 You know real quick and make sure that he didn't let's see how Little privacy there it is. Okay. There we go. Thanks. Now you're off the nope just award wallet something Hey there Thank you, thank you. Yeah, you know, so I'm writing a book now about cases where the UN or some other external actor picks up Functions that were usually Central Thinking thinking a fair amount There's some intersection between some of the Ideas about national identity It's the the cases I'm looking at I've drawn the boundary around Around the study by looking at cases where there's some sort of government request and or Consent to This Well, it's rare in the economic arena even despite the interest in getting debt relief or getting access Doesn't happen often in the economic arena to mostly The external actors But it's Or incumbent officials Other areas but not when it comes to Welcome everybody I'm John short here. I'm the director of the International Policy Center here at the Ford School and We are delighted to welcome back to Ford Scott Atron Scott is the research director in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in France where he has a tenured appointment at the Equal normals superior. He's also a founding fellow of the Center for Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford He has he's a research director of artists international as you see on the opening slide here He's got appointments also at UM's Department of Psychology and the Institute for Social Research and last but certainly not least He was recently reappointed as an adjunct research professor at the Ford School We've certainly benefited greatly over the years from engagement with Scott in particular his work that he's done with Bob Axelrod One recent example of which you can find in science magazine on challenges in researching terrorism in the field Scots are globally recognized expert On how scientists and ordinary people reason about nature on the psychology of religion and on the limits of rational choice Explanations for political and cultural conflict He really embodies the link between the Academy and the policy arena that we try to foster here at the Ford School and IPC Scott briefs officials in the US and in European governments in NATO in the United Nations and a number of other entities nationally and internationally on issues ranging from pathways to violent extremism To conflict in the Middle East and beyond He was in fact the first anthropologist I learned recently to address a full ministerial meeting of the UN Security Council a few years ago to shed light on the relationship between youth peace and Security that's just one of many examples. He contributes often to the New York Times and foreign policy magazine He's also been featured in in the New York Times magazine in the Chronicle of Higher Education Nature and other prominent publications His numerous scholarly books include and I'll name just a few to give you a sense of the breadth of his work Cognitive foundations of natural history toward an anthropology of science by Cambridge University Press in God's we trust the evolutionary landscape of religion by Oxford The native mind and the cultural construction of nature by MIT Press with Doug Medin and talking to the enemy Violent extremism sacred values and what it means to be human by penguin press and that latter book is Related of course to the topic of today's address so rather than have me talk further about The wealth of insights that Scott can bring to you. I'll allow him to do that for himself So thank you for coming back to the Fort School Scott. It's great to have you. Thanks John Well, thank you very much, and I'm happy to be back at the Ford School after so long Mostly based in Europe these days, but it's always nice to be back here in Ann Arbor Visit some old friends Talk to some new ones What I wanted to discuss today is Research on the front lines with the Islamic States in Iraq, but to speak to a larger larger question First raised by Obama in September 2014 The the biggest mistake he said that the United States has made in the Middle East recently was to underestimate The willingness to fight of the Islamic State and to overestimate The willingness to fight of the Iraqi army and that he and James Clapper as national intelligence director said Is due to the fact that willingness to fight is an imponderable so the purpose of this research Was to try to find out whether indeed willingness to fight is ponderable or imponderable and And as you'll see, I think it's eminently ponderable and we've come up with I think new ways and experiments to probe that and it speaks to larger questions in Political sociology and science and in psychology and in human history About what motivates civilizations willingness to fight and die for them and what accounts for their survival or their end So the research question is a more general question How comes it that humans make their greatest exertions including killing and dying not for their own gain lies or family? But for an idea a transcendent moral conception they have of who I am and who we are And this is the privilege of absurdity to which no creature, but man is subjects at Hobbes and Leviathan So our multidisciplinary and multinational team of academics policymakers former military Playwrights and poets as well Explores why people refuse political compromise Go to war a temp revolution or resort to terrorism focusing on what Darwin called Those virtues and values highly esteemed and even sacred That give immense advantage to any group inspired by devoted individuals willing to sacrifice for them Here's an example of our handsome devil in the middle is me Of our recent work on the front lines. This was the first battle For the retaking of Mosul first sort of practice battle. It was a battle called Kudila. It was a very interesting battle There were five to six hundred Peshmerga Kurdish Peshmerga forces a Iraqi army Arab Sunni militia arrayed against about 90 Islamic State fighters in this particular village 52 of them died There were a score of suicide bombers called in Ramassi These are specially trained to pierce enemy lines and in fact the retreat of the last 15 were covered by seven suicide bombers so this is an example of commitment and it was such that when the the purpose of this battle was to give the lands the villages back to the Arab Sunni militia from the same tribes they had been taken from and although the forces overwhelming forces were able eventually to kick out the Islamic State after what many describe as the fiercest battle in their lives when they left the Sunni militia the task of Taking keeping hold of their villages the Sunni militia asked her where you're gonna stay with us Of course, and they said no we can't and although the Sunni militia outnumbered by two to one the Islamic State They decided to withdraw the next day and of course Isis came back in This I think is a Parable for the entire situation in the Middle East today. I I view the Islamic State more as a symptom of some structural dynamics in the Islamic State that haven't changed a whit since the The attempt to displace them and I see that although the Islamic State will probably destroy it in Raqqa and Mosul and their territorial base Destroy it. I think that's something as bad or worse will probably succeed them. Anyway, that's my opinion We can talk about that later. So how do we proceed we interview political and military leaders fighters and militants Supporters and would-be volunteers to generate hypotheses then we do lab experiments even with students To test their plausibility and then we do structured interviews and experiments with leaders militants and supporters again And then experimentally design mass surveys to test potential pathways to and from violence so our studies of Political and cultural conflicts Suggest that unconditional cooperation and intractable conflict are best understood within a devoted actor versus a rational actor framework Which merges two research paradigms one on sacred values. Those are values whether religious or secular as when land or law become holy or hallowed and Identity fusion which gives a sense of visceral sense of oneness and invincibility To any group in which an individual is fused And here's how we test identity fusion. It's a very simple test. We tested out on ten-year-olds before we tested out on other people We just give pairs of circles and we can do this dynamically on the iPad or with paper and pencil And we ask people to pick which best represents their relationship to the group and those who pick the last one You think and behave differently From those who pick any other pair of circles You look at the histograms. They're actually stunning and this is no matter what culture or group we happen to be Working a group working. This is going by itself The Islamic State is really a classic revolution. I don't like the word terrorism. I don't think it tells us much about anything at all In the sense that the French Revolution was or the German Nazi Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution And I think that the criteria we found that described the Islamic State Revolution and its willingness to sacrifice Is very similar to these other ones now in terms of sacred values much more is known about economic decision-making Then morally motivated decision-making value-driven decision-making Especially but here are some features of sacred values. I think we should consider now I have nothing like a prospect theory of sacred values. I wish I did just some empirical findings of interest first there Immune to material trade-offs most of us Many at least in the world wouldn't sacrifice Their children or their country or their religion for all the money in China Of course in standard economic and political theory most things are fungible fact probably everything is fungible in some sense or another But here we have an almost asymptotic a relationship to the values themselves They're insensitive to temporal and space spatial discounting again in economic and political theory Those things that are close to you