 All right, hello everyone, how are you? Sunny day. My name is Urs Gasser, I'm the Executive Director of the Berkman Klein Center and I'm really delighted to be the host of the Berkman Klein Meet the Author series, that's the first edition of it. And you know the idea came, well I was sick actually last year and reading lots of books and then there were these books that you read with great benefit and insight and then you put them back into the bookshelf and then there are the books where you're like, you know what, I would love to meet the author and have a conversation and I'm really really delighted that our guest, special guest today, Farah Pandit, accepted the invitation after I read a draft manuscript of her book, it's really excellent, I will of course talk more about it. And just by way of brief introduction Farah Pandit is a esteemed colleague, a friend and collaborator wearing many different hats, having an amazing career as a public servant, as a thought leader, she currently has appointments as senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, at the Kennedy School, she served as a political appointee for the Bush administrations as well as the Obama administration, she was the first ever special representative to the Muslim communities appointed by Secretary Clinton, you have done, you have had an amazing career already and yet we are here talking about your latest contribution, your book How We Win, you can see the nicer copy standing here, you can also purchase the book outside. And Farah, thank you so much for accepting the invitation for this conversation, this is as close to a fireside chat as we get here at Harvard Law School, although there's actual fireplace downstairs, so I was tempted to switch locations, this is great. So when we scheduled this conversation, we had no idea that we would soon have another big tragic attack in New Zealand 10 days ago, and I thought just to start as we are talking about extremism and what to do about it and against it, I was wondering whether you would be willing to share what's on your mind 10 days after Christchurch. Well thank you so much and before I respond because that's a really important question, I do want to thank all of you for taking time during your lunch to have a conversation with us, but Urs, I also want to thank you so much, he sort of glossed over this and for those of you who have not yet read the book, you will see him in the book because he was an early colleague along with John Paul Frey who when I reached out and asked for assistance just said how can we help, this is such an important question, so we've been working together since 2007, I think even before that actually when I was at the White House, so I want to thank you for your incredible partnership and friendship all these years and it's a joy to be sitting with you talking about this book because we've been working on it together in some way shape or form as I have gone back and forth with you for many years, so thank you so much for having me. Yeah this is a very sobering moment, what's on my mind? It's another reminder of an opportunity where humanity can come together and it's demonstrated some extraordinary light when you see the response from the Prime Minister in New Zealand, what is capable if you choose to lead, how you can bring societies together, you see the very best in the very worst of times and I say it's sobering because it's so rare to see that and so what's on my mind today as I as I reflect 10 days out is with the devastation emotionally and spiritually and certainly the loss of life, I think to myself yet again why we are finding ourselves in a situation where we have to respond to these things when there are opportunities for us to do more even in our daily lives so I'm in a very serious moment as I reflect 10 days out. Thank you for sharing that and some of the themes you already introduced including the role of leadership and we haven't mentioned technology yet we'll return to that too of course are very much themes of your book that we want to talk about. So this book addresses the question of extremism, of ways how to counter especially violent extremism and it provided an incredible framework for me to better understand what's happening in the world so thank you for writing this book. We'll introduce some of the elements as we go forward. At the same time I also felt it's a very personal book. I've learned a lot about you that I didn't know before. Farah traveled more than 80 countries over the past decade or so. I've learned about your origin, about your growing up here as a Muslim woman in Massachusetts, about your experiences. Your mom was introduced to in one of the chapters since you like fool to have her here today as well. So I was wondering as this is some sort of also a very personal story. What motivated you to write down that story and what you have done varying these various hats and different positions in the government but also working with civil society institutions? As you know this is my first book. I think if anybody had told me that it was going to be the experience that it was I don't know if I would have been able to think through a three-year process the way I mean because it took a very long time for me to get out what I what was inside of me in a way that I thought people could understand. So there were two motivation motivating factors. The first was how extraordinary it was and how lucky I was to be able to serve a country that I care so much about for both Republicans and Democrats at a time when our country is being pulled apart on these red-blue issues when the issue that I've been looking at is doesn't have a color it is a human issue. So I wanted to be able to articulate to the reader that as somebody who was so privileged to be able to serve this country in the years after the devastating attacks of 9-11 I felt it was my responsibility to tell the story of what it is I saw inside of government what both President Bush and President Obama were thinking about through my eyes on how do we stop recruitment from happening. Could have told many other stories about the things that I saw in government but this wasn't a story that was covered very much and people tended to gloss over this the soft power piece of the of the story. So I felt listen I lived it I experienced it there is no other political appointee in our government ever who has all this knowledge has because I've seen it I've experienced it I had to be able to tell this in a way to open up the conversation in a new way because it was very faulty but then the other side was also really very important and serious my last day of government was on a Friday in 2014 and I left DC and over the weekend came to Cambridge where on Monday I started at the