Getting ready to leave after president bush the second and getting ready to go until Hillary Clinton brought her in the office and said, talk to me about what youre doing and she said, im doing a lot and Hillary Clinton decided she was just the right person to create a brandnew job for her and the job was special representative to muslim communities around the world. That little job. [laughter] National Security son all, First Time Ever filled position in the state department, but most important for me is shes a very good friend. When she was at the state department i was at the state department and we worked together but i was always amazed at how incredible by smart she is. Strategic inner thinking and she has a way of saying things that you will understand and these are complex problems and when we talk about violent extremism, you once said to me, if you knew what i knew you wouldnt sleep at night, which, of course, made me not sleep at night. [laughter] i knew that i couldnt think of things that would be so bad that would come close on some of the issues that sarah was working on. What we are dealing with is an ideological battle and calls for a different type of response and its very well detailed in the book. How you win what seems to be a problem, so theres a line in the book where you say, this is intractable but this is not, violent extremism, maybe we should begin by you talking about what it means to have open power. Well, first of all, good morning, and i am really delighted to be in madison. Ive been hearing about madison for a long time from han information ah and i often say and this is the true, that one of the best gifts that was ever given to me as the special representative from the muslim communities was the opportunity to work with hannah and get to know her and we will get the circumstances under which we met. One of the things that have puzzled me, smart people that know that we have smart people out there and scientists out there who are trying to figure out a cure, there are other issues where we think this is going to take, you know, everything weve got for 200 years and then we will never be able to figure out, some of us might say that for Climate Change but we will go there another time, but when we look at the appeal of the ideology of hate of us versus them, thats not an intractable problem. Youre not born hating. You learn how to hate. So seems to me after all the work that that ive been privileged to do, we ought to take it seriously, what do we need to do. It is incumbent upon each of us to think think more strategically because it makes a difference in environment which we live but very important that we make sure that both the legislative branch from the government and executive branch of the government understand that for population in america is not going to sit back and say hate is okay, its not what we stand for and it isnt about a problem over there with some group like the socalled Islamic State or alqaeda or boko haram. We get White Supremacists on the rise, we get neo nazis on the rise. When you ask the question about the intractability of this, its not intractable, solutions are available right now, secondly, you talk about one of the things i end the book with and thats a particular diagnosis in terms of what is within our government, around how we solve problems and this book talks about the solutions very critically, government has a role to play and so do corporations and so do regular citizens, we will get into this but open power is an assessment based on my time in government, when we look at what our options are, tools in the tool box, i see and you know that our colleagues as smart as they are, theres a way to do things, so with hard power the military executes things in a very particular way, they study, you know, path to military endeavors and they learn what they must do, they build machinery for the future wars, they have a whole system in place, with soft power, we are looking at the department of states, our tool on the tool box are super limited. We have been looking at things the way we designed the system for the cold war and i think, okay, we are dealing with ideology, here are the bucket of things that we can be doing, the bucket of things that we can be doing, i say thats not enough and 21st century where we have a rise of technology in a way that we could never have imagined, demographic of digital natives, millennials and generation z who are absorbing content in ways that we are all reading in the paper all of the time and we know that there are theres a surge in what can happen with ai and other things in terms of how to get content or what they believe but im saying government, listen, you cant use 20th century tools for 21st century environments, open power says lets open, lets look at things differently, sort of a Design Thinking for government, what do we need at the policy table to help us think about what it is we need to do, government often goes outside and talks to an expert, maybe brings them in, have a round table, we have done that, very, very interesting, they go off and we go on with usual stuff. Thats in the for every problem but for the kind of thing we are talking about, i want to see historians at the table, i want to see anthropologist and stenographers and people who think different about culture to help us understand what is happening to millennial young people who are absorbing and now generation z that are absorbing this ideology. You were traveling 80 countries or so, she just came from london. Last night. [laughter] how do we, the scale of what needs to have is so enormous breaking to doable parts is the challenge, working with government which you have at the highest of levels, as have i, we realized that the congress to appropriate money, they want shortterm answers, they want to see a victory and the program that we funded did it do what we said it would, how do we get the culture and where the real money is which is in government to learn longterm, to not decide that every Little Program has an answer by the next appropriations bill, how do we do that because the state department