in space and time are usually more valuable than those things that are further away But with things that are sacred the opposite is often true those things in the distant past or this in future Maybe much more valuable than things in the hero now think of the exodus from Egypt or the second coming or even places like Gettysburg That imbue one with the sense of who I am and who we are They they blind people to exit strategies no matter how reasonable or rewarding people react to attempts to buy them off or to Use material incentives or incentives or disincentives carrots and sticks As insults that only inspire increased anger opposition to to any kind of political compromise and violence And they generate actions independent of prospects of success because they're the right thing to do Whatever the consequences the risks and rewards and as we'll see they have distinct brain signatures so we Consider abortion rights or gun rights in America consider Russia's relationship to the Crimea as opposed to the Ukraine or China's relationship to Taiwan or the Palestinian right of return We do surveys with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey research that show only between six and eight percent of refugees Palestinian refugees would actually choose to go back to their homes in Israel present-day Israel if they had a chance But well over 80 percent of Palestinians wouldn't reject the right of return And in fact the more we offer or the more material incentives are offers to Palestinians to give up the right of return in exchange for a peace for example along the 1967 borders the more they're inclined to support things like suicide terrorism and continued struggle against Israel and if you want I can talk about the actual experiments We did the one of the one we did with leaders in science magazine and the other with mass surveys of thousands of people both in Israel and in Palestine In the proceedings of the National Academy Brain scans this is very interesting. Why do we do brain scans? Well, sometimes you do brain scans because you discover fascinating and novel things for instance one of our collaborators Molly Crockett found that brain centers associated with revenge and joy are actually the same and that has very intriguing implications For understanding what's going on in terms of political conflict and what we're we were very interested in finding out in terms of Our brain stands of this of supporters of Al Qaeda Philly at Lashkar Taibit in terms of willingness to fight and die For sacred values was that those areas of the brain associated with deliberative reasoning Were inhibited in favor of rapid duty-bound responses So utilitarian reasoning wasn't much involved at all and why do you want to do brain scans? Well, my interest is is not necessarily discovery although serendipitously. We should discover something like Molly did that would be fantastic But it's rather to show that the behavioral results we have isn't simply the result of posturing And I think that that that that that's enough also the fact that this is the first time anybody's done anything with any radical group At all in terms of brain scanning is interesting Now we find that three critical factors are involved in willingness to fight and die and that have been neglected in sort of standard views of what motivates fighting spirit now in military history sociology and psychology Fighting spirit, especially in the studies involving the Brits and the Americans since World War two focus on camaraderie and and and buddies people sacrifice for their buddies There's nothing in terms of ideology or very little in terms of ideology except in terms of opportunity costs and trends and transaction costs ways to summarize Effective strategies to make them more militarily effective But nothing in terms of just the basic transcendental value of the cause itself And the spiritual dimension that I'm talking about again doesn't necessarily mean Religious it can just as much mean secular and it involves three critical factors first willingness to Commit to sacred values and the group's actors are fused with the devoted actor Remember requires both sacred values and fusion with a particular group. These are independent variables Each independently can predict willingness to fight. They happen to be practically uncorrelated But when they interact together we find they maximize willingness to fight and die and to do other things like torture and this is good for Militant groups and radical and revolutionary groups for good or for bad probably also true of people working in the human rights and civil rights movement or in the Environmental movement who are committed to their cause The second factor is readiness to forsake family for values now. That's a very interesting notion most of us And most people assume that the devotion to your genetic family and for evolutionary reasons is the most important attachment you have In life but if you look at human history of the creation myths for political systems and religious systems usually focus on willingness to sacrifice your Family for some greater cause think of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac the greatest cultural hero in history He's not considered a child a molester or a murderer But he's considered a devoted actor for some great cause or the very word Islam Which means submission and it refers to submission of family and tribe for the greater good in this sense God's message and the last one is perceived spiritual strength of in group versus out group now This is something very interesting We wanted to see using evolutionary theory How people perceive themselves on the front lines in mortal combat and how they perceive their enemies now evolutionary theory lends some support to the idea that Those who are willing to fight to puff themselves up and to fight to the death even if they're small creatures We'll usually succeed in warning off the big creature who will then go and see Ah, this guy's puffed up and willing this to fight and die and he's that bigger creature is going to go eat Creature that's not as crazy as this one because it's easier Right, so we we we developed the measure in which bodies got bigger and bigger and more muscular and muscular And we asked people to perceive their own physical strength and that of their enemy and to see to what extent Their perceptions of their own physical strength and that of their enemy predict costly sacrifices Oh go to that and What we found was that the pkk Fighters who are the only ones who stood the line against ISIS in the initial onslaught in the summer of 2014 and who saved the Yazidis together with their the ypg in Syria and the Islamic State fighters we talked to threw away the cards physical strength both of them spontaneously and told us this is not what's important What's important to us is their spiritual strength Ruhi Both Arabic and Kurdish and this was the thing that motivated them and this was surprising for us and then we went back to the lab and we developed dynamic measures which I'll talk about that and in fact Spiritual strength was the thing that best predicted costly sacrifices and perceptions of physical strength were unrelated to performance on the battlefield So let me go through a bit of the data itself. This was This is to show that the interaction of sacred values infusion for the devoted actor predicts Expressed willingness to make costly sacrifices including fighting and dying So we took two neighborhoods which we had done I had done a lot of field work in with my teams One was Tetouan, especially the neighborhood of the Jamama's walk This is where the those who five of the seven guys who were responsible for the Madrid train bombings in 2004 Which was the first terrorist event that actually caused the regime change in a democratically elected country occurred and which had sent Scores of suicide bombers to Iraq during the Initial stages of the Iraq war and we're sending continuing to send many many volunteers to Iraq To join the Islamic State and Syria The second was the city Moomin in Casablanca that had been responsible for most of the terrorist attacks in Morocco In the first decade of this century and so we went into these two neighborhoods and this just shows How those neighborhoods differ from the towns themselves each one have a million post in terms of their support for The Khalifat's notion of Sharia strict Sharia and militant she had so these were two radical neighborhoods to begin with and Again, what we found was that the interaction of sacred values and fusion increases I mean maximizes willingness to make costly sacrifices. This is from proceedings of the National Academy back in 2014 but although we found that fusion and Sacred values this combination Maximizes willingness to fight we wanted to find out which one when push comes to shove may actually be more important Is it as the military literature suggests? Fusion with the group that is most important or do values really matter which the military literature Tends to downplay. There are only a couple of studies in which ideology in a sense has a role One is John dollars classic study of the Lincoln Brigade During the Spanish Civil War in which he found out that the volunteers were mostly motivated by their values their belief in an international brotherhood and Others come from sort of anecdotal evidence, but systematically Evaluated in terms of the Willingness to take casualties among certain units of the northern and southern armies in the American Civil War those that tended to be Highly religiously motivated and highly ideologically motivated. We're able to take casualties more than those who were not In standard military theory when a group is Destroyed to the tune of about 30% it goes to entropy and the fact that's the way the Israelis fought the sixth day war They would see if a unit went to about 30% destruction and without looking further They would go on to the next unit. Well, we find with devoted actors that the ability to resist casualties is sometimes Twofold compared to what's normally expected and we also