Institute of Politics as a spring fellow and in the context of this I tell you this because I was also lucky enough to be around colleagues where I was say you know I just come out I had served in government all of whom said tell us your story you know tell us what you saw like nobody wants to hear about me going here and there and everywhere I was thinking very very much the policy wonky kind of stuff like this is what was happening in the interagency this is but through my conversations with my colleagues at the at the Kennedy School more and more people and by the way including you because we had many conversations about how do you tell this story it was also you need to show a part of yourself and take the reader with you on this journey so they could see you and as I began to do that I recognized I'm a pretty private person when it comes to my own family I didn't I didn't want to expose the world to things that were that were extremely private to me but I thought there's no way I could get the kind of credibility and legitimacy from the reader if they didn't understand who I was so I did expose a little bit more about myself than I normally would and if I may ask an additional question in the same so in the book I was what stood out to me is you basically feature conversations and the voices of many thousands of people you've talked to during you know your the time and different jobs and different contents and to give to give voice to people I thought that that stood out and the other thing that stood out is really you call it nano intervention so we will talk just a few minutes about some of the big ecosystem level systemic issues that lead to this crisis that we started with and started to describe but there is also this several moments in the book there are human moments where where we as individuals can make a change and make the world a kinder a better place and frankly push back against extremism and I was wondering whether you could just share one or two stories how we as individuals can can be part of the solution and not part of the problem that's I think the most important part of the book because we tend to think about things like extremism it's scary I mean let's get real I mean it's a really scary topic terrorism is really frightening some of the people in this room may have lost people we're almost at the anniversary of the Boston bombing it's a very emotional thing that we that we deal with and often we want somebody else to handle that problem for us law enforcement or policy makers in Washington that can surely do something that's going to stop the problem but the thing that was extraordinary for me from 2003 when I came back into government all the way till when I left in 2014 repeatedly I would see that it was the intervention one-on-one that would change a person's mind about a particular issue whether it was race or religion whether it was sexuality or gender that individual conversation walking in somebody else's shoes we always hear about what we never talk about is this skill of listening of conversing that you can actually have a very different opinion than somebody else but there's a way in which you can talk about it with another person we used to have a world where you could have those conversations and and not feel threatened by them you are energized by them what I wanted to be able to do was to say to everyone that you know you you don't always have to win in your in your argument you can actually open up the human dimension of your of your experience and ask questions about why somebody does something what's the motivation behind that thing so for example when you hear and you see something terrible happening to another human being I mean I feel like this is the stuff you learn at your dining room table from your parents so forgive me for saying this because this is so obvious being kind and being compassionate to the person who may be going through something or maybe may not understand something fully has actually made a difference to people who have been at that breaking point where people they thought that they were on the outside so someone would say to somebody why don't you eat pork for example and instead of saying I can't believe you're not eating pork you know you're in this country eat pork you might want to say so tell me about your your why don't you eat pork and oh it's a religious thing and and the way in which you converse that change in tone that sounds so simplistic but that one on one kind of thing that that way in which you act as a human as opposed to acting as somebody who is a forceful entity that is pulling somebody down that compassion that you have I have gone to cities in America where Louisville Kentucky comes to mind where the mayor mayor Fisher made Louisville a city of compassion because he wanted to be able to say here in this city this is what we stand for we're gonna be kind and compassionate to each other and just even in our discourse you may not always agree but you can do it on a one to one level so at its core or is it's really debunking the us versus them ideology that is all around the ethos in which we live right now it's understanding what it must be for that other person and try to bring them and even if they are different even if you don't agree with everything that they're saying find a way to make it human again it's not only the some sort of kindness what you're describing is also a certain curiosity yes to explore a diverse world that is interesting and fascinating and very rich and celebrate the diversity as well so I mentioned it's a book and I really recommend it strongly of narratives of stories but you do more than storytelling you combine these voices that you've collected around the globe and you weave it together in also kind of an analytical framework that really helps me and the reader to understand how we fended up in a world where extremism dominates the headlines and what we can do about it and so in my own some sort of mind map that I drew there are like four roughly four components to the framework you fault line the one that I was eye-opening is this argument that especially young Muslim young people are growing up in a post 9-11 world and actually find themselves in a moment of an identity crisis and I would love to hear you expand on that a second factor of influence both to explain what is happening what are the dynamics when it comes to extremism but also how we can counter it is more the the strategic push by certain actors and frankly you know certain communities and countries even to spread extreme ideology and then the third some sort of cluster and I hope we can focus on that also a little bit given that we're at the Berkman Klein Center focuses on what you call Shaik Google the role of social media