Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We are back with our weekly discussion on COVID-19. What its impact is and what are the likely trajectory for the future? Let us first look at the numbers. We have crossed 100,000 more than 100,000 dead last couple of days back and we are, as usual, we are the highest in terms of new cases. That means we are still the fastest growing numbers in the world on COVID-19. But the next is 34,000 United States, the 12,000 France, 10,000 Russia, and all other countries below 8,000. So we are seven times, for instance, Russia and France and we are twice that of the United States. So clearly India is still the leading country in terms of COVID-19 growth. We are not going to talk too much about the numbers today. Let us go and have a quick look at what are the test to infections or confirmed cases. That is roughly at the moment about 8 percent or so, a little more than 8 percent, which means it has come down from the level 12 percent which was about two weeks back. So again, some consolation that the direction is now slowly appears to be in the right direction, but how much of it is going to stay like this and whether it will again rebound, we don't know. So you can see from the new cases figures, the charts are there in front of you, you will see that almost all states, which earlier were really growing fast, states like Maharashtra, Delhi have now started to definitely come down over the last three, four weeks. And the states which are still holding sort of at the same level are Tamil Nadu, this is West Bengal. These states seem to be holding. That means the numbers are not coming down. The new cases are still growing at a flat rate, but they're not climbing except Karnataka, which seems to be rising still. And if we look at the city's figures, then that also becomes clear that Bangalore still is rising, but the other cities are not driving the growth today. So Calcutta is also holding steady, and that's the reason, in fact, it's rising a bit. And that's the reason West Bengal still is cause of concern, whether it will suddenly take off or not. But at the moment, we seem to see that numbers are either declining a bit or holding, and we don't seem to see news spurts anymore. If we look at the states, the southern states have been harder, northern states less so. But if we look at the details of the northern and southern states, we'll then find that essentially the southern states, the urban areas were hit first. In the north now, you can see the urban areas now being hit. And if you go and see, hover over the districts in our map, you will find that a lot of the smaller towns are also starting to show up numbers. In the north, UP seems to be leading at the moment, followed by Punjab and Haryana. So this is the belt which you can see is starting to show numbers. We have to see whether the numbers hold. Do the numbers really hold in this part of the country? Or will it actually, again, take off? As we know that numbers can flatten for some time, drop for some time, and again rise. That's the nature of the epidemic, because it's going to take place in some clusters first, go to some other clusters. And it is not that until you have either the vaccine or you have two to three years of this epidemic continuing, will we really see the quote unquote herd immunity develop? Let's therefore look at now something else, which is what we should consider at the moment, that yes, this trajectory will see India reach the top, probably another month or so. We are reaching at the moment a doubly great of 40 days, not much of a constellation. That means our numbers will double. So at the moment, something like six and a half million that we have reached will double in another, say 35 to 40 days. So doubling rate has come down from 30 to 35 days, meaning that if the number becomes larger, it's better. So from 30 to 35 days, which it was about two weeks back, it's now about 35 to 40 days, which is good. That means we are still slowly increasing the numbers, but not as fast as we did earlier. But even at this rate, we are going to overtake United States another month or so. So you India still continues on its trajectory of being the epicenter of the global epidemic. We are the ones who are in that sense showing the largest numbers and continuing to show the largest number of new cases by far. So that's where we are at the moment. Things are not good. Our only consolation is the government has been talking about is the number of deaths per thousand or per hundred thousand are lower than others, which is as we have said earlier, an indication of a are counting not being so good. But more than that, the fact that we have a young population and younger the population, the effect of COVID-19, though it is serious, does not lead to death in almost all cases, except a small portion who could have other congenital or other hidden cases or even open cases of say suffering from already from cancer, immune problems, immune compromise, not all young people their immune systems are good. So those cases do have, could have serious complications COVID-19. Otherwise, most of the younger people below 40 do not show serious consequences of COVID-19. But let's face it, COVID-19 is still a serious disease. If you do have it, it is true that it is not that you will rebound within five days, seven days. The effects of COVID-19, as we now know, are continuing to last for maybe 30 days, two months, three months. Those things are also there. So it's not just a small flu, as Trump was fond of saying, that you get over it and you're perfectly hunky-dory. That's not what's going to happen. Let's come to what we now really should be looking towards is the vaccines. And we have Dr. Harshavardhan, our health minister, who has announced that India is going to vaccinate 25 crore people by middle of the year 2021 and sick next, the first six months of the year. We expect the vaccines to be available early next year, and therefore within six months, 500 vaccine doses will be procured and 250 million people will be vaccinated. The reason is, of course, because there are two short vaccines. Most of the vaccines we are talking about at the moment, either the AstraZeneca one, which is what is known as the Oxford vaccine, that is what is being produced by Serum Institute in Pune. And then you have the Gamalaya vaccine, which is again from Russia. And that they have promised 100 billion doses to Red Dies Laboratories or other vaccines we are considering. It seems to be there are mostly two short vaccines, which means if you get 500 vaccines, then you can vaccinate 20 to 50 million people or 25 crore population. Six months, 25 crore population is quite an ambitious target because we have to maintain the cold chain. And then we have to also see that the dosage, the gap between the two doses are maintained. So that's going to require a major logistical exercise, the cold chain that we have talked about. And then seeing that at the center where people have vaccinated, record is kept, they are tracked and they are again after the requisite gap, they're again given the second dose. So this is the challenge. But even if we do that, we are going to vaccinate only 20% of our population, which means the herd immunity that we are talking about was really still going to be far away. Of course, we are targeting the people who are the frontline COVID workers. I would include in that the entire utilities, those who maintain all the essential services, including the food and civil supplies, the transport, all of that are considered essentially essential services for the country. And of course, the health workers, including the technician who actually has the hazardous job of testing for our blood sample or our other samples to see that we are either affected or not affected by COVID. So all of this means that the entire health system has to be geared up. The public health system has to be geared up to deliver 500 million vaccine doses to the people in six months. We have to set up the whole supply chain, which should go down to the delivery centers where people can be vaccinated. It's not that the people have to travel long distance to get vaccinated. So that's a major challenge. We have to see how the central government and the state government fulfills this task. Because till date, the central government has more or less acted by dictates, giving directions to the police, giving directions to the government officials, but have not really undertaken a major logistical exercise of this kind. Fortunately, India's pulse polio program has a spine by which the cold chains are available for reaching to vaccinate babies. So we vaccinate 170 million babies in pulse polio program each year, but that's a simpler one. Why? Because A, they're oral drops. They're not basically shots which we have to take. So they're not flu shots equivalent. So therefore, this is going to be more complicated. Plus the gap between the two has to be also maintained. And since we're not going to do a pulse program where you do either the gap is easier to maintain because you do it on a particular day. After another X number of days, months, you again do the second pulse and every baby is abroad and the polio oral drops are given. This is not going to be that simple because it has to be phased out. It's not oral drops. It's a shot that has to be given. So that is going to take more effort. And therefore we have to keep track of the people you are vaccinating for the second shot. And that, as I said, is a major logistical exercise for 250 million people that we have undertaken to do according to the health minister in six months. Let's see how it works because as of date, the government has not shown efficiency in terms of the deliveries. In fact, its pronouncement has far exceeded its capability. And we hope in this particular case on COVID-19 that they will not botch up the vaccination program as the botched up the lockdown. As you remember, Indian lockdown was one of the most draconian ones. And yet it produced no slowing down of the COVID-19 cases, mainly because it was executed without any public health vision. It was really a police lockdown of the curfew variety. Now that's not a law in the world. COVID-19 is not a law and order issue. So that's not the way it works. It needs a whole set of other