found it among certain units of the German army Especially the Waffen SS those who grew up together in the Hitler youth and who truly believed in their thoroughly rotten cause What believed they did and the German soldiers were by far the best soldiers in World War two certainly far Outfighting taking casualties far in excess of what the Russians the Americans and the Brits were able to take So what we did here was develop a measure with front-line combatants where they're forced to choose between Their value and who they are so it actually overlaps We show these groups over lacking as a devoted actor and then we show them dynamically separating out and then we ask them to choose On the iPad for example, which way they'll go and it's interesting those on the front line overwhelmingly choose their values and It's a tragic choice when we ask people sometimes they break down crying and Tell us for example Kurdish fighters telling us that they had to abandon their families just a few kilometers away Because they knew that the fight for codaity as they called it for being occurred But their survival of Kurdishness was at stake and they were willing to sacrifice their families for it Of course the Islamic State fighters would say the same thing if our parents opposed it we'd have them executed This just goes to show To what extent people are willing to sacrifice family and other groups and here We find that among the fighters on the front line P. K. K. Wasn't involved in this particular battle It was the Kurdish Peshmerga willing to fight and sacrifice more and we show that And sacrifice kin excuse me And we also show this in terms of the number of casualties They have the number of times they're wounded and the degree of wounded one of the interesting thing about doing research on the front lines and in combat is that the the great difficulty in social science between the great gap between willingness Expressions of willingness to do something and actual actions disappear and of course for policy makers It's much more important to know what actually happens than what people say will happen This just is how we do these studies. This is an example of the Those bodies different body size. I showed you with the Islamic State fighter and on the right is the Dynamic measure we did on the iPad. It's the same measure We find that they're completely redundant that is there's no different in the results whether you use one measure Or the other here is sort of the overall judgment for all fighters on the front line We did this for all the participants including the Russians the Americans the French the PKK the Iranians I just thought this one would be interesting for most people in this country almost uniformly all the combatants view the United States as in terms of physical strength as maximal and in terms of Spiritual strength is middling and viewed whoops and view the Islamic State as weak Physically in fact, that's true the Belgian army could defeat it tomorrow. It was just a matter of ordinance but spiritually very strong and What we find among Western youth in France and in Spain for example is that They view themselves as spiritually fairly weak and not only that the more they view themselves as Spiritually weak and their enemy as spiritually strong naming the Islamic State the less likely there are support they are to support armed intervention and Willingness to make sacrifices and this is the overwhelming majority of youth we test in these countries We show a spike just after the Paris and Brussels attacks But within three weeks this goes down to what it was before and this I think is the most important finding actually and I'll tell you why later This for those who are interested in actually what recruitment is like Al-Qaeda was much more like the National Science Foundation Or the NIH it would accept a bunch of proposals it would fund 15 to 20 percent of those applied it never had really any recruiters But in any sense ISIS is much more hands-on. They do have recruiters. It's much more. They're much more important But you would be surprised that the social media and the role of Direct recruitment is not Entirely the name of the game in fact only one out of five who actually joined the Islamic State do throw through social media Not only that if you look at the recruitment patterns, they're extremely clustered in particular neighborhoods and towns It was just a manner of direct recruitment of social media. She a very dispersed Recruitment powder, but again, it's highly clustered. It depends basically on who your friends are The best predictor for who joins the Islamic State is who your friends are and your fellow travelers are in the neighborhoods We find surprisingly surprising numbers of whole soccer teams and neighborhoods go to join the Islamic State, so it's the spire social networks That are important the pre-existing groups three out of every four who join these groups do it with their friends and fellow travelers Now here's an example of our analysis. This is just a rough. This is just a very cursory Representation of our analysis of the Paris and Brussels attacks. We've been doing this for a couple of years We found over 300 people involved in these networks. If you look at the attacks back in 2014 They were very highly dispersed and unsuccessful because they didn't operate on the basis of prior pre-existing social networks Over time what happened was people would go to Syria They become devoted actors. In fact, they'd be vetted by the Leaders the emir's of the Islamic State and then be sent back by the emny Which is the external operations command of the Islamic State back into Europe and there? They would recruit their friends and families who had been left behind and what we find is vast networks Where most of the people don't even know they're involved in the network But they are from the same neighborhoods and families and the more that they were relying on these networks Which are not directly involved in criminal activity Which just happened to be friends and families of those who were the more successful the attacks were and now what we're finding is that? Women are the key connectors They have the highest between this factors the most connectedness in these networks and they're almost entirely below the criminal radar So the success or not of these attacks depends mostly On women who are not even being tracked by police forces So as I said the jihadi movement is a classical Classical revolution and it follows fairly well the classical revolutionary term trajectory It begins with a set of fairly well educated and well off elites And this has been true since the anarchist movement today. In fact, we find that all of these Insurgent and revolutionary movements Yet led by elites the plurality of leaders usually have training in the sciences and usually a very Operational technical training in medicine and engineering And the reasons is probably I mean this is just speculation on my part Although urban planners for some reason happen to be over represented lately Especially in England is that they have hands-on knowledge of how to actually accomplish things and also can show delayed gratification Of their goals. I mean medical school takes a long time, right? And so does and so does engineering Then it became a mass movement and although there was an overall reduction in Level of education in SES many more elements of society have been drawn in and it varies Inordinately across the world there are a hundred group a hundred nations that contribute to the Islamic State or did until recently And they come from every walk of life. There are concentrations in particular socio-economic groups in different countries, for example, we find over representation in the petty criminal world in France. Why? For two reasons first a general reason why we find more petty criminals involved in jihadi activity The United States has been very successful in stopping Monitors large-scale monetary transfers from institutional groups and charities So these groups have to look for money and logistics where they can find it and where they can find it is in the petty Criminal world now in places like France 78 percent of the population is Muslim 60 to 70 percent of the people in jail are young Muslim men Just like black population in South Chicago. You have an endemic disadvantaged group and In this society, it's very easy for the Islamic State to recruit it doesn't work in the United States for reasons I can talk about but it does work in France They basically come in and say look you don't want to be criminals and most are Penny criminals who do it for opportunity costs and they really aren't Pathological or hard-car criminals in any sense the Islamic says that this is what society has forced upon you Why don't you use the skills that they've forced upon you and turn it against your oppressors? Free yourselves free your brethren free the world and it's an amazingly powerful message when you talk to these people And we find they're overrepresented for example in the ranks of suicide bombers those who have education of course are less Represented for the very simple reason that the Islamic State requires that each educated person with a college degree Must pass on their knowledge to at least five people before they're allowed to become a suicide bomber before they're allowed To become a martyr and it's the same thing for Nusrah. Well, what was called Nusrah? El Qaeda, but now it's engaged in state building and this is very different than what was the case for El Qaeda El Qaeda and the Islamic State have very different views of Of the way the world is Bin Laden always opposed the idea of a caliphate because he thought that as long as the United States held held Jomodi in the world And that's a changing factors. Well today It would delegitimize any attempt to build an Islamic State caliphate because it could be defeated militarily Whereas Zarkawi who was the father of the Islamic State back in 2006 when it was just restricted to the Levant Felt that we have to destroy the world to save the world and bringing in the