didnt do that when we were there . Well, we we have to think very differently about what it is our goals are. If our goals are in fact, to radically change the environment so that the majority of young people, not all of them, can push back against hate, if thats what a goal is, then Congress Needs to understand that the way in which we are asking questions have to change, you cannot ask questions the way you would for the department of defense to say, is that fighter going to the new, you know, piece of equipment that weve spent 3 billion on, is that going to work, im not against hard power, i think its important in some circumstances, this is not a solution that means that plane, that satellite, number of troops will fix the problem, this requires congress to say, our excellent colleague, former colleague who are in the department of state that are in embassies around the world have the capacity to do something really remark financial they are given the tools and we are asking them to do things with one hand tied behind their back with no money to actually execute and the issue here is scale, hannah, it isnt a schedule of program here and program there, i cant tell you how often, you know, ive told you, tell me what the priority countries are, oh, yeah, ideology has no borders, folks, something that happens in trinidad when the socalled Islamic State was appeal to go appealing to young people and everybody shocked that people from trinidad were going over there. If you were paying attention you would understand that what is happening to the people that these socalled Islamic State are trying to recruit, whats the difference between culture and religion, these are the questions that we know they are asking. Thats not only happening in nigeria or in denmark or only happening in morocco, thats happening across the demographic thats connected as digital natives, what does Congress Need to do, it needs to think globally and think about how we can make sure that we scale and they need to put their money where their mouth is, dont get in front of your constituents and this goes for executive branch too, dont tell me that ideology is important and receiver single politician and policy maker has said that and dont do anything, id rather you tell the American Public we are not going the fight hate, we will get into it and go on our marry way, options available for far less than what is spent in the shortterm for fighting the physical wars, i will give you a data point that i use in the book and i think its an important one, it came out of the commission that was done, Bipartisan Commission by cfis that was strategic and International Studies that did a survey really and series of recommendations for leadership in government and and leading up to the last election, what would we need you to do to fight the ideology globally and it wasnt just the socalled Islamic State, it was also the rise of neo nazis, we are looking at the data but the right of antisemitism and the rise of all of the things that we know we are feeling and its really shocking to see that in 2019 we are in this state we are in but we was look at a number that i think tells a very important story, we spend trillions of dollars on the war on terror in general, you know that, specifically on fighting the socalled Islamic State since about 2014, we spend billions of dollars on this, what percentage of that money have we spent on soft power, meaning the idea of fighting the ideology so young people dont find it appealing, the number is 0. 0138 . So how is it that youre supposed to look at, this im calling for not eradication of military act but im saying a strategy needs to be built thats global, that is sustainable over time not hundreds of years, 2 or 3 years all day every day, 24 7 at the same scale needs to be done and integrated strategy of hard and soft power that will allow us to do what it is we want to do, we want to reduce the appeal of the ideology so it is manageable, youre not going to eradicate it from the world but reduce it so we are not dealing with the kind of threat we are dealing with. Have you ever met any people who are coming from other countries and they come to your community, they speak, we bring music, we bring art, we bring things that are culturally important in defining identity, there are other ways of power that obviously you wrote a whole book on, we did a project together that i think, i think dealt with identity, i didnt count how many countries we went to together, but it started with a conference in kasikstan, if you can believe it. You know where that is, and what happens at a diplomatic conference is you sit down where your countrys name is in front of you and you hold the seat and youre called upon and you read a statement that has been cleared by 45,000 people and by the time you get it its its what you see on tv. [laughter] so farah and i were sitting with the ambassador of kasikstan and we decided to do Something Different. No, no, you had the idea. She came up with the idea. We had before we went decided because like a laser focus, farrah focuses on millennials because thats where the population bulge is with muslims and we invited some millennials to come and observe what was happening. What we decided to do together when we were in the seat and called upon by the chair of the meeting, we would flip what we were saying, so the jew was not condemning antisemitism, you know, that does not headlines make but the muslim was condemning antisemitism and the jew was condemning what they refer to in diplomacy as islamic phobia and i know you dont like the word, hatred of muslims, we just did it and much later when i went to saudi arabia thats all they talked to me about, you are the one, youre the one. So that in some ways, the message is important and sometimes the messenger can increase the impact and so what did the millennials that were there say to us . They said that was very nice with speeches and we get it, we get it that the messenger can enhance impact but what did we do and as we are flying back and when we got back to the state department, we decided we have to come up with