measures, including isolating the people who are infected, also contact tracing. Contact tracing is an extremely important element. And then following up on the contact tracing of the people, without this COVID-19 lockdown is only partially effective. And it tends to break down as it did because people had also no food, no jobs. And therefore the entire lockdown really failed in its intent. So we hope that this time the government will prepare a lot better. They have time, at least another three months to prepare for, and they will take the state governments into confidence. And this will be a partnership between the central and the state governments because health is a concurrent subject. It has to be delivered by the state government in the places where people are. Therefore it is not a top-down exercise. And unless the communities are involved, this will not happen. So we hope this time the public health vision of involving communities, the state and central government, local government officials working together will be the model followed. And yet it is a major challenge that's not underestimate the enormity of the challenge of vaccinating 250 million people and giving them two doses, which is what the health minister has committed to do. And hopefully in another six months they will be able to get 500 million people vaccinated by which time probably will be much closer to herd immunity. Six months you're still not going to reach herd immunity. So for a lot of people the problem would still be there. And we will not be able to go to what is called the opening of the Indian economy, because irrespective of what government says, the Indian economy will have the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic as long as the cases are as they are today, that you cannot have 75,000 cases per day and yet return to normalcy, which is what the government keeps on talking about. So this the vaccination will be the crucial element for us to reach normalcy. This is all the time we have today. Do keep watching NewsClick and do follow our COVID-19 discussions and also look at our charts on the on the NewsClick site.


n a part of our field for a long time, and there's a lot of experts on this. And we've engaged in some of those issues as well, but it seemed like there was changes in the field. We needed to up our game, and we needed to do that through a partnership approach. It's really what we as a network decided. And so this new initiative on narratives for peace that came out of this, now we're working with USIP under their grants program, really was about a year in development together with our umbrella organization, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, because we also happen to be institutional members of the Alliance and were co-located in the same office. So we really wanted to make sure that what we were doing from Partners Global also had a field-wide perspective. So one of the challenges that was addressed, and we've talked a lot about this in a lot of our network and Alliance meetings, is how fragmented our messages are, or our narrative frames. So we all know that it's a wonderfully diverse field. And in fact, the way that our education system also with many, there's over 800 master's programs now in peace and conflict resolution. We just did a study for the Rotary Peace Centers program. Everybody has a slightly different piece of peace. And so we talk a lot about how those who are kind of really pushing, let's say, counter narratives to our values are really organized and simple in what they are communicating to a public to create this environment where we're marinating these narratives. And so we did want to just demonstrate all of the different things. We're promoting democratic values. We're promoting maybe empathy. We're promoting the role of women and young people. Sometimes all of that kind of cacophony of messages gets lost. And so one of the aspects of the research that we're doing right now is how we might think about a frame, a narrative frame, for peace. And then how do we embed that in our work? But also it's really a partnership strategy because how we communicate what we do brings other people into our space. So one of the central questions is, can we come up with this narrative frame on our own? Or are we maybe a little bit too close to it? And do we need support from other fields? I'm going to go back to this. The partnership approach that we've come up with then is to essentially say that there are a whole bunch of other professions that really look at narratives from a business perspective and have a lot of success in selling ideas because they do it for profit. And there's a business model out there to get under people's skin. And so what we tried to do over this last year is really reach out to a lot of different industry leaders to then say, well, how do you go about crafting narrative frames, engaging with those narratives, and changing people's concepts? Or are we changing them? Or are we really trying to kind of, what they talk about is kind of jumping on an existing narrative stream and hijacking it for our values? And so what we've started to do is really build partnerships with these kind of advertisers, marketers, design folks, brain research folks who really then look at how we are digesting information and all of the cognitive biases that we know that we have. And so really starting with some very in-depth social science research, looking at how the models of how to really kind of think about the audience that you're working within.  The other aspect is then trying to kind of identify, well, okay, then what does this mean for us? Is it just strategic communications? Is that what we're trying to do and just have each of our peace-building kind of local organizations do this better, or is there a way of really just thinking of a series of questions to then be able to partner with other industries to bring them in? And then we've been ultimately matchmaking between the creative industry leaders and peace-builders, and that's the thing that I want to focus the most on. What I wanted to do, though, is put up all of these brands of the groups that have been participating in this initiative with us, because to a certain extent now is our moment as a peace-building field, and I think globally there's a lot of different industries that are really interested in being a part of our values in our brand. So I'm just going to show you a quick little video, only because I want to let you know that the intentionality of bringing these different industry leaders together to then think about peace and peace-building led us to a whole new academic field that they're more connected to, and hopefully this works. I want to show you this video. One, it's obviously a marketing piece for Tom's, by the way, and Tom's supported this influencer's dinner, so the company that makes shoes was really interested in having this influencer's dinner with us to identify some other influencers in their field around Creative Week in New York. They were giving an award for Best in Marketing, and they had access to all of these other people that we as a peace-building NGO would not have had access to. The folks from Google, we don't even know to appreciate all these superstars in the advertising industry who were there, but the intentionality of reaching out and figuring out how to reach out to these groups has been a big learning for Partners Global of building these partnerships and then having a field-wide connection with them through educational initiatives, and that's what I want to say. Our entry point for continuing the relationship has been through to say, okay, what are the young people that then feed into your industry, and how can we approach them so that they think about their peace-building opportunities as designers, as marketing, as communicators, as advertising professionals in the future. And so there's an organization called The One Club that does give out kind of the best in design. It's a professional award that all of the advertisers compete for. They have an educational initiative every year where they invite 800 companies from around the world to basically have their students submit a social brief. And so our peace-building agenda is now this year's social brief. So that not only, and again, I'm excited about the brief. I'm excited to see what the students submit. The top 10 students get to come to New York. Last year we were involved, and they came from India. They came from South Africa. They came from Sweden. They came from all over the world. And pitched some of the most well-respected industry leaders their ideas for how to sell peace. This year we're in relationship with the UN Together campaign. So the specific aspect is around solidarity with the world's migrants or refugees to make it a little bit more specific. And then whatever they come up with as their campaign, the UN Information Center is going to distribute through their network of 23 field offices around the world. So the student's work actually gets to be seen and used. What I'm the most excited about though is we've gotten to know all of the professors and mentors. We've gotten to know all of the people who are really the recruiters in these ad agencies, who now are thinking about, oh, this is really cool. That the students are being inspired by what they can contribute socially. And that that can also then be a part of kind of our agency work in the future. And the other thing that I'll just say very quickly is Universal Spirits is another initiative under our Narratives for Peace platform, which is working with music schools in the Berkeley School of Music. Essentially bringing together musicians from different cultural backgrounds, different ethnicities, to then compose and record and tour together and linking them with local peace builders. And we're starting this initiative in Lebanon because Berkeley also has a center there. What is my main point when we think about education for peace building? We are really committed to breaking out of our NGO development field. We want other fields to be considering themselves peace builders, meeting them where they are, and finding opportunities to influence the educational systems in that way. I have a lot more to say. I'm going to stop to let Bridget talk and then hopefully we