United States and everybody else into this apocalyptic event Would force the coming of the caliphate But now it's engaged in state building and that requires women and for the first time We're seeing massive involvement of women in the jihad in fact one out of every three who joined the Islamic State from Western Europe countries like France are women because they need them and women tend to be younger and yet From higher higher socioeconomic status than the young men who joined in places like England We find much more representatives in the university Then in the criminal population although we do find as well in the criminal. Why the universities well because young men young Muslims in England Come to the universities and they're exposed to what American students are exposed to binge drinking and Free sex and this bothers a lot of people and so they're invited to cultural mixers Where they where it's where they're told why don't you mix with people who think like you who believe like you? and Slowly they're vetted for their willingness to blame these Excessive behaviors on a crisis a moral crisis within their host countries that is the lack of moral principles and Metaphysical principles and some of them a small minority are then drawn off to join the Islamic State now people talk about the Islamic State as nihilistic brainwashed cruel Well as far as nihilism is concerned the opposite is the case they argue that The reason they're doing what they're doing at least those who join it the foreign volunteers is because Western societies are nihilistic they have destroyed all metaphysical and moral principles that mean anything and Interestingly we find that the women who join the Islamic State tell us almost to a person One of the reasons they join other than the fact that they can't speak Arabic to their parents who are from from Arab countries and yet they're looked upon by suspicion by their host societies in places like France is Because they want women to be women and men to be men and you'd be surprised How many people who join these groups whether on the left or the right? Believe that to be the case and they wholly reject or multicultural society as destroying the moral norms of society And this is a very important message both by the Islamic State and the xenophobic Narrow nationalist right which is working in tandem To sort of undermine the European middle class Brainwashing is a fiction of the Korean War when about a hundred Brits and Americans decided not to come back to Britain in America, and so a book was written the Manchurian candidate in which these Chinese social engineering wizards use Pavlovian techniques to wash the brains of these Brits and Americans to kill one another And to kill their political leaders, but that's all basically hogwash But it's what parents especially invoke when they don't want to take responsibility or can't understand why their kids Have gone off to join the Islamic State most parents don't know That their kids are doing this thing in fact the idea of a clash of civilizations is I think Entirely wrong the opposite is the case There is a crash of territorial cultures where vertical because of globalization the creative destruction of globalization Where the vertical links between the older generation the younger generation between parents and their children have been sundered and Peers young people are looking up to connect peer-to-peer horizontally across the world And they're doing so through social media and through other means in a very very very narrow bandwidth And people say it's cruel now it is cruel Okay, but if you look at the Twitter feeds for example of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda You find about three percent are concerned with punishment 57% for example in the Yemen and the Marjah are concerned with social development projects for youth 57% 18% of the Twitter feeds arc and Instagram and Facebook are concerned with Religion but in a broad sense why do we have the markets? Why do we have the courts function this way of? again of which only three percent concerns Punishment now in our Representation of the Islamic State of course we turn that completely on its head almost all our representation of the Islamic State and This groups is barbarous and cruel which indeed it is, but that's not all what it's about. It's a very joyous and festive movement very much like the Nazi movement was at its very beginning people say well Providing economic incentives is going to especially in for these petty criminals who join for opportunity costs is going to get rid of the Problem or help get rid of the problem. Well, the World Bank has a report in fact They didn't publish it for three years, but now they have an initial publication of it Which shows that there's no relation whatsoever between job production and reduction of violence And if you think about it the Islamic State is telling their young people come here to be sleep Deprized to die come here for danger and glory and Jobs offering jobs isn't going to do it or they say the the solution is to be moderate and To take on moderate religion and how anybody who has teenage children or probably you at your stage in life The idea of being moderate is a crazy idea people want to be Powerful in terms of their ideas glorious. They want to do great things and that's what the Islamic State Appeals to as a former Imam. This is an interesting interview. We had on the Syrian border It was with an Imam who was a recruiter for the Islamic State left the Islamic State to join al-Qaeda because he felt that the Islamic State was killing foreigners indiscriminately and it was Islam owed respect to their guests including foreigners and Besides Zawahiri should be the caliph and not Baghdadi for historical reasons and his It's very interesting because al-Qaeda was reaching out at the time. They had been excommunicated by the Islamic State and They were reaching out to people like us Telling us that look we were really never interested in attacking the West to attack the West It was just you keep out of our hair and we'll keep out of yours Which is baloney, but that was the message They were giving out at the time because they were under great threat from the Islamic State and trying to make alliances of all kinds And we're we're making alliances in Syria at the time But he said the young who came to us were not to be lectured out like witless children They're from Olo's for the most part understanding and compassionate, but misguided We have to give them a better message But a positive one to compete otherwise they will be lost to Daesh This is just a general summary of what we found for every terrorist attack Initiated in the West It almost in every event in every case what we found is there's a counter-cultural movement a protest scene Like many of us experienced in the 1960s But this is the result of the structural dynamics of globalization at the current historical juncture Well, most people just talk Most people don't do anything. They don't plant bombs. I mean in my day we had SDS, but very few went on to become weathermen Who actually made bombs and then someone For some reason usually because they actually went to fight somewhere in places like Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan come back often occurs in Friday services If it happens to be a religious community and say all you do is talk blah blah blah blah blah No one's doing anything. We've got to do something people are dying. So let's act At that moment, they're usually expelled from the mosque. That's when Usually intelligence authorities in these countries in Muslim majority countries pick up on who these guys are and can usually stop Them for example in Morocco, you have about 2,500 who's made it to the Islamic State You have all you have nine to 12,000 have been stopped by the authorities because they figured out who's likely to go Many of them being expelled from the mosque after these types of of things and then they go into a parallel universe They usually get an apartment together And they start talking one another and show each other videos and inviting people to sleep on their mattresses I mean when we first did this with the 9-11 bombers in Hamburg We found that they all went to the same sort of general University They went to the same two mosques El Nour and El Kuts Mosque and they psyched themselves up They get an apartment together the neighbors told us the place stank because nobody went out for months except to take out The garbage occasionally people would come in they'd show each other videos and then they came out of their cocoon wanting to Do something but they didn't know what to do first They wanted to go to Bosnia, but the Bosnians they contacted said you know how to fight They said no, so bring us some goggles night goggles Which were just coming on to the market after the collapse of the Soviet Union and then they wanted to go to Chechnya But actually they were told that the Russians aren't allowing anybody into Chechnya at the particular moment So that was the end of that plan and then they met somebody on the train actually people think Mohammed Atta Was the was the leader of the group? It wasn't it was a guy named Ramsey bin al-Shibu was a real back slapping a guy But he couldn't get a visa to get back into the United States So they gave it to Atta who happened to be the oldest member of the group remaining anyway They got into Afghanistan not sure exactly what to do They hooked up with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who said who by the way had just applied for an al-Qaeda grant And had been accepted in the split vote He had a previous plot that had failed and he said hey boss look what I got I got these guys From Europe who want to do something great. That's usually the way the plots occur And of course publicity especially in our society is the oxygen in which all this occurs I mean ever since 9 11 the average number of Americans been killed in terrorist attacks has been nine Much less than those killed by lawnmower or falling into the bathtub falling in their bathtub