. Next is two cups of broccoli. Now the fresh broccoli was actually too expensive. And so I went and checked on the freezer aisle and you can get two cups for just a dollar. So we're gonna do this and then steam it. Next up is our cheese. Now it's a lot cheaper to buy a block of cheese than it is the shredded. So we're gonna save money and buy a block. Now from the previous recipe, we needed five eggs. This one we need 12. So we're using the rest of the 18 eggs. So we're gonna just count this as like 50 cents. Also for this recipe, we're gonna use more of the milk. Now if you watched my last video, you saw that I made a ham in the slow cooker. Now usually we have a lot of ham left over. So I love to put it in bags or tin foil and freeze it in the freezer. I'm gonna use leftover ham. I apologize if you don't have ham. It might cost you an extra dollar or two. You can buy some just diced ham or whatever ham you wanna use. But if you have leftover ham, this is the perfect recipe for it. All right, let's make the casserole. First we're gonna cut up four English muffins into bite-sized pieces.  Now I'm gonna steam the broccoli so it's not nearly so frozen. Now while the broccoli cooks, I'm gonna cut up my ham into bite-sized pieces. You want about two cups of ham. Okay, in a nine by 13 pan, we're gonna spray it with some cooking spray. And we're gonna add our broccoli. So about two cups of broccoli. And I didn't cook this all the way through, but just enough so it wasn't frozen. So, okay, next we're gonna add our bite-sized English muffins. And then I also cut up the ham on here too because they're all gonna mix together. And then I shredded up some of the cheese so we have a three-fourths cup of cheddar cheese. All right, now we're just gonna gently kind of mix this all together. You just want broccoli and ham. Ooh, there you go, puppy. And English muffins just kind of all, all spread out a little bit. We're gonna go ahead and set this aside and then get our eggs and milk ready. All right, into the bowl, we're gonna crack just 12 eggs.  It's not sponsored or anything. I just love it because it's like one hit. It cracks it perfectly. I just love it. It's just one of the things I love. I'm just having it in my kitchen now. Now there's one extra egg.  To the eggs, we're gonna add one cup of milk, about one teaspoon of paprika. This is almost gone, so I'm just gonna use the rest of it here. And then instead of four teaspoon of crushed red pepper, so I'm just gonna grab like a pinch of it and just kind of put it on in. And we're just gonna whisk this all together. Make sure you break all those egg yolks. That's my biggest struggle. And I forgot one important thing, salt and pepper to taste. You'll want some of that. All right, mix that in here too. All right, I think we're ready. Okay, now we're just going to very carefully and gently pour this on. Now this recipe says it needs to sit overnight. I'll be honest, I never do overnight. I don't have the patience for it. So I'm gonna let it sit in the fridge for about 20 minutes. Let it soak in all of that bread. And then we're gonna go from there. But if you're gonna make it in the evening and then cook it in the morning, perfect, perfect for overnight. So you can make sure everything is kind of covered here. We're gonna cover it with foil and then stick it in the fridge. All right, whether it's been in your fridge for just a little bit or overnight, we're gonna take this and add the rest of our cheese. So it's about an extra cup or so. The rest of our cheese, we're gonna cook it 375 for 45 minutes and we're actually gonna cover it while it cooks. Here we go. All right, it is done. Browned on top, it is looking so good. All right, so we're gonna try the casserole for us. Broccoli and ham and eggs. Thumb up, thumb down. That means it's okay.  But not my thing. Okay, what you gonna rank it? A four? Still pretty good? Mm-hmm. Actually a four. A three? Cause it's not. And the last recipe is our twice baked potato casserole. Woo, say that 10 times fast. The things I needed at the store is a five pound bag of Idaho potatoes. Next, this recipe calls for 10 strips of bacon, but 10 strips of bacon is kind of expensive. So we went with the bacon bits. A lot cheaper, still the same bacon flavor. Next is one eight ounce package of cream cheese and then you need some cheddar cheese in there. So we just grabbed a block of cheddar cheese instead of the shredded, just because it's a lot cheaper. Now this recipe also calls for sour cream and butter, but I already had those two things, so I apologize if you don't. That might bump up your price a little bit past the $5. Now this recipe is in the description, but they bake their potatoes in the oven.  So we're gonna cook all the potatoes in the Instant Pot and make our lives a lot easier. Now I'm gonna try and cook all five pounds of potatoes at the same time, so I'm pulling out the giant eight quart so we can cook them all. Now you wanna make sure that you've washed your potatoes really good, especially if you're leaving the skins on and I'm gonna leave the skins on cause I love potato skins. Our potatoes actually didn't go all the way to the top, so if you have a six quart, it might just work. Just, yeah, fill it up as much as you can. Okay, potatoes are washed. We're gonna add about a cup of water in here and then just put it right into our Instant Pot. All right, go ahead and put your lid on. There we go. You have a little knob that says sealing and venting, make sure it's on sealing. Okay, we're gonna go to pressure cook and we're gonna take our time all the way down to 20 minutes. Now with this machine, because it's my eight quart, I do have to push start, but sometimes you can just walk away once you set the time. All right, we'll let this cook. All right, the potatoes have been done cooking for about six minutes. We're gonna release the pressure and let them out. All right, all the pressure's out. Potatoes are done. This is my favorite little thing, silicone steamer. Oh, it's a heavy pot. We're gonna hook it on. There we go. And then we'll just drain out the water. All right, drained all the liquid.  