can have a good conversation. So thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I think I just took out Bridget's. Let's take it down. So Bridget. Let's put these here. I'm going to do a little show and tell. That's perfectly fine. Thank you so much. Thanks to USIP and to NAFSA for organizing this and for having us here. And thanks to Julia for that presentation and all the work that you're doing. This really is always inspiring to hear about what you're doing. I know we need to partner and work together more. I'm glad we get to do that a little bit already. So I want to talk a little bit about Peace Direct's work. And I'm just going to use a few websites as I do that. And give you some background and I'll do three things. I'll say a little bit about Peace Direct in general. What's our mission? What's our approach? I'll talk about some of our resources which I think may be relevant for educators and for diplomats and others in the audience that may be useful. And then I'll talk more specifically about a particular project which we're working with USIP on, Local Voices for Peace, and how that emerged and what we hope can come from it in terms of education for a peace building and particularly connecting, as Jeffrey mentioned, the local voices, the local peace builders and situations of conflict with international decision makers, which is one of the areas of work that we try to concentrate on. So just in terms of Peace Direct, please go and find out more about us. We're relatively new in the US. We've been in the UK for about 12 years now. And we have a small US office in Washington with a few people here and also a representative in New York. And our office in London is only about 15 people. The heart of Peace Direct, though, and who we are, is the partners that we work with and the networks that we engage of local peace builders around the world. So Peace Direct was founded by two women in the UK because they really asked this question of, how can we directly support those people who are most impacted by violent conflict and who are working for peace in their communities? And they looked around and they actually didn't find many ways that they felt they could directly connect with and support those people. They've thought a lot of international NGOs doing peace building and knew that they could connect with those. But they said, where are the voices and the people who are doing that community level work? Which the instinct was, we know that that exists. We know there are local peace builders in any situation of violent conflict, no matter how dire, who are doing brave and important work. And so why don't we see them more often? And why can't we support them more often? Those instincts from our experience over the last 12 years proved true in the sense that we have found that wherever we have sought out local people doing the work of peace building in places like Syria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, even places that all we hear in the news, all the narratives that we hear are about the violence and the violent conflict. There are always those local peace builders. So our model at this point is that we have strategic partnerships with about 10 partners around the world in about 10 countries. And you can see some of those countries here. And you can go and find out more about those partnerships. And those are long-term relationships where we really are trying to directly support the leadership and the work that local people, local peace builders, think is most needed in their communities. And we find ways of mobilizing resources, mobilizing support, lifting up their voices and their profile and their work to decision makers so that they can garner greater support. And this is really also part of our approach, is that we do believe local peace builders and local people in situations of conflict, local civil society are the experts. International folks have certain expertise as well. And we want to work and partner together. But in terms of the conflict realities that people face, the local people are the experts. And so we're trying to learn with them alongside them. And that is sort of a mutual education from our perspective. So we have a number of areas of work that our partners are engaged in. You can see there everything from prevention efforts, early warning systems, to tackling violent extremism, our partner in Pakistan that we've worked with for a long time, work with women, et cetera. And then another important part of our approach and our work is to work not just with strategic partnerships. And I'll just bring up another where we have these in-depth relations for a long time, because we're small staff, so we can only manage a small number of those. But then to lift up the profile and the work of as many local civil society groups who are doing peace-building work around the world that we can. So one of the things that you often hear, and I worked within US government as a fellow on a trustee prevention USAID for a couple of years, and I would even hear this in that context sometimes, you will hear policymakers sometimes say, well, there's just no local civil society capacity. There's just no capacity in that country. And I find that an offensive and an untrue and unproven for any situation comment. And so Peace Insight is a website that we run working with a network of local peace-building experts in about 28 experts who are covering 44 conflicts to really look at what are local civil society groups doing in the area of peace-building in countries around the world impacted by conflict. So does someone want to choose a conflict area? And I'll just show you how this works, because this is one of the resources I wanted to highlight as I move into talking about resources. Yes? South Sudan. Let's look at South Sudan. Now, before I click this, we have just transitioned this website. So let's make sure that all the information is there. Great. So this website started as basically a static database. It was a list of local peace-building groups. And we've just done a lot of work over the past year to try to add in more interactive elements and overlay the peace-building data. So with the peace-building data, you can choose to display local organizations, international organizations. You can zoom in and see who are these organizations. What are they doing? You can go in and read more about individual organizations and what we know about them and their work. And sometimes there's contact information as well. And then we've now added conflict data as well. So if you add in conflict data, it's got a question mark, so let's see if it works. From other sources, you can also see, well, where are the flare-ups of violence? Where is the conflict happening? And then where are the peace-building groups in relation to that? So this is a resource that can be very valuable for educators and for students we found. We always recommend this for students when they're doing projects and research on conflicts. But also, we hope for policymakers in the sense of understanding where is conflict going on? And then what are those local capacities for peace that we know exist? How can we reach them? How can we find out what they're doing? How can we generate more support for them? So this is one of the resources that we offer. You can see there's also then, in addition to the organization information, there is information about, from our local peace-building experts, there's blogs, and then there's the incorporation of other information from other resources, other experts or other organizations who are doing work in South Sudan. So that is peaceinsight.org. So I recommend that as a resource if you're interested. We also do a lot of research. I won't go into that right now, but we do do a lot of research on both the obstacles to supporting local peace-building groups. Why is it hard for donors in the international community to support them well and sustainably? And then what are the opportunities? Where are good practices? We're doing some research with USAID. We do some research with the Peace and Security Funders Group, a lot of different lines of research going on as well to help us improve what we do, as well as hopefully help educate and inform others in the field. And then one more resource that I'll mention before I talk about the other project is that we've really started to do more intentional evaluations with all of our partners, our strategic partners, because one of the areas in the field of peace-building that is so important is that evidence base that we keep hearing doesn't exist, we can't prove prevention, we can't prove that peace-building, especially local peace-building and communities, has a big impact. So we've started trying to do very intentional, independent evaluations with our partners, document those work, which lots of peace-building groups are doing now, but then I said, well, you know, I work in Washington, so a 50-page evaluation when I go try to talk to somebody at the State Department isn't gonna help me, it's not what I need, so I've said you have to condense them into snazzy four-page documents or six-page documents that we can give to those people who are making decisions that have to be made very quickly with whatever information they can acquire quickly. So we now have evaluations that we're doing of our peace-building partners and their work. This one is on Burundi and a country-wide monitoring and reporting early warning and early response network that we've supported for a number of years there, one on Sudan that works with peace committees in Sudan, and we're doing more of those all the time. So those are also available on our website. Others are not for security and sensitivity reasons, so feel free to ask me if you'd like to see some of those. So then finally, the project that we're working on, Local Voices for Peace, and this is kind of a project that has emerged over the last couple years through work we had been doing on more of an ad hoc basis. So one of the things we realized as we worked with local partners and often worked with maybe one or two groups in a country was that they really wanted opportunities to network more and they would ask for support to network and engage with each other. So we started convening what we called peace exchanges and this was just a space where local