But of course it's not a question of statistics. It's a question of perspective and for all sorts of political reasons and media reasons This has been blown into an amazing thing which is responsible, of course in part for the current political situation We were in Okay, so how do you combat this? Well the general approach is Counter-narratives. This is the idea almost that there's something out there called ideology Which is divorced from the real lives and social networks of people and that we're gonna come up with some counter Ideology equally divorced from the real lives and networks of people and this is going to parry The ideology that's brainwashing everybody well, I Think this is a disastrous approach and it's led to nothing I mean if you look at our at our success against these groups the 9-11 cost between 400 and 500 thousand dollars and a conservative estimate of the money We've spent in the war on terror by brown war costs Brown University's war cost project is between four and five trillion dollars That's a ten million to one advantage for the bad guys and things aren't getting any better So our strategy isn't working very well and one of the reasons I think our strategy isn't working well is because we come up with these crazy notions like counter-narratives Which are almost laughable in terms of their impact Because the things that may move people have to do with mobilizing Who they are in the particular real-life networks they happen to be inhabiting and remember the what we found is that Recruitment and enlistment into the Islamic State and any of these groups is bound to prior social networks and highly clustered in particular neighborhoods and towns So you have to engage with the people where they are and those ideas can be highly different From group to group so I got a call from the head of the medical school in Sudan telling me that 17 of her brightest students all a students have just left to set up a medical clinic in Raqqa Okay, these were all from fairly wealthy families and she asked me why did my students do this? Well, I didn't have the answer but that was another data point for me To show how diverse the messages of the Islamic State are and how much they engage with the actual networks They will literally spend thousands of hours on a single person if necessary To bring them to the Islamic State they will say to a young woman in Seattle We know how hard it is for you to leave your mother and your father Your brothers and your sisters. We know how much you love them, but let us explain to you Why honoring your family is not the only or most important thing of life? And then when you come here, you'll understand and you'll explain to them and they'll go into it They'll go into their history. They'll go into Why in their own society and in the host societies is necessary for them to come to fight So how do you engage? Well, I told you that the way al Qaeda and ISIS engages is they actually offer social development projects they offer involvement in the political program itself and one of the great successes is that a Woman named Elizabeth Kindleville. We also work with in Oxford. She was able to plug in and ride piggyback off al Qaeda and ISIS Successes in the Yemen and offer social development programs for youth But get the youth themselves to offer their own development social development programs including peep cleaning cleaning up 500 kilometers of beach Which is a remarkable achievement in the Yemen Completely done by young people who proposed it themselves and many other such projects Which cost absolutely nothing because the young people were doing it themselves and they felt empowered and it is an interesting thing that they empowered themselves as representatives of their Particular government that is like their particular state as Marjadis or as Yemenis in which nationalism played an interesting role Another example is the aware girls and among the Taliban. These are two teenagers who I work with We work with the secretary general now in promoting a UN council resolution to 250 Which is to bring youth in to have youth themselves proposed solutions to violence across the world amazing amazing bunch of young people Some of the most amazing people I've ever met in my life Actually people who have been shot who've suffered incredible horrors during war turning themselves to to making peace Well, these are two young girls. They were 15 and 16 years old at the time Who set up a group called aware girls in northwest Pakistan and their function was to build an advocacy group for women Hard in this most conservative of all regions in Pakistan They were they were threatened and shot out by Taliban and by Pakistani intelligence agencies of ISI from both sides And yet they persisted and they brought their Awareness to young men who were joining the Taliban and they brought out first 50 Taliban and then those young men started talking to other young men and Now they have 1500 young men working with these young women to bring people away from violence now We have examples of these local success stories across the world another young woman for example at Cambridge now from Pakistan she Developed a theater group which does a sort of passion play of the founder of them of the Taj Mahal Who's two young sons whose two sons one was a scholar the other was a warrior? competed for their father's affections and for the rule of Northern India and Although the young scholar was supposed to have won He was appointed by his father to become his successor he was eventually killed by his brother who imprisoned the father himself and when these stories are played out and Young people are allowed to discuss them They find themselves ways to resolve those kinds of historical problems in interesting ways and propose novel solutions For today, but here's the problem There are important success stories all over the world, but they're all local success stories And that's not enough one of the things the Islamic State has been able to do is build a worldwide coalition How can we compete against this? There are no institutional means in existence young people are the solution. They are The bulk of today's terrorist recruits and tomorrow's most susceptible populations The average age of people who join the Islamic State in al Qaeda is 26 But it's becoming younger in Palestine we find for example 14 or 15 year olds have been joining the Islamic State to counter The Hamas so how do we bring them together to find their own solutions? Well again one of the big problems is that governments view the view young people as a problem to be clobbered Especially young men to be smashed. There's very little opportunity given to them at all So There's no room for expression There's no room for ideas all the solutions are being posed by a political class That has allowed this all to emerge that has been extremely unsuccessful in stopping it to any degree And none of the sort of bottom-up solutions have been able to emerge at all That's not to say that young people are going to come up right away with the solution to a problem It's a little bit like Alan Brooke Churchill's chief of staff saying about his boss Winnie He's got ten good ideas a day one of which may be good The same thing we heard from young people at the World Youth Forum in Amman a couple of years ago They came up with a gazillion solutions to this kind of thing some of which were incredible But the first thing they would say is Governments of the world have to do that and governments of the world have to do this and governments of the world have been doing this And they have to stop doing this and they must give money for this And I'm sitting next to the crown prince at the time and I say it's dead isn't it and he goes Yep, it's dead. He goes you should have seen what it was like before we got to talk to them at all Because people in government are also real people and these young people have to be helped to navigate power Including the power of corruption and there is no guide for them at all And I think that's the biggest problem. We have I mean think about youth in the United States after the war It was the youth boom It was responsible for the most creative Time in the US American history in American history in all spheres and Led to radical changes in society For the good in terms of human rights and civil rights But there is no such thing there's no talk whatsoever about a youth boom anymore and there is a youth boom Okay, I mean half the population of the Middle East is youth But it's called the youth bulge and the problem with the youth bulge is you try to shrink it You don't try to develop it. You don't try to empower it and here I think there's a more general problem than this problem even a deeper problem For the future of liberal democracies even beyond the threat from violent extremism the core existential issue seems to be How comes it that the values of liberal and open democracy? Increasingly appear to be losing ground to those of narrow nationalisms and radical Islam Which are in a tacit alliance that's sundering the European middle class the mainstay of open democracy Perhaps the one finding of political science. That's entirely robust In ways similar to the hatchet job on Republican values by the fascists and communists in the 1920s and 1930s Well, the situation isn't irredeemable, but it's approaching a very dangerous threshold with mainstream middle classes Increasingly alienated from government elites joining underemployed working class and blaming marginalized immigrant groups for social ills and radical Islamists earnestly and with increasing success Driving the mainstream from Muslims with brutal acts that are meant to heighten sentiments of blame among the mainstream and victimhood among the immigrant Muslims so that back against the wall They lash out with violence and all this against the backdrop of general demographic Decline that increasingly hampers the European countries from sustaining a large middle class much less armies 1.6 per couple Without massive immigration to which the European mainstream is increasingly