and technology but also in interesting way blending it into the consumer space what you describe as halalization of everyday practices again with a focus on young people and then lastly the fourth kind of cluster on my personal mind map reading your book of your framework is some sort of the rise of anti-Americanism and the anti-Americanism ideology I hope I do roughly justice I clearly read the book but if we can maybe spend a little bit more time talking about this notion of of a identity crisis both at the individual level but maybe also at the collective and cultural level among young people who then create some sort of a vacuum and may lead to to really terrible outcomes what I thought was very important was that we actually take a look at the kind of extremism that I was asked to deal with and so let me just take a step back to make sure that you are clear we're all on the same page here obviously there are many different types of extremism that is that are present in our world today the us versus them ideology is the commonality across these ideologies but the type of ideology that I was dealing with directly connects to terrorist organizations that use the name of Islam to prey upon young people to pull them into their armies okay I obviously am not making a statement about the religion of Islam I am talking about terrorist organizations that are manipulating religion for their nefarious ends I just want to be very clear about that I also want to be very clear about the fact that every young person all of us I sometimes still go through this myself ask the question who am I what am I what am I supposed to be doing here what's the meaning of life everybody goes through this you know and there's nothing peculiar about it you know it's not about your religion or your race or your heritage it's it's that's part of growing up the human mind is not mature the brain does not mature until the age of 24 there are lots of things that are happening to you along the way but when 9-11 happened something remarkably new came forward and that is a consciousness globally of this terrorist organization called Al Qaeda whose frame about us versus them was was built around America this is what we think you are this is what we believe that you are doing against Muslims and it was to say to young Muslims around the world we want to tell you what it means to really be a Muslim okay so they're doing those two forces are pushing out at the very same time that young kids are growing up with the word Islam or Muslim on the front pages of papers online and offline every single day since September 12th 2001 that is stunning and it's a huge change and when you think about that demographic there one fourth of the planet is Muslim 1.6 billion people 1 billion of those are young kids under the age of 30 young people under the age of 30 that's the demographic from which the bad guys are recruiting so the numbers are huge and it is not to say that every young person under the age of 30 who happens to be Muslim is a potential terrorist obviously not but the bad guys want them to believe that they are the arbiters of what it means to be Muslim and the only way that they can actually develop that if is if they understand that this is happening what's happening for these kids who have grown up post 9-11 who are trying to deal with this navigation of who am I they are seeing a fierce attention all the time on the fact that they're Muslim it is a post 9-11 phenomenon there's nowhere you can go where you can look away and pretend you're not Muslim you have a weird name you look a particular way you're experiencing your life with people that you had always known suddenly looking at you differently parents having to go to their schools to pick up their kids who's 11 year old child I had a conversation with a parent who's telling me that their teacher is asking their 11 year old kid in the class please explain what who some of in Laden is and why Muslims like him I mean are you kidding me so these kinds of things are happening all day every day to a generation that's huge and it's obviously global Muslims are all over the world and at the very same time that this is happening where there's fierce attention they're going through they're growing up at adolescents as young people they're asking really important questions about the difference between culture and religion they're having a hyper experience about sort of Muslim this the bad guys know that they're going through this and so what are they providing they're providing ready-made answers that make sense in pure friendly ways so that they're they have to build their armies that's what their job is they don't want to just sit around doing their thing they can't do what they do unless they have armies so you're going to go after vulnerable young people who are going through an identity crisis and they're delivering those messages online and offline in ways that we could never keep up with okay that's a different question about how do we solve it so I'll just stop there but that's the identity crisis they're having it the bad guys know that they're having it they're delivering answers to those bad guys through what I call shake Google okay because they're going to the thing that's the easiest manifestation of an answer so let me just make this clear to you you all remember the underwear bomber you guys remember that guy he was born in Nigeria he came from an affluent family he was studying in the UK he goes online and he asks shake Google why doesn't my family eat halal meat now those of you in this room know that halal is similar to kosher it's a very particular way you you kill an animal so you can eat the meat that way so he's not asking his mom and his dad he's not asking his cousins his sisters his brothers why in our family don't we allow me he's asking shake Google and what does she Google say your family's not religious come to me let me show you how to be religious you go through shake Google you end up on the other side talking to a bad guy so it is it's pretty it's pretty smart of the bad guys to be doing this they understand because they too are of the same pure generation they know what's happening I urge us all to think about this idea of all day every day seeing the word Islam on papers online and offline it's made a difference even for the strongest bravest most courageous humans it is hard it is hard to navigate that identity piece when all of this is happening around you so we have what's the system one of the pieces of the most essential form of the system is that one billion experience of young people under the age of 30 that was stunning to me because I used to think okay this is maybe only the kids in the first world or this is somebody you know it's happening in