peace-building groups would be invited to come to share their analysis, to share their work, to help design an agenda for the exchange, what do they wanna get out of it, and then often to talk about peace-building strategies in their country, what's working, where could they collaborate more, are there ways that Peace Direct or others could help seed more collaboration and more work. So we were doing these peace exchanges just sort of when we had a chance, we did them with all our partners from different countries and then last year we did one specifically in Northern Nigeria and we said, this is so rich, we should really write a report about, we should make this more intentional in terms of capturing this information, this analysis, this expertise from the local groups and getting it up into the conversations in the hands of decision-makers so that they're informed about what the conflict analysis looks like from the local perspective and what the recommendations are from local peace-builders. So we did that on Northern Nigeria and we found it was really, really helpful. It wasn't only helpful for me working in Washington to have those conversations, but our partners said, these reports are great, can you send me more, I'm going to Abuja and I wanna go have a conversation and bring this report. One of our partners was invited to give a workshop based on something that was in the report about their work on community-based responses and prevention to violent extremism. So we started to say, well, we should really have a more intentional project around this and also we should then bring those local peace-builders to the US, to Washington and to New York where we work and engage with UN decision-makers so that they can share the information and their perspectives directly. And we had done that on and off, but we hadn't done it in such a systematic way. So we're doing that now much more with the Local Voices for Peace project. Just as an example, we also, the next one after Northern Nigeria that we did in person like that was Zimbabwe. And so now we're getting more traction out of our Zimbabwe report and I have a few of those if anyone's interested because it's quite relevant for happenings now. And then we started to realize, well, how could we do this on a broader scale? And we were looking at technology options. So I guess maybe this is where the innovation part comes in. I never think we're very innovative, but we have a fantastic tech person who is innovative in London. And we found one tech platform that does online dialogues. It was actually a marketing company that usually would do this for market analysis or for corporations who wanted to figure out how to brand their new product. And we said, well, we could use this for peace building, couldn't we? And so we did our first online consultation, our first online peace exchange in a way in Pakistan. And we had 62 local experts, practitioners, peace builders, academics participate in that for five days online. It went extremely well. I was extremely skeptical of it. I said, I don't believe in technology. It's gotta be face-to-face. And I was amazed at the richness and the depth of the conversation that was happening online. And the feedback later we got from people saying, I was actually more comfortable online because I felt safer. I was able to say what I wanted to say. I was able to come in and out. So it was an interesting learning for us. So we then said, well, what if we did this in multi-country contexts? And we did a next one online with the issue of violent extremism. And we invited local peace building groups around the world in different countries who were dealing with different forms of extremism to have an online consultation. And we had 118 people participating from 30 or 40 countries. And it was, again, it was incredible. So we did a report. So we are now continuing this and we follow up each report now with an educational visit from participants to Washington DC and to New York. We organized round table events. We organized discussions face to face one to one with key decision makers on those issues. And we're really encouraged and excited about this project and how it's hopefully helping link the local perspectives with the international decision makers and bridge that gap of knowledge and understanding really about the realities and what can be done. So our next one's coming up. There's one on atrocity prevention, which is coming up at the end of this month. Again, it'll be a global consultation. We're gonna do one on youth and peace building next year, which will be part of the whole UN's youth, peace and security process. We're gonna feed back into that. And then we're looking at some other country contexts like Somalia and Mali where we might do the in-person version. So we have this option now of in-person and online and it's been exciting for us to work on this and see where it goes. And I will say that for our partners, one of the most valuable things is hearing them say that this is valuable to them and that this is helping them in their work and in their communities. And that hopefully is ultimately a big part of the goal too. So thank you. I'll stop there and we'd love to have discussion and questions. Thank you very much, Bridget. I will start with just a question to each of you and then we'll open it up to the audience. The first question I have for Julia is to what degree is the creation of a narrative focused on sort of the right narrative or the right may not be the right correct word. A narrative that becomes compelling as a way to brand and market peace. And is that distinct from what we hear particularly around this town sort of counter messaging and counter narrative as ways of sort of countering violent extremism, et cetera. And then for Bridget, I guess the question I would have is about elevating local voices and getting those to be heard by policymakers.  And how does one sort of, is it about local voices plural or is it sort of thinking about what voices need to be heard? I was just bringing up another presentation that I did because I think it's helpful. First of all, let me say I am just learning about all of this. So this very good question that you just asked, like I don't even think I know the answer yet but I can tell you at least kind of how we're thinking about it thus far. First of all, I think it would be helpful to like give you a little definition about what we mean by narrative because I think that we throw around that term a lot. And you know, George Mason University, CERECOB has done a lot of work on narratives and conflict resolution. And so the way that in a very personal way we engage in narrative as a key element of understanding empathy and breakthrough is a field unto itself. And that's not what we've been really talking about. But with that said, I do think that the definition of narrative that I got more from a private firm that deals with businesses that I found helpful that a narrative is a story a person tells his or herself and others to express deeply held beliefs around an idea, an industry, a product, a cohort, and a narrative articulates feelings and drives action. And I think when we think about, sometimes we don't even know consciously the narrative that we hold that story we're telling ourselves that drives our belief. And so what I'm learning is that the concept of pushing a counter narrative is completely faulty. That you essentially have to, first of all, do the social science research to understand narratives. And it's not through a survey. What do you think about X issue? And then somehow we're gonna understand then how I can message to you better. It's observing people talking and then coding that in a way to say it looks like their narrative is this. Or they do all of this big data analysis of looking at the conversations on social media and pulling out the way people talk about it. So when we say hijacking narratives, we have to say can we somehow kind of jump onto the way they're already thinking and talking to kind of influence it a little bit? Or do we eventually come up with our stronger way of communicating our own narrative but specifically understands how personal and how identity related, a lot of the CVE work obviously knows about this. But the private sector of folks say don't try and convince them not to think the way they think. Yes, let's see here. There we go. Who's local voice? Absolutely. Important question, we don't have all the answers and we certainly can't claim to represent all local voices. I was asked to be the civil society respondent on a panel to one of the UN officials. And I almost laughed because I thought how can anyone be the civil society respondent? Civil society is so diverse. People have different opinions, different experiences, different positions on issues. So what we try to be very upfront about is that we are trying to lift up the voices of local peace builders. So we're trying to find people and organizations who are committed to the work of peace in their communities and demonstrate that and have legitimacy within the communities. The communities say yes, those are peace builders in our community and help amplify their voices. When we do the consultations for the Local Voices for Peace Project, so we do some work with our strategic partners that's often one-on-one, one particular group. We're helping amplify their work. But for these processes, we actually put out a very open public call for applications. And we always get more applications of groups than we can fill. And they're specific to peace building. We ask for groups that are working on peace building issues. And so then we do have to figure out, well, who do we include? And so for the Zimbabwe one, there were 19 groups included. In person's always smaller than the online ones. The online ones are great because they let us include so many. But we do very intentionally then look to try to have diversity of gender, diversity of geography, diversity of religion, diversity of types of work, peace building work that they're doing. And there's a process of trying to do that. I'm sure we don't get it right all the time, but we try to be inclusive in that process so that we're able to at least offer some diversity of perspectives. And for instance, on the violent extremism consultation, which had so many groups