Come on, love it. Now I love this recipe because we're gonna work just straight from the pot. Now my beaders broke last time I used them, so I don't have beaders right now. So we're gonna do the potato masher and just mash the heck out of all these potatoes. While we're mashing, we're gonna add a half a cup of butter or one stick, as my mom used to call it. And then we're gonna also add the eight ounces of cream cheese. And then the last thing, if you have sour cream, which I'm sorry, yes, I already had some, so I didn't need to buy any. But just, it's about one cup of sour cream. I only have about a half a cup, but it'll still work. All right, then we're gonna keep on mixing this. Now if you had beaders, you would mix this until it is nice and smooth, but with my potato masher, this is about as creamy and as smooth as I'm gonna get it today. All right, we are not done yet, so we're gonna add salt and pepper to taste. And there's a lot of potatoes here, so be a little generous with your salt and pepper, okay? I mean, I love salt, so. Then we're gonna add half the package of bacon. Just be careful, sometimes that little blue thing comes in it, and then about a cup and a half of your shredded cheese. Okay, I'm gonna carefully mix this all together. Looking good, this is like loaded mashed potato bake. That's what it should be called. I know it's twice baked potatoes, but it really is just like a giant mashed potatoes. Yeah. Our last casserole, here we go. This thing is heavy. Okay, we're gonna dump this all into our nine by 13 pan. Okay, now we're just gonna spread this out. Ooh, at least the best that we can. That is a lot of potatoes. If you guys have a lot of people coming over, this is actually a very easy, easy dish to make. Okay, now you're gonna take the rest of your cheese. I don't have a ton left, about half a cup or so. One thing I would change is probably buy a little bit more cheese, because this is a lot of potatoes. And I'm just gonna take the rest of the bacon bits, and we're gonna go on top here too. So we're gonna cook this 350 degrees for about 30 minutes or so, but my potatoes are already hot, so mostly just until the cheese is melted, we should be good. All right, these are all done cooking. My kids are gonna be in heaven. All right, we have a taste tester, Sarah, for the mashed potatoes. Ready? Good? Nice. I'll give it a five. A five, good job. Now if you want more simple, easy recipes, I have some three ingredient recipes right up there. All right guys, I'll see you next time.


I welcome immediately the Secretary-General, his Excellency, Antonio Gutierrez. Thank you very much to give us your opening remarks. Thank you very much, and I'm going to apologize, because I will speak, listen a little bit of time, and immediately have to go, because today I have about 40 bilaterals, and this is my sixth intervention. So it's a little bit complicated, and I will be extremely unpolite, but I have no alternative. Your Majesties, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here today to focus on the role of financial inclusion in sustainable development. But I want to particularly thank Her Majesty, Queen Máxima, my special advocate, for raising the profile of this issue around the world in a way that has been absolutely remarkable. I believe that these 10 years have indeed made an enormous difference. I believe that when you started, we heard in the kind of proto-history of financial inclusion, and today we are really in a very dynamic movement everywhere. So on behalf of the United Nations as a whole, I wanted to thank you very much and to say how pride I am that you have accepted to go on remaining as my special advocate. And I thank the group of friends for financial inclusion, for their work, and for co-hosting today's event. Achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development depends on adequate financing, based on the global partnership agreed in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. This relies, in turn, on taking full advantage of the FinTech revolution. New financial technologies, institutions, and markets have great potential to extend financial inclusion and to facilitate investment. Since 2011, the proportion of people with access to formal financial services has risen from 50 percent to nearly 70 percent. Some 1.2 billion additional people now have access to savings accounts, credit, payment plans, and insurance products. These services can help people and communities to build resilience and to make the most of opportunities. New financial technologies have also reduced operational costs, enabling governments to reach people with financial services more easily. They can facilitate investment and help small businesses to access credit. And they can help to fight the tax evasion, money laundering, and illicit financial flows that can drain resources from the developing world. However, despite these enormous progress, some 1.7 billion adults still do not have an account with a financial institution or a mobile money provider. And more than half are women. Gender equality is a proven driver for ending poverty and building sustainable communities and economies. And