London and it might be happening in New York but surely it's not happening in Suriname surely it's not happening in Malaysia surely it's not happening in Tajikistan but guess what across the world that is the one data point Muslims in Muslim majority countries and Muslims that lived as minorities who were under the age of 30 all had that thing going for them so that's the essential part the mechanism the tools to deliver the messages of the bad guys what was actually existing our part of the system as well I talked about shake Google will talk more about technology but that exists so you're going to an alternative source for your own authenticity and your own belonging really important what was also happening through that is this this unbelievable fragility that was connected to identity so these young people wanted to live there like you know they wanted to show you that they were really Muslim whatever that might mean okay but so how does that happen it means that you're going to live Islam it would like a lifestyle brand that was also happening I observed that weird it was really weird to me that in cultures that were hundreds of years old that people who dressed a very particular way suddenly were changing the way they dressed and they were dressing in ways that were connected to their peers and other parts of the world because they all wanted to be Muslim whatever that meant and so I say in the book you know it's like the it's like forgive me for those people who have Fitbits on okay all some of you will really be athletic with your Fitbits some of you I know are wearing the Fitbit because you want to tell people that you're really athletic right so you kind of have this thing that you put on to say look at me look look at look at what I am and I was seeing that happen with with young Muslims that they were it wasn't about their religiosity it was about this idea that they had to sell to their peers look I'm doing it the right way so for example that I call this halalization and that's what you were talking about there was a guy that I met in New Zealand who was selling halal water now there is no such thing as halal water okay but people were buying it they were buying the halal water because they wanted to be able to show you like look look look at the water I'm drinking look at the scarf I'm wearing look at the shoes I've decided to buy look at the vacation I'm going on look at the everything is all about this world that I want to live in that is demonstrating a religion out loud so all of this is going on so then there's the lifestyle it's a lifestyle there are two other parts of the system that that we know are underlying I experienced underlying so across the world in a chapter that I call America the boogie man there is this sort of question that all of you read and heard and I'm going to pop the balloon for you because this is the wrong question to ask why do they hate us okay it really is the wrong question it's not about that but the forces of the bad guys are putting out there what what they say America is and so whatever it is we do no matter what we do they take what we do and they manipulate it in such a way that it comes out the other side in a really terrible way so I you know it is as silly as things like I remember being at the National Security Council and I mean I thought it was a joke I mean I just couldn't believe it so there was a tsunami in Indonesia a really horrible one and as if some of the tsunamis could ever be good but a really bad one and we were getting information that the bad guys were actually saying that we actually started the tsunami as if we had like sort of the weather switch in the White House I wish we did we don't we don't really we don't and but it's sort of anything that could happen America did it it's bad you know and that kind of it wasn't just about foreign policy it wasn't just about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan it wasn't just about how we felt about Isra Powell it wasn't it wasn't about the things that you would imagine it to be it was all the other stuff on the inside as well so that is another plank and then the final and for those of you who read foreign policy they just did an excerpt on Sunday yesterday from this chapter that I call plague from the Gulf and it the most essential thing outside of the identity crisis that I discovered in the work that I did in all of these countries was that there was a decade long decades long effort on on behalf of Saudi Arabia to indoctrinate their view of the world into countries all over the world to tell people how to be a particular kind of Muslim now it is very important that you understand that I take no position at all about how to live your religion out loud I don't care if you cover or don't cover I don't care what kind of Muslim you call yourself I don't care that's not my thing it's not that's not why I wrote this book simply telling you that for three to four decades Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars making sure that the world only understands that the only way to be Muslim is their way and the reason why that is problematic for the problem we're trying to solve is because their very strict interpretation not just of gender roles not just of what is right and what is wrong but the way in which you're supposed to interpret the Quran and interpret your daily life impacts and us versus them ideology because it is all about us versus them ideology so I would see for example Saudi Arabia these are things you guys read about in the press you know about textbooks that have been funded by Saudi Arabia to teach a very particular thing that are sent for free all over the world the US State Department has written about this and our human rights reports you guys have seen this you also know about the translations of Koran's that are translated in a very particular way to make sure that anything that has nuance is scrubbed and I go into a lot of detail in the book about this another method another tactic the Saudis have used is to put money into communities all over the world to pay people to address a very particular way and in addition to that they have enforced around the world a scrubbing like Hitler did a scrubbing of cultural history so that isn't just a Muslim thing that is a human thing we want as much historical data in our world as we can to remember who we are as humans where we came from they've gone into countries and decimated ancient sites and rebuilt them to be extremely either to eradicate them or to replace them with a Wahhabi interpretation of that mosque or that particular thing all of these things are part of the system that they've designed to be able to spread what they're doing so when I write about all these things in the book it's not one