an answer to this when a millennial says to and that person can be from germany, can be from uruguay, can be from malaysia, whatever, what can i do, we felt that we needed an answer, that we always when youre speaking had a call to action and so what did we decide . Well, i want to first tell you that that as hannah is telling the story im getting nostalgic because hannah is a rouser and she always thinks outside of the box and when i think of the particular program it did start there, i will give you the end before how we did it, it ended up being one of the most important, i think, initiatives that we took on at state around fighting hate because it was very tangible and what we said was young people dont have a lot of money, they do have time and weed like them to walk in the shoes of somebody else, we want them to experience in a different way so we created this campaign that we launched on facebook because we had day jobs and we knew that theyre not listening and following Hannah Rosenthal and Farah Pandith every day. We are asking to walk in somebody elses show, somebody who doesnt look like, love like them or pray like them and we thought its a modest thing, we started in year 2011, lets see if we can get 2,000 in year 2011, turns out that it just went crazy, we had kids all over the world doing things for each other, different communities that they had never had the time to talk to or really thought about going into, you know, finding a way to connect and we asked them to post what they were doing online and they then also got to talk to each other, it built so much momentum that we had 7ngos in the uk that came to us in 2012 and said, hi, we really love this campaign and we really wanted to be part of the london olympics and paralympics game and turned out to be partner and took on the life of its own because hannah and i decided since the olympics wanted it we would go where the olympics began and we went to greece and asked for a very specific logo that you have seen, we went to Olympic Committee and said we are doing this, we used the logo which they dont give out very often and so they said this is exactly the way we would want you to use it. This is the kind of thing, universal thing, we are citing hate and we have to do more, its a very successful program, how simple is this, you know, and i love hearing the stories of young kids who did things for people who were different than they were whether they were making Peanut Butter sandwiches for kids on the other side of town for lunch or taking a place, you know, volunteering to listen to an hour on something that they never imagined, it was inspiring, i think theres opportunity in thinking about that particular initiative because it means it was born from the millennials but imagine how many more other authentic credible organic things can happen if we think about what we can do. And theres another aspect to it and we called it hate, we named the problem. There were people including the secretary that said, cant it be about love, cant it be about world peace, how can we all get along and they said, no, name the problem, you cant solve the issue unless you recognize that all the stuff, bad stuff is happening is born from hate and so it caught on, it caught on all over the world. I mentioned before that farah once said to me if you knew some of the things i knew you wouldnt sleep at night and since then i havent really had a good night sleep, one thing that is amazing and its relevant to the news today and that is that the epicenter of hatred is saudi arabia and i dont think we think about it that much and we are putting truth there. I have no idea why, but for a second talk about how the epicenter of hatred is a country that we are aligning ourselves with and what do we do about this . Well, i think its important in dissecting what the problem is to be really honest with ourselves and with each other about what we are seeing, what we absorbed and when i talk to a representative to muslim communities, i traveled all over the world and you begin to see patterns, this is about the patterns that i saw, im taking you on this journey whether im in cambodia, whether im in norway, whether im in sisily and i didnt come to this position nor did i come with any expectations about right or wrong and what countries were doing around muslim identity. Unless you are going into the communities youre not really seeing, but the patterns that i saw were really disturbing to me and as diplomat and only so far you can go in terms of being, you know, just talking about everything all of the time, but i was seeing a couple of things, i was seeing schools that were built and and staffed with teachers who who taught a very specific brand of understanding around what islam is and which was monolithic, very stern, very direct, as the u. S. Government we are not and should not go around the world telling people how to be a good christian or a bad christian, this is the right kind of islam and it is not, thats not what we do, lets be clear but when youre calling on violence in the name of religion there are things that you have to be clear about and when youre teaching young people in schools whether its through textbooks, whether its through sermons and mosques that the people that are doing the sermons have been trained in a particular way, whether there are qurans that are translated in a certain way that its the us versus them and distributed around the world for free including american prisons, i want to be clear about that, you begin to see patterns on how that affect it is population, one the diversity islam doesnt deal with you know islam has been around the earth 1400 years, its diverse, its in every part of the world, you all know that america is the most Diverse Group of muslims anywhere in the world, these are things we know. When you begin to bring diversity and make it monolithic, only one way to be a muslim, thises the way you must dress, this is what you must eat, this is how you must pray, this is who you must talk to, it changes the entire character of the experience in terms of your identity and pushes away hundreds of years