from so many different countries, different forms of extremism. We didn't come up with, here's the one thing that you should do to help prevent violent extremism. We came up with dilemmas in some cases and debates. And we just tried to lift those up and said, here's one perspective. There was a trend towards some people saying, peace builders don't wanna be involved with the violent extremism agenda. And others said, no, peace builders want to use that agenda for good for their work. So I think it's trying to represent the diversity as fairly as you can. But it is intentionally groups working for peace and for peace building. So we are selective in that way. Great. Questions? Yes, if you could go to the microphone. Thank you. Hi, my name is Katie Russell. I work for a place called the International Student House. And my question is for you. You just mentioned how, of course you get many applications and you can only choose a select few. So my question is actually, do you know of other organizations essentially doing what you do? Do you work with them, the community based organizations on the ground, those who don't get selected to work with you? Do they work with each other? And kind of how does that, how does that network kind of work in terms of collaborating? Yeah, that's a great question. We do do some, for instance, we have in the past when there's been a consultation and there were groups that were, we usually have a group process with our local peace building expert in the country who is the person, so the local peace building experts are the people in charge of the mapping. So they, you know, they're local folks who really know the peace building sector in the country and they know a lot of these groups. And so we work with them on these processes and we'll often say, you know, these three groups, we can't include them in the consultation, but you know, should we go out afterwards and invite them to another event or can we make sure that when we share the report, we engage with them and somehow, somehow. And then those local peace building experts are always, most of them are natural networkers, you know. And so they're trying to engage and include people and push out information and bring in information and perspectives. So we can't do it all the time, but we are trying, we're also all trying new models. So for instance, in Mali, we are starting a new program this year where instead of doing strategic partnerships with one or two groups and having a local peace building expert in the country, we're doing what essentially will become, we're doing five peace exchanges in one country, which we've never done before. So it geographically different to include more groups. And then we're going to be doing small grants to as many of those groups as we can to do different kinds of collaboration projects. So that's a whole new approach for us. We're excited about it because it helps us reach more and include more groups. But yeah, I'm sure there's more we could be doing if we knew how. And you know, I was sitting here thinking, why don't we know all of partners, you know, organizations in the countries? You have a Nigeria, and is our local peace building expert even connected with your Nigeria office? So we have a lot of work to do on networking more. Yeah, and you find also that locally, people are networked. There's a desire to network more and they often ask for that, but often the groups are networked more than we realize to. So. I think that's right. Yes, sir. Hi, I'm Ed O'Brien. I'm the State Department and I think my question is for Julian and for either of you, just to kind of bring back to this topic today, what's been the role of educational exchanges in some of your efforts, especially toward governance is what I'm interested in. But just in general, in which way have you seen more value in terms of US people going to universities and to do their or going the other way? Yeah, so our organization started in 1989 and there was definitely in the beginning, I would say a lot of more US-based exchanges with Central and Eastern Europe because that was kind of the focus after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I don't think we've done kind of a US-based training or exchange in like 15 years. So most of what we, very similar actually in approach, but maybe not at such a grassroots level as Peace Direct, most of our exchanges were promoting within regions. And so we've got teams of academics who study religion and conflict and the role of religion and governance from Brazil, then going to El Salvador and working with academic teams there. So a lot of the exchanges that we've seen to be the most helpful have been the kinds that we do. I hate, I do not use South-South, but that's kind of like the shorthand for that concept of experiences within academics. And now though, having said that, we were just talking at the break about how much I personally have been benefiting from the reverse learning from my network to come and share with us with regards to challenges that they have of working on a peace building and governance agenda and a really divided polarized society. And so I think that what we're seeing is more and more kind of really great academic exchanges and other exchanges of colleagues who have been working in really difficult contexts coming to the US and sharing how they walk that fine line with being bridge builders and activists and working on issues of corruption and at the same time trying to kind of maintain that kind of neutrality to be able to be a good convener of different partisan lines. Yeah, I was gonna mention that idea as well. I do think that we need more exchange for the US right now too on peace building experiences around the world, but I'll give a shout out to the State Department's International Visitors Exchange Program as well because a couple of our partners, I didn't find out until they were here and we were talking to the State Department and someone said, oh, I'm from that, and so I know Saba is from, one of our partners from Pakistan is a graduate of that program. And then the other one who was here from Nigeria said, I am too and I didn't even know. So that program and that program, sometimes I've spoken to groups from that program. That's a really important program I think. In addition to education school and academic exchanges, those programs, people, and I know I will just say, keep the funding for those programs from a peace building perspective because they really do plant seeds and encourage leadership and build connections that you may not see the results from until years later, but I think they're really important. So yeah, I think those exchanges are really part of the work. And I just say one last thing, I was cause you mentioned governance in particular. Obviously, in our world where there used to be kind of this knowledge transfer concept that somehow we're gonna talk about good governance and we're gonna tell you how to do it and based on our experience. So there's a real legitimacy question that we have working on governance issues around the world now, because that's partners for democratic change. We're mostly a democracy promotion organization with conflict resolution interspersed in there. And it's a challenge, it just is. And so I think that this kind of humility of like, wow, we're all facing challenges now. And how do we work on them collectively? Just that posture in an educational mind frame is helpful. This time for one more question. Yeah. Everybody, my name is Sumit. I'd like to thank you for being here. I work for the Global Partnership for Education. We work with 65 countries and we help them to strengthen their education systems. Most of our support goes to the countries that are in some kind of conflict situation. So our objective when we work with such countries to make sure that schools remain open while they're going through the conflict. So, and we, at the same time, we also work with local civil societies. My question is, can you think of any example where any local civil society organization acted, played as a broker between the parties to make sure that the schools are safe and open? If there's an example, the second question would be what kind of capacity building training that civil societies need the most? Yeah, those are two questions. Thank you. Sure, I'll start. I don't have an exact example of the specific local group mediating to ensure that schools stay open, although I'm quite sure it happens in places in a lot of different ways. But it just prompts me to say that we do have partners who work with schools and on education, peace education. So for instance, our partner in Northern Nigeria works with peace clubs, and they've started peace clubs around Northern Nigeria that provide both a forum within schools. So a lot of them are in-school peace clubs where young people have an opportunity to engage in constructive activities together where they're sort of reaffirming their belonging to a group other than an armed group that's trying to recruit them kind of thing. And they do activities for the community. They have a lot of peace football clubs, soccer clubs in Nigeria because it's big. But also the importance of the peace clubs outside the formal education system. So a lot of times local peace building groups are also, and similar with our partner in Pakistan, they've worked in the madrasas to try to provide girls' rights education, human rights education, work with the madrasas to sort of ensure that some of that's included. But they've also found the importance of informal education peace clubs or peace education opportunities because sometimes the schools either can't or are unable or unwilling to really provide what's needed. So I think that that is part of the work. I also, we have a partner in Syria now, and I know they've done a lot on rebuilding schools and working with youth in Idlib province and working with the local councils on a variety of issues, which may include, I'm not sure, but might include some of the issues around education as well. So thank you for that work, it is important. And then on the question of capacity building, we've been having this conversation in Peace Direct about that word, capacity building, and how do we actually get rid of it or change it? Because, I mean, it suggests that we have all the