thing or the other the other it's how all of these forces build together to create the system that is underlying extremism and it's the situation we face today great summary and really helpful I think for everyone also for those who may not read all the 500 pages but what you're describing suggests the headlines we're reading today about extremism about the violence about the role of technology is actually that's a complex into play across these factors and it's been in the making for a long time arguably right and so it sounds very much like an ecosystem level problem you're describing there are you know the role of governments there are technology companies their identity individuals cultural religious identity questions at play so what happened that governments in Europe and in the US as you describe in the book haven't really identified the challenges I had 10 15 years ago I mean you you identified these trends and challenges but what happened that we didn't you know get ahead of these developments as they have been in the making for a while and it was not some sort of one incident here or there but really a system level combination of factors that came together in a perfect storm kind of way one of the things that government is hard-pressed to do is to imagine we don't like to imagine the worst we don't like to imagine there are parts of our government whose job it is to only imagine but the vast number of people within the interagency aren't sitting around going if I'm a bad guy what's the worst thing that I could do and then we build the system for that and we need to do that because they are doing it I mean you're reading one-offs on a son of bin Laden son Hamza who's 30 years old who is a peer-friendly actor for certain components of the people who will be lured in we should be we have we should have already imagined him on the planet and the things that he could be doing so one of the problems that we we face is this lack of imagination of what's what's the worst we didn't imagine that ISIS could exist you know one could see the beginning signs when we only look at the crisis we face by looking at the physical manifestations of war the ideological manifestations of war becomes something it's on the side government doesn't do soft power sort of ideology emotion stuff very well our soft power bucket is around diplomacy it's around sanctions it's around I mean sorry the coercion systems that happen at hard and soft power we look at them in a very particular way what what I would say to you is if you don't if you only look at a particular region of the world and think your understanding like for example suggest the Middle East or Afghanistan Pakistan and you say those are the two most serious things because we know we have terrorist groups over there and we're gonna look at them you forget everything else because that's not a quote priority what I saw in traveling a special representative is you had to connect what you were seeing in Guiana to what you were seeing in Canada to what you were seeing in Fazdukatsu what we were seeing you was start you have to start building that global map of the trends and this and the things that were happening within the system so you could see the entire problem and solve for that as opposed to the whack-a-mole kind of thing that we're doing we're doing a little bit over there and a little bit over there so we didn't we didn't connect the dots we had nobody in government we still do not have anybody in government who wakes up every day and does what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs does the chairman of the Joint Chiefs wakes up every day is responsible for the physical component of the defense of our country that person knows where every troop is where every drone is where every satellite is I mean we could go on and they know how to use it nobody in the Bush administration nobody in the Obama administration and nobody in the Trump administration wakes up every day and says what are all the tools and our soft power arsenal how many more do we need how do we deploy them how do we build the antibodies within our communities to make sure the bad guys can't recruit we in every national security strategy from 2006 until the one Trump just did talks about the ideological war let's remember that in 2006 President Bush said we have a battle of arms and we have a battle of ideas this battle of ideas has not received the kind of money or attention that it needs you can't stop recruitment if you don't have you can't deploy the countermeasures to make sure that the bad guys aren't getting ahead of you so that's why we are over here so before we switch towards some sort of the solution space your book title is how we win and throughout the chapters you have a you introduce lots of ideas and suggestions and actually a roadmap of what can be done to counter extremist violent extremism before we turn to that I wanted to open up for a few questions from the audience perhaps staying a little bit within the problem description that we introduced or maybe you know if you want to to learn more about some of the stories far already introduced so if anyone has comments as well of course not only questions yes please go over here and there's a mic sorry if and please introduce yourself briefly I was just gonna ask when you said you admired the approach of the prime minister of New Zealand and that's not about Islamic terrorism but it's about the us them mentality and in a way there's some reaction to Islamic terrorism in that man's behavior I mean we haven't seen his manifesto most of us but do you agree with what she's doing in terms of saying I'm not going to mention his name let's not talk about what he said let's look at the victims or do you think it's better to actually study and share all the information about him in order to solve work on solving this problem it's a really important question so let me talk about that in a and I'm getting I will get it to where you ask that question so I'm gonna sound like I'm not but I promise I'm coming back to you when I was in government one of the things that we like to do is to opine on lexicon and really think through how we're going to say something is this the right way of saying it we spend a lot of time and energy on these kinds of things we don't spend as much time nor did we on some things that sort of shot up along the way Geert Wilders is one example I can come up with a few others of horrible events that happen and we want we gave a lot of agency to those people one of the people and I'm not going to mention his name this story how this this is in the book so I'm telling you a story from the book but I think it is important when I was in Cambodia I was I went to go see a Muslim community outside of Phnom Penh we