opposed. So there's a deep deep structural problem and in fact if you look at the Bible the track the main track of the Islamic States called either at what? Which means the management of savagery or chaos the idea is to eliminate the gray zone The gray zone is the area between true infidel true believers and infidels in which most of humanity includes most of Muslims live And the way you do that and that's what they mean by terrorist attacks is you attack Those aspects well you go into places like like Africa where there's chaos and you manage it You govern it and you create chaos in the home countries of your enemies and the way you do that is through Political violence, but a particular kind of political violence The violence has to be perpetrated in the name of Muslims Islam in order to increase suspicion among the general population against Muslims, and it's got to be against soft targets Like cafes and theaters by the way, this was the same way the anarchists act that a hundred years ago for many of the same reasons It's a long story Because that will do two things it will undermine people's faith in the security Of their nations, which is the primary function of government and therefore undermine the governments themselves and cause chaos in the political system as if we don't know about that and It will also increase suspicion against Muslims, and I'm reminded of one of my favorite Favorite it's I have two articles That are my favorite articles that usually give to my students or when I did have students I gave it The first was a discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick Which is just one and a half pages and it's a beautiful Article in which the end of it simply says it has not escaped us that this may have Implications for the origin of life. I love that that line the the second one is a one-page article It's a it's a review of mine comf by George Orwell one of my favorite thinkers in the world and in it he asks How is it that the Western That the socialist countries and to a more grudging extent he says the capitalist countries Are willing to offer their citizens ease avoidance of pain hygiene health care in short the good life and Even the best of us are not willing to commit to fight for those values at all In fact the Oxford student union the cream of young British intellectuals had just voted never to fight again for those values Mr. Hitler what is he offering his people? revolution danger glory death Destruction and he's got 80 million people who fall down at his feet Why? Yes, or well because mr. Hitler has understood something profound about human nature human beings need at least intermittently a sense of transcendence and self-sacrifice and That's what he's providing My view it's an old view Toynbee had it civilizations rise and fall On cultural ideas and not material assets alone most societies have sacred values for which their members would passionately fight even unto the death This is the case for many who fight for ISIS especially foreign volunteers and for some who fight against them especially for pkk Also happens to be on our terrorist list and some of the Kurdish fighters we find But we find no comparable willingness among young western or many non-western youth who profess commitment to liberal democracy As opposed to those who support narrow xenophobic nationalism more and more those people are willing to fight and to fight hard Now I ask you what dreams may come from current government policies that offer little beyond grudging promises of comfort and security People who are willing to sacrifice everything including their lives the totality of their self-interest Will not be lured away by material incentives or disincentives The science suggests that sacred values are best opposed with other sacred values the inspired devotion Or by sundering the few social networks that embed those values and forging new ones and above all a transcendent message and Meaning that gives individual existence and significance beyond death that binds people together beyond perceived self-interest and Creates an enduring preferably peaceful Common good, so this is just a so I was at Davos in January presenting some of these ideas And I was dumbfounded actually by the sort of ostrich style response to the current populist wave Sweeping the world first we had President Xi Jinping of China telling us that globalization as everyone has always held as Davos is ineluctable It's inescapable. There are a few hiccups and the West hasn't managed it very well And I'm really the only grown-up left on the block and you have to leave it to China to manage globalization through double harmony and felicity the way they usually talk about it and to Do away with the asymmetries in income and in the distribution of wealth That is keeping the populist wave alive Then we had secretary Kerry who I admire very much as a as a person I think it's way off both in terms of globalization and terrorism saying that this is all going to be gone in three years This is just a hiccup. We had madam Lagarde from the IMF saying exact thing and nobody These are the people who basically rule the world. I mean Leaders and billionaires and no one was coming up with any kind of interesting idea. They were all baffled They were all stunned by what had happened. No one had predicted it Well, no one can predict history very well except astrologers in any event But no one had any idea of what was going on the only novel proposal that I could Glean at Davos was the proposal for universal income for poor people Now Anybody who knows anything about people who join revolutions know that it's not poor people who initiate revolutions Poor people basically have to find ways to eat and survive and they don't really have time for political agitation In fact, we have empirical studies showing this even psychological studies But people who do have their basic needs met would are frustrated in their aspirations Or will have no purpose or significance where they think they should they become revolutionaries so actually the Davos people were Proposing something that would probably lead to much heightened insurgency in revolution especially against those people and Then I was thinking about a much larger parallel and I guess I'll sort of end with this and That is between what happened between the Congress of Vienna and 1914 and what's happening now No between the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and 1914 World War one and what's happening in the long relative peace since World War two and I think it's not just continuity and parallel that I want to talk about its actual Parallels its actual continuity So what it happened was there was a quasi anarchic system Before the Napoleonic Wars where every state was fighting against basically every other state in the zero-sum game With all their neighbors and then came the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars With massive bloodletting on a scale that Europe hadn't seen in a long long time And so the powers the conservative governing elites came together in the Congress of Vienna To establish an informal international order which held pretty much to the eve of World War one It wasn't a peaceful century as Hobbesbaum said it was also an age of revolution but it was revolutions like those of the 1830s and 1848 which were contained and Especially through British pressure and interference They managed to maintain the empires and nation-states as they were just after the Napoleonic Wars All the way up to World War one, but then what happened? well the creative destruction of The market economies and the mercantile economies of the time Forced the peoples of Europe to make a gamble which many of them lost and that gamble was to participate in the Enlightenment project of reason and Material success as a means of self-expansion and As I said it failed for many who resorted to revolution and when those revolutions Collapsed it resorted to terrorism which was the the basic the reason for the anarchist movement the basic social revolutionary movement Which caused such havoc in Europe even greater than Isis and al-Qaeda killed the czar of Russia the president of France Prime Minister of Spain King of Italy Queen of Austria president of the United States and the reaction to that movement For example Teddy Roosevelt's first speech upon taking power after the McKinley assassination and his Subsequent speech on the what's called the corollary of the Monroe doctrine was that this terrorist scourge was the greatest threat to humanity that humanity has perhaps ever faced and Necessitated the United States to take the role of an international police force and To interfere everywhere in the world where barbarism was rampant at that case including the Philippines which was undergoing a native insurgency which then was Confused and confounded with terrorism Itself the reactions again were very much the same and the only thing that stopped this movement Was World War one itself and the rise of the Bolsheviks who killed off the anarchists because they basically co-opted their message in a much better Organized fashion that was territorial base much as Isis had done to al-Qaeda up to the present time But what really undid the world order of which anarchism was only a symptom was The inability of the governing elites to provide a sense of meaning and stability To lies that had been forced to give up millennial age-old traditions for this incredible gamble in this new material world and so Those people and the states themselves began to rapidly throw the rules away Russia in the Balkans and on its frontiers Italy in 1911 going into North Africa and eating up part of the Ottoman Empire to create Libya Germany decided that it had been left out of the world competition and had to go on its own and the whole system rapidly wound down and you Nowadays we talk of globalization But globalization in those days from the Congress of Vienna to World War one Greatly surpassed the the pace of globalization today For the first time in human history human beings had been freed from muscle