so it's particularly negative that more than half of those that are deprived of these instruments are women. The strategy for financing the 2030 agenda that was launched last year sets out ways in which the United Nations can support a fundamental shift to align global economic policies and financial systems with the 2030 agenda. Seizing the potential of financial innovations, new technologies, and digitalization to provide equitable access to finance is one of its three key objectives. Beyond the United Nations, I am pleased that the G20, the Gates Foundation, and others are prioritizing financial inclusion, and more than 50 countries have now developed their own national financial inclusion strategies. Lack of a legal identity is a major bar to financial inclusion for 1.1 billion people. Many solutions must include efforts to tackle these. Excellencies, majesties, ladies and gentlemen, new technologies can create new risks, disrupt labor markets, and contribute to growing inequality. Financial systems and regulatory frameworks must manage these risks without creating new obstacles to achieving the 2030 agenda. The task force on digital financing of the sustainable development goals is addressing these challenges. This forthcoming report finds that digitalization is already helping to mobilize funds more quickly and direct them towards sustainable development. And I hope these initiatives will continue to complement and support each other to harness the fintech revolution for sustainable development and promote lives of peace, dignity, and prosperity for all. And Your Majesty, I know that with your leadership, with your enthusiasm, and with your mobilization capacity, this is going to move even more quickly in the next 10 years.


To all the carnivore dieters out there. Are you picky? Are you just practical? Hey there njbrew22.com here with a little this is a link the low carb keto carnivore thing But it's more towards the carnivore eaters And I guess towards the people who are wheat meat on a low carb or keto genic diet I see a lot of people that are that are kind of hung up On the organic and grass-fed and all this other stuff and I Don't think that's something you like most of these people have to be consumed with it's just another thing It's one of this gamification. I guess you can say of eating you always want to do the best you always want to fine-tune You always want to get the like I can't explain you just want to be a perfectionist I don't know. I don't know exactly the right verbiage to use but I think when it comes to Being a low-carb person and just eating meat. I'll tell you this much right off the bat If you just eat red meat so many of your problems are going to go away I'm gonna do another video about this later on but no digestive issues no skin issues no sleep issues no joint issues like Eating red meat and it doesn't matter if it's organic or or freaking a shop-right brand ground beef Your problems kind of go away and anytime I eat anything other than red meat these days I don't feel good and I don't feel any better or any different if I'm eating any kind of organic meat or Grass-fed meat or pasture-raised beef It really does not matter and I know some butchers out there that have their own Livestock and the taste of something that is a truly grass-fed or even you know There are some some times that the meat does taste different and I'm sure the commercial cows I don't want to get into it too much, but I think It's best to completely not get hung up over the the labels of what something is I don't think it's negligent. I don't think it's sorry my bad. I don't think it's Significant enough to worry about at least in the first 90% of your journey Maybe once you've gotten to this level of perfection where you're sub 10% body fat And you're like running like a lean machine and there's nothing left to perfect Perhaps if you want to and you have the money for it, by the way, it's a lot more expensive to eat organic grass-fed pasture-raised beef In the order of like five times more expensive or even ten times more expensive depending on how Elite and boutique you want to get with your meat if you have perfected your You know carnivore diet so much That there's no room for improvement anywhere else other than Quality and types of meat you get perhaps then maybe it's worth it, but in the beginning You're not going to see a statistical difference, and I think really that You should just go get your ground beef. I'm not kidding It's not even about steaks or rib-eyes or porter houses or filet mignon's while those things are good I still think a nice low high-fat ground beef Cooked rare or medium rare or medium at the most is your best bet and that'll that'll push you along Just fine. Just be really careful about like a lot of these people get all hung up Okay, just remember that they get hung up and there's some sort of marketing involved with that You really got to just look at it like I said If you've perfected everything and there's nothing left to improve go ahead and eat the best best of the best And see what see what happens. You probably won't notice a difference except your bank account will be lower I mean if you're wealthy enough, that's great. Please send us some PayPal tips or Or something like that. We haven't set up our patreon account yet But if you want to do that you can do that too, but I really don't think anybody should be worrying about the Quality I rambled again for something simple. I could have said it in a minute. Please like and subscribe I'll try to edit my videos to under three minutes in the future But that's it. Have a good week and see you next video