so we drove out into the jungle and I was I was there with my team embassy team I don't speak the local language I had a translator with me we were sitting on the floor of a very modest mosque in a very very modest small village and you know we're in the middle I mean there's jungle everywhere okay somebody raised his hand I called on that person the question that they asked and I'm not gonna name his name was does blank represent America the person that this person named by name it had been three years since the story had broken this is a pastor in Gainesville Florida who was going to burn a Quran you guys remember the story okay now you guys remember I used to ask people do you remember his name and most of the time people would not remember his name they remember the story and I used to give them his name but I'm not giving his name anymore for the same reason giving somebody agency around that kind of power allows that person to actually thrive in ways that we don't even know because it takes on a life of itself okay we gave him time on CNN and other channels to tell his story to do what he wanted to do we gave him we gave him a platform he had 50 people in his church he was not he did not represent America obviously but all these years later these people in Cambodia believed that he did represent America because he was a force we gave him a big platform I don't know what will happen years from now I don't know how the the far right extremists will manipulate facts we are unbelievable you know we're started this conversation by asking me how I feel and I told you I was reacting from this event but hate is hate and we're sitting here having conversations in America but which is the worst kind of hate is that the ones that come from the people in New Zealand or I mean whether it's Charleston or Christ Church whether it's Boston or Bali does it matter hate is hate and we have bad guys that are out there destroying our communities and killing people based on an us versus them and so for me I will not give agency to those people who want fame to be able to ignite more power because we have decided to keep telling that story over and over again with them front and center but you ask something so important it is important for us to learn from things like this and there will be hundreds and hundreds of researchers who will be looking at that guy who will be reading the manifesto who will be unpacking and dissecting and connecting the dots it doesn't mean that we need to see his name all day every day on TV and and on the internet because what that does for the bad guys who manipulate and we can get to that in terms of how the bad guys are actually doing what they do they are actually taking real life events and turning them to the way they want to do it so they will take a president prime minister using that person's name and shape the narrative to suit them even though that person did not mean it that way so I think it's wise of her to be as careful as she's being you knew I had to introduce yourself to Crissel global programs at MIT and I mentioned that because we're here at Harvard MIT you've talked somewhat about how individuals can address us but institutions and especially institutions of higher learning MIT's had a whole debate should we take money from Saudi Arabia I've got a meeting on Wednesday with some people from the UAE how do you approach engaging but not enabling it's really the most critical question universities and companies are actually facing we're we're looking at and really it's important to think about the subtitle on this book because I call out every sector of society to make a difference here not just government but I look at the private sector I look at philanthropists I look at social media because all these issues are intertwined it's it's it's how we solve a problem I think the question around money that comes from sources that are doing harm are are fair questions to ask but the next question becomes can you control the money what do you do with the money and how do you develop the antibodies in the system to prevent the thing that we we know we can prevent some of the time we can some of the time you can take money from from from philanthropists who who are are who've made their money in ways that were not always the most humanitarian right I mean I don't want to call out particular sectors but we could look at the energy or the oil sector and people have these questions about would you take money from big oil would you take money from big tech now is a question that's happening because we know what how they're manipulating human data to do what they're doing those are fair questions but Stu one of the things that I think is most important is sending a signal back to these countries if you're taking money from a nation state as Americans the things that we stand for in terms of freedom of speech human rights all of these kinds of things that are no there's no wiggle room whatsoever in terms of how we think about these things we've got to be clear I believe to these countries about how we expect them to behave on these issues and if they're taking money from those places how your school is going to use them and what you're going to do with them will say a lot about what your school stands for so that internal debate I'm not exactly answer because I can't tell you what to do and how to do it because it it really actually I've seen different solutions come to the table around around these issues some universities I know that have taken money from a Saudi or UAE or a Qatar but have absolute 100% opportunity to use that money the way they want to use it and there's a way to there's a way to be able to do that they've also offered an opportunity for their students to be able to learn why this is such a difficult conversation and so you have an educational component to that as well it's a very fair question it's a real question and I think it's going to become an even more pressing question not just from nation states but also from from companies who are who are redesigning the way it feels to be a human take one more question please George McCrae first to comment Diane de Prima the poet wrote a poem called rant and one of the lines is the only war that matters is the war against the imagination all other wars are subsumed in it what's the relationship between Saudi Arabia oil Wahhabism and terrorism that is a really long question and I and I there are many many scholars who have written about the interplay of all of those three things and have to your point about research done some very deep research around following the money I would urge you to look at FDD the foundation for defensive democracies who's done a lot of work and I'd urge you to look at David Weinberg at who is now