capacities and we just need to, it's a one way transfer somehow. And actually, what local partners and local civil society tell us they want, first and foremost, is recognition and respect. And they want to be able to make decisions about the future of their communities. So they really want us to build our capacity to listen and to respect that they have knowledge and expertise that can actually be the most informative and the best capacity they have in terms of designing solutions, they want support, they do then want support and engagement on often technical skills. Maybe there's an area where they want to do peace education in schools, but they need more examples of curricula from other places that they can then copy and adapt as they want. Or whatever, so there's a technical skills. There is a financial reporting and financial capacity building that because of the way that external donors require accounting and based on our needs for accounting, et cetera, there's often a need for that kind of technical skill as well. But we're trying to shift it to think about how do we do capacity building as outsiders alongside them or something. Yeah, I was just thinking just quickly about kind of examples that you may look at for civil society groups and kind of protecting that school space would be in Columbia, because there was a lot of really good examples of those kind of, and I can't remember the exact term, but like the peace zones where the communities really stood up to say, no, we really wanna protect our space, including schools. So I would get with some Columbia experts on that. Yeah, and then again with regards to, I would just a couple of things with regards to education. I mean, another aspect building on what Bridget was saying is we also focus a little bit on kind of the kind of democratic voice of young people in these environments and a lot of schools. So if the local councils, there's some kind of process for leadership of young people to also get together and voice what they see needs to happen and it's a little bit of just flexing that democratic governance muscle with young people. And so embedding within the school system, a lot of schools have strict student councils, in fact. And so ensuring that there's gender diversity in those councils, but really fortifying the space where they're also participating in some kind of democratic process in their schools, ensuring that that kind of feeds into their concept of citizenship going forward. And so that's a focus of a lot of our network members. And then finally with regards to, I totally agree, we don't really use the word capacity building. We talk a lot about accompaniment of just we're all accompanying each other because we do acknowledge we're in an ecosystem. All of us function in an ecosystem. I'm here in Washington. I have access to the State Department and others. My colleagues in Yemen do not have that same access and at the same time they want the respect. And so really just also just being an authentic partnership together to say, well, I have access, I have networks, I have partnerships, you have your knowledge and you're gonna have your local leadership and how do we just be in partnership together to build on each other's talents and networks and partners. So we spend a lot of time on the business model of not needing to be the prime recipient of funding. That's, I mean, we've spent 25 years like really carefully stepping out of that funding ecosystem, which entails a ton of financial management and reporting and the rest of it. So that's part of it. More and more though, we talk about organizational resiliency for what our partners are really looking at how do we adapt? How do we reach out to new partners? They're very good networkers, that I agree with, but how do we get out of our own bubble to think of other partnerships, whether it's the business community, whether it's, you know, and that that partnership approach to their own financial sustainability one, but also just to kind of be bringing more people into their, we end up both doing a lot of workshops and we actually broker new relationships between different sectors and then accompany them on a process of building those new partnerships, both for their own financial sustainability so they don't need foundation or US bilateral support anymore and that there's some kind of support locally through and we're well positioned to help them with that partnership approach. Terrific, thank you. So please join me in thanking our panelists. I'm gonna say a few concluding words and then I will ask Esther to come in and close out this morning. As an Institute of Peace, this has been a really terrific discussion, not just because of the connections that we want to promote through education, but that peace building and conflict transformation and conflict resolution depend upon the contributions of so many different fields and disciplines so that when we think about education, you know, yes, we want people to people exchanges, we want to learn from each other, but there's also the ways in which peace building itself is strengthened by the contributions of other perspectives, disciplines approaches and that I think is clearly embodied by sort of partners, globals attempt to draw upon other fields. I think about, for example, some of you may know that Drexel University just this fall launched a peace engineering masters program. So there and there are other fields that are starting to expand their curriculum so that you've got peace or conflict related topics or courses that build upon things that we've learned from the peace building field, but using that lens to enhance what's being done in a particular discipline. And the other thing is I just make a point that exchanges, there's sort of a cycle to exchanges and somebody asked the question about, well, when do you see the payoff of some of these things? I will commend one program that I think that somebody mentioned in passing that has had a really interesting impact on some of our work and that's the Humphreys Fellowship. And in two ways, the Humphreys Fellows actually are providing what I would call in many cases sort of mid-career exchanges where individuals who are engaged in public administration or public policy or law or policing are coming to the United States at the mid part of their careers and they're getting more professional development. We've had a longstanding relationship with the University of Minnesota Center for Human Rights which has hosted many Humphreys Fellows. So through that program, there have been a number of police officials, particularly from Northern Africa, from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Southeast Asia. We do training of police to help the police in a sense move beyond or move to a more community-based policing to really think about protecting and serving communities. When we have done programs to transform the training that police provide, Humphreys Fellows who have passed through our doors have been point persons to help make the case in their senior departments or themselves have become senior officials to help in laying the groundwork for some really interesting transformation of police training curricula. And that seed was sort of sown 10, 15 years ago through a program like the Humphreys Fellowship. So that's part of this kind of international education. I mean, yes, there's a lot of young people who are coming through, but it's also about education and learning at all levels, even at sort of professional levels as well as academic levels. So that's why for the US Institute of Peace, we find these discussions in the many programs to be tremendously rich and oftentimes do have very interesting payoffs. So with that, on behalf of the US Institute of Peace, thank you all very much for coming and participating in your excellent questions. And Esther, we will give you the final word. I'll just quickly say thank you to the USIP for cooperation on this event. This has really been a stimulating discussion as we looked at and since the narratives that we do tell ourselves and how we use exchanges to deepen our knowledge in order to be able to broaden our perspective and to challenge some of our narratives as well. And to pick up on your point about the importance of exchanges throughout one's whole career, that indeed that we think about the habits of learning that we may first take up and maybe in that first exchange program is an openness to ideas, challenging our assumptions and being open to learning from all disciplines from many different places. It becomes a habit of mine and that's something I think NASA and USIP support. So again, thank you to all of you here this afternoon. Thank you to USIP for hosting. Thank you for those of you who joined us online. Good afternoon. Thank you.