power through science and technology Massive worldwide communications and transportation had emerged for the first time Telegraph speed ship Steamships and later the telephone and film capital flows the free flow of capital in 1912 wasn't achieved again until the 1990s And the only countries in the world that required passports were russia and turkey So there was a relatively free movement of peoples and it all came to a rapid sudden grinding halt and that Of course continued through up until world war two Which was just the continuation of the processes that occurred and then there was the sudden victory Of the united states which suffered nothing at all from world war two and was empowered With an incredible amount of wealth And ability to manipulate the world system and created in its own image And that has plateaued But the the the important thing I think for us to understand is that the processes that led to continuous revolution and eventually the sundering of the world system between say 1878 And 1914 are very similar to the processes now extended to the entire world not just europe That occurred then that is the dark side of globalization Is such that the great majority of people are left out as driftwood And they have not had the time that the peoples of america and europe had To adapt to the gamble Of material success and expansion And they're left in the lurch because their age old traditions have suddenly disappeared and they're on shifting tan There's nothing at all to hold them And so in this world They reach out to these insurgent and revolutionary movements And populist movements and frankly I find it No interesting proposals To change this dynamic And here's my last slide So where do we go? This is something I found while photographic while actually being interviewed Uh about near the world trade center. This is right in front of I mean the new liberty tower And it's an advertisement that says commit to something guys just lying on his bed with dollar bills right Or Isis seems to be the other choice. What in between do we have in our society to hold our values? Because it's the vitality of our values rather than the threat from violent extremists that represent the key existential issue facing us and this Molly Crockett the woman who just who discovered the relationship between joy And revenge in the brain just sent me this yesterday and said you should include that in your slide Thank you So we have some time for some questions So I'll pass around the microphone for anyone who wants to raise their hand and ask I do apologize. I always go on until somebody stops me Sorry for going over the time Hi, I enjoyed your talk quite a bit. I'm an engineering student. So a lot of the stuff you talked about right over my head Uh, so a practical question Um, how were you able to interact with the isis fighters and get willing participation from them in the studies that you were doing? I know, okay. Nostral fighters. I got willing participation isis fighters. I use captured isis fighters Okay And then you develop techniques. Well, I must say the foreign fighters are few and far in between because They come to die And many of them most of them and they put suicide belts on them So they're never captured and very few that are captured executed right away Basically because for example of the Kurds capture them. They say, okay, you've come here to kill us Screw you. You're dead and they blow their brains out after three hours of interrogation Which is the standard operating procedure, but local Local isis fighters or fighters from the immediate region. They will keep alive and actually try Because they want to keep relations open to the tribes From which they come and this is a way of showing even the isis says we will only exchange corpses The the idea of keeping open a dialogue with the tribes in the eventuality that those tribes will Will will either be liberated from isis or fight isis Allows us to get access to these fighters now people often say well captured people Are likely to lie to you They want to get out of their situation. They'll say anything they can Well, believe me, we've we've thought about this for decades and we have techniques to be able to deal with this Including be able to monitor for deception through video Uh and now one of our one of the guys who works with us Doug stone. He was deputy commander of the forces in iraq after the abu grave scandal his his role was to Get rid of people. No to um depopulate the prisons And uh, he's developed all sorts of techniques interviewed thousands of guys and things like voice stress analysis So we have them with us and things like that. But anyway, we can usually tell when people are lying or not Okay, and and and there's a technique we use For is for isis that we don't use for the others. We will never ask an isis fighter What do you think about killing torture by we ask them after they've already done the fusion task with their cross comrades Say what do your comrades think and that gives us a good idea of what they think because also we don't want to incriminate them In any if if if they're going to have any kind of subsequent appeal on their trial, which many usually they don't Yeah more questions Hi, really enjoyed the talk. Uh, I was hoping if you could expand on something that you just briefly mentioned, uh, you talked about um How and maybe I heard you wrong, but you said that uh, is fighters might Or they they want to see uh, zoa Zoa here is why? Yeah, they want to see him Is there leadership? No. No, this was uh I was talking about uh, imam who is a recruiter for isis and who left isis to join al-qaeda And he in leaving isis said that one of the reasons is he believed zawahiri the leader of al-qaeda If anyone deserved to be caliph he should that makes sense. Yeah, so it's not Not that they in fact, they can't stand zawahiri. They excommunicated al-qaeda Sort of a couple of questions. So the first one's about Have you tested the counter narratives argument that it doesn't get much is it an issue of source a source effect Has that been tested with regards to if an imam were to provide this narrative? As because he's much more, you know, I guess more central to the networks, right? So consequently might have more of an effect and I'll also pitch in my second question Which is much early on when you're talking about the fusion I had a thought could values be potentially proxying For the idea that it's the self-interest in the afterlife Uh-huh good both good questions. Okay What was the first one? Source effects. Oh, yes um First of all for local fighters. They know nothing about islam So we asked them who athman was Home out of the first caliphs were they having the slightest idea who these guys were and that's sort of basic um Islam not 101 but islam zero um But they're you know Many of them from poor peasant families who when isis came in and they had been shafted by the shia that the americans had installed Uh had no choice. Many of them told us life was held their parents had been killed Their families they couldn't go out of house for months at a time. So it was a no-brainer for them to join isis Then in those circumstances the counter narratives that work are best seem to be tribal narratives This is our history. This is our tribe and isis is trying to take over our role And just as democracy isn't very good at adjudicating over confessional boundaries Um unless isis can appeal to the tribes themselves. It's not very good either Okay, so it either has to be able to draw upon those tribal passions And histories or it fails And one of the best ways of opposing them is doing that now as far as those people who actually understand something about the history of islam Isis is very careful about um, how they frame And how they bring people in So in february 2014 they floated the notion of the caliphate Okay, and then for six months there was an intense discussion Uh in islamic circles on the internet and social media about the meaning of the caliphate its history blah blah blah Then in june 2014 They established the caliphate after vetting it Um, it wasn't something that just came like athena from the head of zeus spontaneously without no reflection of the other and while they're doing this they're elaborating again a fairly a fairly deep um Interpretation of islam of the salaf So for example, one of the things you hear from people who don't know anything about the islamic state or in very little Is the traditional Idea that jihad is really the inner struggle for spiritual enlightenment rather than this violent struggle Um for the expansion of islam. Well, this is a sufi Uh invention of the abbasid caliphate and in the early days of the caliphate There was no such thing as this in spiritual enlightenment as part of islam itself Even though you can use the hadith and the quran to justify it as sufi scholars Did so the way You can succeed Is to try to Show that their interpretation among those who are knowledgeable Is that their interpretation may be erroneous and that works the saudis have tried it with very very limited success after pouring Literally hundreds of millions of dollars in it They have very little success and and few people that have real don't have real deep knowledge of how they actually thinking Could hope to succeed against them on that level. So yeah, you could use narratives But you have to be pretty well informed narratives and certainly nothing like we had we used to have The head of the imh who happened to be a man of american holding up a piece of pita bread and say We have the best pita here as well and anybody can do it and muslims in america It's it's it's laughable and cringe worthy, right? But that's basically what our public diplomacy was So it has to be much better than that and the second question boy. Am I getting seen now? The afterlife. Yeah, you know Rational choice models um Can always come up with ad hoc hypotheses about why preferences Um are not to us rational but to the people we're trying to describe as rational and one of the popular ones You see in public choice or in the political