at ADL the anti-defamation League who is in this in my book he's a friend I say that to you but he's also done incredible work and has testified before our Congress on these very issues so he's really that's a starting point for you to be able to look at that in a very loose answer I would say to you obviously you cannot do the kind of dramatic strategy that they have deployed over decades without the money to be able to do it and if you have an unlimited amount of money to be able to do this it's connected to how they earned that money one of the questions that I want as a former US government public servant to to be able to say to government is we have to be far more clear and direct with the American public about what we know we haven't done that and I think it is vital that we tell a different kind of story because I think American parents who have servicemen and women who are deployed around the world protecting our nation deserve to know more than they know today great powerful segue into the question you know of the roadmap what's ahead what can we do about it and you already made a few important points about the role of governments but also the role of philanthropy we touched up on that perhaps we can spend a few minutes and and look more closely at the role of technology companies in particular it's a topic we've talked a lot about in the past so as much as we understand these platforms do a lot of good in the world they enable and empower people to you know share information and and be connected across distance and are so vital in many ways to the way we live our lives today but also really bad things are happening and it's a moment of crisis of course one thing that I didn't say into introduction is that you predicted in the book that before too long it is very likely that we will witness life coverage over social media platforms of mass shootings and sadly you were right even as the book was still in print so what's the role of technology company specifically in all that what can we do how can we help each other to make progress so the platforms the major ones the Google's the Facebook's the Twitter's were obviously first to the fire when it came to us understanding how the bad guys could manipulate obviously today there are far more platforms that are being used by let's remember Millennials and Generation Z are the demographic we are talking about okay they are not being lured in online through ancient platforms they are ahead of everything that government could ever do okay they are right there they are using it platforms they're using their imagination to use platforms so it's not just about a meme it is not just about a petition particular hashtag it is about the entire way in which the bad guys are using communication to lure in emotionally and pull on the strings that I just described this is not news to the companies okay so I would first say to you that while the technology companies have in fact invested some money by partnering with NGOs to work on really very small but they have done it pilot programs to try to see what we could do in an online space and and technology companies to give them credit have also hired people to look at this issue to try to do more and to give them credit have said yes we have more of a role to play with all that great stuff that I just told you I mean what are they waiting for I mean truly I I will tell you that I am boggled by this thing Facebook is one of the largest countries in the world okay they have to live through that they have to understand what that means just the way any country thinks about how their citizens act why we do what we do and I'm not talking about uber regulating I'm talking about what you stand for what's the ethos of that thing okay now it took them a really long time not just Facebook but all the companies to say yes we can do more it's not that they didn't know the bad guys were using the platform it took them a really long time to say yes we have a role to play in doing that I took from a lot of pressure it took all kinds of things okay so now they're doing it the answer that you get from Facebook is what we have ten thousand people that are working on this one component takedown which by the way important and if you think that's the answer it's not but let's just pretend for just five seconds that that is going to do remarkable things immediately on mass takedown is something that we heard a lot about after the New Zealand thing so they're saying they have ten thousand people who are doing this are you kidding me it is one of the largest countries in the world ten thousand people that is nothing okay so one of the things that I get really frustrated by is don't tell me that you're doing something tell me the scale that you're doing it tell me how you're actually going to be able to offer a solution here with the kind of might and the kind of reach and the kind of innovation you have within your company that requires leadership and it requires commitment and I have not seen the kind of forward leaning let's think out of the box let's do something brand new let's shake this whole thing up so we don't have this problem from the current leaders in the big tech companies it just hasn't happened I look and I talk about somebody named Paul Poulson Paul Poulson excuse me in the book who's who was head of Unilever gigantic company how did he think differently to get the platforms of that company to do social good I think of your audience as millennials and Generation Z they are in fact demanding that companies do more they have a different sense of social good I think that the big tech companies are very late to the table I don't want us to be only looking at if they would only do this and only do that we'd have a problem we'd have a solution because as you rightly said the bad guys are innovating in real time in ways that we can catch up with the bad guys can see the beginnings of change we've got to imagine where we need to be and build for that as I've said before I just don't see that I just don't see that happening so the lack of leadership in that sense and call for more leadership to put it in positive terms it seems that the core is also some sort of recognition of power and what the power is that you know these platforms have the fact or whether they like it or not now they have it and I want to maybe circle back on this notion of power you you introduce a very powerful concept more looking at the public sector but I feel it may also translate into you know some of these discussions about the responsibility of big platforms and that's the notion of open power you already highlighted the idea of soft power and hard power in the conversation earlier on can you can you flesh out a little bit what what this notion of open