This is covering the spread part of the Fandall podcast network We have actual football games that matter to discuss this week week zero is finally here for college football We're gonna break down what Ed's model says about those games What goes into Ed's model and get you set for our first weekend of actual real games of 2022? It is a great day. You talking to all of you welcome on into covering the spread That's right here on the Fandall podcast network and number fire calm My name is Jim saw this I am a senior writer and analyst for number fire calm joined here Once again as always by my Wednesday co-host dr. Ed Fang you can find his work over the powering calm Ed we got games coming up this weekend on Saturday. I'm ecstatic. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm excited to have some games Although kind of overwhelmed with all the things that need to be done before then but yeah, we're gonna roll Whether I'm ready or not. So here we go. We absolutely are and we're gonna break down what goes into the numbers You're looking at we're gonna break down your favorite bets of this week. We'll break down Some of the key games aren't really any big games this week, but who cares? It's college football I can't talk about got the game of the season the game of the century Ed. Let's not let's not your hat Denotes a tune and playing in this game of the century. I mean it's NU versus NU the the battle of NU the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which is not NU by the way versus Northwest University, which actually is NU out in Dublin, Ireland I'll be there on Saturday. I am flying out today on Wednesday. That's gonna be a whole lot of fun I saw that there is a Northwestern bar set up in Dublin somewhere. So we're gonna have a blast We're gonna watch some college football in person. I will now have seen Northwestern play in Evanston obviously a couple big 10 places But then Jacksonville Nashville and we'll add Dublin to the list and those are very random places It feels like to see a Northwestern football team play Well, I mean it's it's gotta be a fun venue a fun trip. I'm glad you're gonna get a chance to get away before Everything goes crazy with the NFL soon. Yeah, that's that's that's the issue here is I had a bachelor party last weekend Got Dublin this weekend Fandall events in Chicago coming up off week one of NFL then I have a wedding in Denver in week three So a whole lot of travel not a lot of rest But we'll dive on in and break down that NU versus NU game and much more in just one second But first NFL kickoff is still a few weeks away You can get on the action now on Fandall sportsbook with their NFL super win bonus right now anyone who places at least a $50 Super Bowl winter bed will get $5 back for each Win your team has during the regular season There are also a ton of other futures markets available like team win totals division winners player props and so much more There is no better place to get ready for the football season They end on Fandall America's number one sportsbook and official sports betting partner of the NFL must be 21 plus and president select States only bonus issued is not withdrawable free bets that expire seven days after a seat max a free bet $50 Restrictions applies to terms at sportsbook.fandall.com gambling problem call 1800 gambler or visit fandall.com slash RG in Arizona one at a next step protects next up to five three three four two in Connecticut one eight eight eight seven eight nine seven seven seven seven or visit ccpg.org slash chat in Indiana one eight hundred nine with it in Louisiana one eight seven seven seven seven zero stop in New York one eight seven seven eight Hope and wire text open why in Tennessee called the red line at one eight hundred eighty nine nine seventy nine in Wyoming One eight hundred five two two forty seven hundred in West Virginia one eight hundred gambler Dot net also regarding the podcast for the next couple of days Tom Beck yeah We'll have you covered Thursday and Friday Tom filled in for me last week on Friday to get you said Talks and MLB and some NFL Tom back with you Thursday Friday So still having daily shows here on covering the spread I'll be back with you on Monday fresh off the plane to break down more MLB next Monday as well So get all those by subscribing to the covering the spread podcast feed Let's dive in now this week is zero slayed Ed We'll talk about the actual games in the second to first we were talking last week and our win total show about What goes into your win total model and the complexities of that but now we're talking about actual games So when we're talking about your actual in-game model What are the key data that you lean on to try to predict how a single game will go? We're in the preseason right now. So You know, it'll change in a regular season, but we're looking at preseason metrics and all of that Is based on one of two things it's based on data from past seasons and teams tend to persist in college football So I used four years for example to look at how a team has performed and So data is one aspect of it and then the other aspect of it and actually probably what's unique to what I do at the power Rank is I use market win totals And I have code that backs out the rating for every team Given the price to go over and under a specific win total and then of course your schedule. So, you know Seven and a half wins means different something different in the SEC West than it does in in the Sun Belt So, yeah, there's some code that does that I've found that to be a very powerful predictor over the past I found it to be, you know, the point spreads you get out of that to be Very good at predicting what's what's going on in the future and for week one and you combine that with some other metrics you trust as well and Those are the member numbers that I will talk about today And how much does it change as you get actual in-season data? Like is it a blending of two separate models that spits out like once we it's like week three How does it kind of integrate as we actually get real game data here? Well by week three. Well, I mean actually after this week Yeah, so after this week it'll start adjusting based on data from the current season and you'll see those adjustments for the teams a couple years ago I started making some way more aggressive adjustments in college football because That is what I feel is needed to really capture How these teams change it is also what in some of the pros that I've talked to I think that is the right approach for college football So don't be surprised if you see, you know, if you see a team that You know, maybe it looks kind of terrible. We'll talk about Georgia Tech in a little bit but that is a team that is kind of on its last legs maybe with a coach entering his fourth year and If they they put a real stinker out there on against Clemson You could see and whoever they're playing in the first couple weeks You could see some drastic adjustments there Clemson is another team that can move Well, I mean Clemson is actually the perfect example of a team that You had to move on pretty quick last year because the offense just stunk and actually never ended up getting better over the course of the season the defense was still pretty good but My model wasn't quite aggressive enough to capture Clemson last year I think I think I did not end up overall profitable Betting on Clemson last year, you know, that's what my model said and with the belief that look This is one of the preeminent programs in college football. So it's always, you know, you have to You have to put some objective analysis over the model as well I mean, sometimes you're gonna be able to catch teams. Sometimes you're not and That's that's kind of the art of a betting Yeah, for me, I've always found a blend of having a model to tell me spots I want to look at and using subjectivity to decide do I agree has been The biggest successes that I've had has been a blend of that too And I think that's kind of along with what you're saying there as well So let's have a week zero games here again Not the the best most robust sleep will start things off with the headliner over in Dublin It is Nebraska versus Northwest from right now a fan dual sportsbook Nebraska 13 and a half point favorites Total here is 50 and a half said I Have spent two of the past three years watching and hit a hideous product product on the field for Northwestern Looks like Ryan Helinski is probably won the quarterback one job based on his Instagram I know that's very very official very informative Coach Fitzer feases it to say who's running a quarterback, but simple question. Do my cats have a chance here? For sure. I mean, I mean maybe to cover in particular I mean, it seems like this line is getting out of control a little bit So these are two interesting teams in the sense that you need to ask how much are they gonna regress to kind of their program mean I don't even know if no, Nebraska has a program mean anymore. They've been Significantly underperforming throughout the Scott Frost era. You can quantify that a little bit They were 0-7 in one score games last season. I also believe they lost to Ohio State by 9 Which is pretty good given how good Ohio State was So it was it, you know, you're not supposed to go 0-7 in one score games. You strongly Expect things to regress to 500 there. So So they shouldn't be 3-9 again Markets have win totals at about seven and a half for Nebraska. I honestly think that's a little bit high Based on some of the models that I looked at They have things a little bit lower for Nebraska and you know now that I'm talking about and thinking about it It's like, well, where is that program mean, you know, it hasn't really been I mean, it's been a long time since they were a permanent program and they've gone through a lot of coaches and had to figure things out They, you know, they kind of they got quarterback case Thompson from Texas in the transfer portal I don't know if anyone's convinced that he's necessarily answer. They're resorting to a lot of other transfers to To get this program to the next level. That's what you have to do when you're Scott Frost and really on the hot seat To really turn this program around. I mean three wins again. This season is not going to do it now They should win more than three games But the question is how many, you know, they they're probably gonna get this first one against Northwestern. I Have this game at a neutral site and I've Nebraska by 11 and that's about a 79 percent win probability, so Your Wildcats are not favored, but you know one in five they could potentially pull the victory here And you know Northwestern, they've been well last year They were significantly below what their program mean is and we kind of know what the program mean is for Pat Fitzgerald, right? It's somewhere between 25 and 60, you know In in in FPS and that's just where he is and sometimes you win a lot of close games And you go 10 and 2 and in win a bowl game and sometimes it doesn't work out You know last year was an outlier because they were really bad on both sides of the ball Programs traditionally been really good on defense You lose a legendary coordinator and you're kind of starting over and you're you're trying to figure things out on that side of the ball the offense it's kind of stunk for a while and I don't know. I mean it should get better I mean Northwestern should be somewhere between the 25th and 60th best team in the country. That's not where they project right now But it's the same, you know, it's the same head coach and he's done it before and and you should get back to that program mean If that's anywhere near the case, then I do think there's a little bit of value in Northwestern plus What'd you tell me the number was 12 and a half? Yeah, 13 and a half 13 and a half seems like a lot. Yeah for A Nebraska program