science journals Is belief in the afterlife is a rational preference for these irrational people and therefore what they're doing is perfectly rational well Of course, you can always come up with ad hoc hypotheses Um, I haven't found among any group um the criteria of Looking for virgins in heaven as a motivation as a systematic motivation For something like suicide bombing in fact all of the organizations i've talked to said it's they came looking for sex In the afterlife they slammed the door in their faces now. That doesn't mean that some won't for example Alaska Alexa martyrs brigades because Hamas had been so successful in their use of suicide bombing in increasing market share. I'll use the language that Oh, you know you guys like increasing market share The fatah elaxa brigades and democratic front for the liberation of palestine also decided to use suicide bombers And they would actually convince a few people especially nine-year-olds That they could get sex in heaven And that may have been uh, that may have been played a role idiosyncratically, but certainly not for Hamas Certainly not from Hamas. I mean well the Hamas people at the time They were telling us we would only pick the best of our and brightest and there you can use Uh a version of evolutionary theory and they were explicitly telling us for costly signaling purposes Because if you show if we show that we're willing to sacrifice our best and brightest To this cause then that cause is truly worthwhile and it shows we are sincere And that's a more general More general lesson about religion. I think and about something I call meaning and purpose in life Social contracts are an inherent disadvantage To religious and transcendent mental ideas for this very simple reason Social contracts are matters of convenience And that means there can be a better bargain down the line And if there's a better bargain down the line then by backwards induction anytime you suspect the better There's a better bargain down the line It's much better to defect now But if you live with in a religious system, which is blind or a transcendental system, which is blind to exit strategies As bob would say you have a long potentially infinite indefinite shadow of the future And a guarantee that the contract will endure and here's another paradox about human beings Human beings make their greatest exertions for ill or good For absurd ideas take religious ideas. They are inherently absurd. They're non-propositional take god is three and one What the hell does that mean or god is omniscient? Please excuse the slip god is omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient Now what does it mean as as hobs himself said and Galileo? It's incomprehensible. That's the mystery of god In fact, we treat we do experiments where we say okay, johnny. He's in wisconsin His foot is caught under a rock the wood is rising. He prays to god to save him at the very same moment in australia Mary she falls on the railroad tracks. She can't get up. The train is coming. She prays to god to save her What does god do? Now we do this with priests and rabbis and imams and saddus and no one says wham Thank you, ma'am. God does it and that's the end of it They ask how fast is the train coming does mary have any brothers and sisters Things like that to make it comprehensible because it is literally comprehensible now. Why can these kinds of ideas? Inspire such powerful Devotion and action and look at ritual Rituals even crazier all sorts of crazy things and tappings and things like that but they provoke The greatest and costliest sacrifices among human beings in fact the The absurdity is almost proportion to the willingness of people to sacrifice now. That's an enormous paradox In terms of human behavior. Why is it that apparently absurd ideas are able to provoke such sacrifice? Such cooperation and such seemingly intractable conflict That's who we are So we're just a little over time, but we're going to have one more question So, uh, you talked about that these communities that uh, that engage with isis They operate in small communities and they are like part of some neighborhoods or like mosques That are like in localities and they mostly communicate through social media. That's very identifiable such as facebook and twitter So how what strategies do you recommend to identify them firstly? What and what's your stake on privacy? And also even if like we do identify these these people How do you want to like handle them as and like how do you target them or? right Just subside them or Okay, so the path to radicalization to the radicalization Revolutionary right is a path and those people who lock into devoted actors To tell you the truth I don't think there's much you can do except suddenering the networks and doing something once it's destroyed Then you do something like the notification which only worked intermittently But the problem with isis, of course is even though they have territory. It's a very dispersed infrastructure So it's going to be very difficult. The question is the people before they get there before they lock in And become devoted actors. What do you do with them? Well, they're at very early stages material incentives Can help But mostly it's young people turning other young people away Through things that mean something in their particular neighborhoods and networks And I can't a priori tell you what's going to work and what's not going to work Let me just give you an anecdote. So I'm asked to evaluate for usaid Is agency for international development Something called local governance project in morocco Where they've invested tens of millions of dollars and helping young people get into local governments, of course I'd estimate well over 90 went into corrupt officials who I know who Bought furniture from the queen and their apartments of 10 times the value. Anyway, there were a few Good programs, but anyway, I asked the the aid people. So what what criteria of evaluation should I use? And they say well things that we can quantify a number of Dar el shabab Maison de jeunesse youth houses that are built How many people are coming into them? How much money was is spent blah, blah, blah, blah I said, don't you want to know what they're thinking what they're doing? I mean That's the whole purpose of this. Well that we can't quantify. By the way, this is what I get from congress all the time And so does people like panetta Who tried to bring the same stuff up to congress and he gets the same answer. Well, how do you quantify this? And what I found was when I went into these youth houses, they're surfing On computers paid by the american tax paper Payor pornography sites jihadi sites everything in the world and they've come up with their own language Which they call franglish, which is a mixture of french and english and spanish and arabic And many of them are just semi-literate But they've managed they've mastered this language and they're communicating with one another and they're talking about everything in the world You can think of their futures their hopes their dreams. What's available jobs women jihad everything You can think of and I'm going this is the best thing I've seen. This is the most successful Action by usa id I've ever seen And our best chance because here we have inadvertently Help create a medium for these young people to express themselves freely and they're coming up with ideas Maybe we can follow them. Maybe we can even enter them and see which works and which not moving them away from jihad And the answer was we've got to kill it right away I said, what are you kidding? I said, this is oh, this is this is serendipity And they said no no, can you think of the new york times? or the new york post Coming out with something a headline ux taxpayer Promotes pornography and jihadi surfing in morocco, for example, and so it was dead If you look at the bureaucratic structure of the united states, you'll also find that the united states security council national security council Leads up to the president administration Is responsible for all of us foreign policy the state department and the defense department are merely Executors and if you sit in on the nsc, you will see That there's no representative from any human health education welfare thought conception anything there's the kinetic agencies and there's the council of economic advisors and they're all Rational choice people right and all believe that the enlightenment There are particular inversion of the enlightenment is how the world works and they can manage this And so there's very little attempt and this is different from domestic policy, of course Where things like that matter there's very little attempt to actually understand What people are thinking and what can move them away and so you bring in Experts you think are experts especially those who cater to your particular interpretation of the world And who tell you that this narrative was work going to work or this narrative is going to work or Moderate is going to work or this interpretation of Islam is working. That's Basically where we're at. I don't see any any really concerted effort except one It's called peer-to-peer. It was started by a guy named george selim at homeland security And then taken over by facebook Which now funds it entirely which has represent representation about 70 countries In which young people themselves come up with projects to move other young people away And it's amazingly innovative. I mean, I've seen the theater productions. They've done the sports. They've done The historical projects. They've the social development project But no one's evaluated it yet. So i'm holding my but it's the most promising thing I think so I guess Alongs The short of the message is let the young people come up with something themselves give them a platform And uh, let's see what the real world constraints on achieving those dreams and aspirations are And I again, I don't see anything like that. I mean, I was talking to what's his name. Let's say what's what's the former senator from kinetic it Come on I was talking to leverman a little