power is about as a potential approach and mindset of organizing these different pieces that need to be part of a movement as we want to address this problem of extremism one of the walls that I hit when I was in government was I felt like we didn't have enough creativity and innovation in the way in which we were thinking about power and and let me be clear I was not at the Defense Department I was at the State Department so the the thing that we do at state is diplomacy it's soft power you know what hard power is you know what soft power is open power is a concept that I came up with which is really a derivative of soft power okay what it really says is rather than wielding power over someone your it open power is wielding power with others and what government has not been able to do is to be able to think differently about how we win how do we get to the goal we want to get to it requires us not to say we did this it's ours it's the American flag we we're all over it we've orchestrated is to say we have a problem and and I outline different different things that have to exist for the kind of problem that open power can solve but one of the things it is that you're putting different kinds of people around the table to be it's more design thinking for for human problems that we're dealing with in the in the world of the State Department so things like human trafficking things like climate change things like extremism where the only players there are not just diplomats there are people that you would want to bring I want to see historians I want to see ethnographers I want to see behavioral psych people I want to see anthropologists sitting around the table with diplomats talking about how you would think about that problem if you were going to so you're opening up the aperture you're thinking about things in real time you're not designing the solution for many years only and you know we're working our way through to that point you're figuring out that there is a longer framework you can use you can get some results immediately but you can also get some so as you work with these teams in real time this you're you're opening up what is possible and and for me that is the solution in the 21st century you can't just we can't just keep looking at these problems and say we've always done it this way and so those are the only silos we can go through those are the only mechanisms we know how to do you know the revolution here is to say our planet is so connected there are so much there's so many incredibly interesting ideas that can be applied across the board even though you use that for one particular kind of problem that you think that there's no way that could be used for for this but actually the lessons that you learn here can be deployed in a different kind of way so I was very keen on making sure that we were doing more to solve the problems that I was seeing I wish that state would be a place where we could experiment more boldly around how we use power people talk about new power and smart power and believe me when I when I came up with this the first person I went to was Jonah I obviously and asked him to help me think through this and and I feel very fortunate that he was very supportive and and really saw the need for us to be able to do this do this differently but it was at its at its heart in a networked world the way we are living today we have got to be able to think differently about how we get to the solutions that we really need for for human reasons more than anything else not about which country is going to win this or not we have to do something together thank you for the book is full of wonderful ideas concrete suggestions a lot of data a roadmap innovative new ways how we can go after the the issue but I have to ask you is somewhere in the book I think you wrote that you're an optimist and after writing this book and spending so much energy over many years working on this hard depressing complex problem where we haven't seen much progress in the right direction are you truly still an optimist and what if so makes you optimistic I am an optimist and I'm an optimist because I've had tens of thousands of conversations with Muslim youth all over the world who are incredible who don't want this ideology in their communities they don't want foreign ideologies changing the way they behave and how they live they're all kinds of incredible ideas literally from from Mali to Malaysia I mean these kids are incredible and I I know that just the beginnings we're just at the beginning of what could be possible if we knit together the networks of these young people to actually be able to scale their ideas we will have to do very little this isn't costing money this is not a trillion we've spent almost a six trillion dollars since 9-11 okay do you know how much money we've spent since the beginning of ISIS in soft power 0.0138 percent of the cost of what we've done to fight ISIS soft power doesn't cost the kind of money it it requires us to be imaginative it requires us to say how do I take that incredible idea that's over there scale it or how do I get that young person to know that other young person and connect them I am not Pollyanna but I am somebody who has seen with with little resources what dedicated effort can do I'm optimistic because the solutions are available and they are affordable and what I hope will happen is as people read this book and hear me challenge communities to say do you want to live in a place that's filled with hate or do you want to figure out what you can do in your house in your school in your city in your town to actually make it a different place what are the touch points in day-to-day life you can change to make sure that hate is not thriving there are stuff that you can be doing here I am optimistic I believe in the human spirit and I believe most essentially I mean Stu said it here we are we're so privileged to be sitting here at Harvard in and and even more privileged to be in the Boston area with so many extraordinary schools filled with students from all over the world who all have experienced extremism why isn't Boston the hub of innovation around fighting hate I don't understand and I've called on this I said this in a Boston Globe op-ed I called it Dumbledore's Army that's a whole nother question but but but the point is I need to see the kind of leadership from people who can help build the powerful ideas that's the that is the roadblock but the ideas are there so I that's why I'm optimistic yes wonderful Farah thank you for writing an important book thank you so much for many years of hard work on a very important topic close to my heart and thank you for a great conversation for meeting with us and taking the time to share your thoughts thank you thank you