that I'm not sure anyone who who thinks deeply about college football really trusts. Yeah I I think last year Part of it was the quarterback situation, which is not better this year because again Ryan Holinski He's probably the starter and he's the same guy who was in there for a lot of last year But also they're replacing Rashawn Slater who did miss the 2020 season two because he opted out due to COVID Greg Newsom was gone. They had a lot of guys. They had to you know replace and they didn't they didn't do that well, obviously, but They've had some seasoning on these guys now. It was a decently young team So 13 and a half is a big number and I'm glad your numbers say there's value there Because we will hope as I get on the fly But we'll see how that one plays out over in Dublin between Nebraska and Northwestern So Ed's numbers do like Northwestern potentially plus 13 and a half in this one Let's stick in the big 10 and talk about Illinois Illinois now a 10 and a half point favorite Against Wyoming this game is in our band of champagne. I believe total is 43 and a half and We're talking about Illinois last week on the show and you said you like the wind total under for Illinois So we're looking at an individual game now versus Wyoming. What are your numbers saying about the Illini here? Yeah, I mean, we're seeing the market go away from my number again. I have Illinois by 9.3 points I just think it's gonna be It's gonna be a step back here for for Brett Bielumov before maybe he gets this program back to To to where well until he gets the program better They lost a ton of production on both sides of the ball. They they lost a quarterback wasn't particularly good and It's probably gonna be a little bit of a reset. So so I do believe in that. I'm not exactly too excited about Betting on Wyoming in this situation They've been decent on the defensive side of the ball with Craig Ball but not so much on offense and and I'm not necessarily convinced that they're gonna do it as well. So I'm probably staying away from this but In general, I do think I'm looking to fade Illinois this early early in the season now with both these first two games we've seen spreads that were more ambitious than what your numbers said and I I'm inclined to go into your numbers early in the season because there's a lot more variants. There's a lot more volatility which typically When you have a wider spread it implies certainty it implies we kind of know what we're dealing with Do you feel the same way an inclination towards? You know not laying a massive massive number when there is this much uncertainty Especially with programs like Illinois, Nebraska that it's hard to in a vacuum see them covering massive massive spreads from the get-go Yeah, I mean, I think so I think some of these spreads are a little bit high. I I I haven't ever quantified this but I personally do think there's a difference between NFL and college football College football the market seem to be a little bit Happier to acknowledge that a team is gonna be particularly good I feel like the NFL spreads are very cautious those first couple weeks in the season. You tend to see small numbers You don't yeah, you the markets are essentially assuming regression to the mean Right like you're not gonna give any team credit for being particularly good And it's only after you see teams Just think it up for a couple weeks and we're all when you start seeing those double-digit spreads and and then you can start Fading that I don't feel like that's a particularly good strategy in the NFL in the first couple weeks Probably a little bit more so in college because I do feel again I haven't quantified this but I do feel like the markets tend to give the favorites a little bit more of an edge Yeah, I think that that is interesting, especially the way we've seen things move for these first two games But also for this third games. Let's go now to Hawaii. I'm going to Dublin. I wouldn't mind going to Hawaii instead So if Northwestern wants to play I guess USC in Hawaii in a couple years sign me up I'll go to that but we got Vandy at Hawaii right now Vandy eight and a half point favorite This one six and a half Tuesday morning. It is now eight and a half again a lot of points a total here is 54 and a half Typically though Ed. We're seeing Vandy against Tougher competition Hawaii not quite in that realm. How does this Vanderbilt team compare to Hawaii in Hawaii for this week? Yeah, so this is a game that I Did that I don't kind of understand quantitatively so my numbers have this almost a pick and I don't know. I'm not sure Vandy should be an eight point favorite against anybody FBS anywhere This is a program that hasn't really done. Well Clark layers in a second year on the job and he's got a lot of work to do But you know the kind of argument is like why he's kind of starting over in some sense They brought in Timmy Chang talk Ramis fired over some allegations of player abuse and They lost a lot of key players the transfer portal and I think they're gonna start that trigger guy quarterback who was like this complete wild gunsling or last year so that that should be kind of interesting as well and So yeah, it's tough to know exactly what to expect with Hawaii I think, you know, Vandy's probably gonna have a talent edge being the SEC program I I'm pretty sure my numbers that say this is close to a picker is not right but you know, is there some value with Hawaii probably being at home in this spot, but I Think there's a lot of uncertainty there. Yeah And again, it just sounds like when there's uncertainty, it's okay to you know Be skeptical of a large spread with regards to Vandy here So we're liking Northwestern plus 13 and a half liking but not betting necessarily Wyoming plus 10 and a half and then into Hawaii plus eight and a half versus Vanderbilt for this week But yeah, we got a lot of the games on the board for this week to not the most robust way But there are still some other games any other numbers standing out to you is presenting some value for this week I want to talk about a week one game and I want to talk about Clemson and Georgia Tech at a neutral site. So Clemson is a team who's often stunk last year but Again, it's been one of the permanent programs, right? I mean, we expect the offense maybe not to be elite but to to get back closer to the program mean which is which has been Pretty good. I mean, I guess it's always gonna be pretty good when you have to show on Watson and and Trevor Lawrence at the quarterback position I think they're gonna get better. They're not gonna stink like that They have an amazing defense that really isn't gonna change and Georgia Tech is is kind of not a really good football program lost Right now lost a ton of production from last year Gonna be over our line on some transfers just not coach on the hot seat just You know a program that could fall even further from from where it's become and So anyways the market is Clemson minus 21 and a half my numbers are even more bullish I have comes by almost 24. I do think there's some value there. I think that gets away From Georgia Tech pretty early. Yeah, that game is at Mercedes-Benz stadium. So in Atlanta for that week You have that as the new cycling as you mentioned So 21 and a half the spread in favor of Clemson there at is going to lay that for week one I would advise You know with these week zero games We saw a lot of movement today Tuesday, you know yesterday Tuesday and If you like week one numbers get them now because we're seeing movement still despite the fact that these games have been posted for a very long time We are still seeing movement So if you like Clemson minus 21 and a half you agree that there or if you like any other week one games I would get them now because we will see some movement early in the week despite the fact these numbers have not for a very long time So if you like Clemson minus 21 and a half out in Atlanta I would grab that one as well That is all that we have here for this week on covering the spread But and delight to talk to you again to like talk to you about some actual games For here as well if people want to find your numbers whether it be the public-facing ones or signing up for your member numbers Where can they do so for that? It's all at the power egg calm. It's my site for better sports betting through predictive analytics And I do truly believe that predictive analytics is a crucial component of football betting So if you want to just check it out, I recommend signing up for the newsletter this is try to I write about games that I bet and then We also have seven Nugget Saturday, which is curated list of sports betting tips and news So you can check that out at the power bank calm And then also I just put up an article today about the craft of sports betting professionals So this was a product that I did over the off season. Just trying to figure out what the The processes of some top pros and listened to a lot of podcasts and wrote that up So that's something you can check it. It's pinned to my Twitter feed at the power rank If you're interested at all and how this all works You should look to what the pros are doing and I tried to make it easy for you With the craft of sports betting professionals And I would say especially if you're someone who is new to this given that we've had a lot of states legalized since last college football season If you're new to this Learn from the pros learn what they do learn those best practices learn What they're looking for stuff like that now is the time to soak up as much information as possible So finding the aggregated source for all that stuff that added compiled for you, especially helpful there So find that it's that it's on his Twitter at the power rank to find that Football and the analytics show is at its podcast and also the power rank calm to get all of ads numbers I'm on Twitter at Jim Sonnis J. I. M. S. A. N. N. E. S. You can also follow the fan dual podcast network at Fandall podcast once again Tom Vecchio with you for the next couple of days Thursday and Friday to get you into your weekend. I'll be back with you on Monday to recap What went down for this week in week zero of college football? Good luck to you with your bets We'll talk to you once again soon This has been covering the spread right here on the fan dual podcast network