The creator, writer, and ceo of games steve anthony. Brod. Burrowed you two are some of the most creative people i know. You both spend your days thinking about how the world is changing. You apply gaming and fiction to imagine the future. I cannot think of two better people to dig into this discussion with us. Poseourage our audience to questions by the time at the bottom. We only have 25 minutes in this first session. I will try to hurt as many heard as many of your questions as i can. [indiscernible] as we address in the report, the United States used to be protected by a tech from two oceans. September 11 showed that terrorists can use nonmilitary means to kill more americans than were killed at pearl harbor. Spectrum ofce a threats in the cyber information, commercial domains that bring security challenges to the u. S. s doorstep. It to maybe i can kick you first. I would be interested to hear how you think Homeland Security has evolved in the last 19 years. What are these security challenges that most concern you . In terms of how it has evolved, i think given the threat that we are currently facing and how difficult they are to predict, i think evolved might be generous. I think the types of things are very difficult to predict. I make video games, and we spend time coming up with these crazy scenarios. This can happen. That can happen. We never believe it is going to happen. There was a moment this year when i very specifically asked myself the question i was watching something happen on the news channel, could our democracy actually fail . That type of threat is something that has never occurred to me as a possibility before. Documentaryis called the unknown known, which i think was Donald Rumsfeld to work. Im not sure that i believed everything in there. Highlightedted he pearl harbor as a failure of the imagination. Commission said the greatest failure fort 911 was a failure of the imagination. 9 11,sked myself since what has been the next failure of imagination . Thee is a case to be made ramifications in 2016 the ramifications of electing a president who refuses to play by the established rules of democracy, what could possibly that iss a result of another failure of imagination and perhaps the greatest one so far in 2020. We have a 911 death toll every four days. It is not only that these failures of imagination keep happening, but they are getting worse. The gaps between them is getting smaller. That is not a good trend. That is why Everybody Needs to Pay Attention today. We will not keep getting away with this. At some point, something really bad is going to happen. I am going to steal a quote. What sent to me yesterday, this is not a call to arms. It is a call to imagination. That is how we desperately need to look at this. That is very interesting. Max, i will bring you and hear. Here. Some of those more imaginative pieces that seemed unimaginable previously in some respects our reality today. You previously remarked on how the u. S. s adversaries, readily china and russia have gone to school on the american way of warfare. Is the u. S. Adapting to it era of Great Power Competition . Is our National Security toolbox today equipped to handle these challenges . Sorry about that. Called anat is imagination gap with our enemies, the same way that we had a missile gap with the soviets in the 1960s. That goes back to the worst were we ever fought, which was desert storm. As that was seen as a victory for us, it was a crushing defeat of imagination. We thought we were teaching our enemies not to confront america. We were fighting a war of deterrence. We thought the message to our enemies and our future foes, if you confront the United States on the battlefield, we will utterly destroy you. We thought that would deter aggression. What we did not understand was the lesson we were teaching our enemies is do not confront us on the battlefield. Develop alternative means to go over, under or go through , thist being noticed imaginary line of military might that we have been building since the end of world war ii, and that is what has been happening. Since the 1990s, our enemies have been developing asymmetric means to get america off the world stage, because we push them into that. That is why at the department of Homeland Security has now been catapulted from rear guard to frontlines, because our enemies have learned to go right over our military might. And penetrate the heartland cyber, information, economics, and now biologic. Even though covid19 might be natural, it is done what massive soviet could never do, taking an american supercarrier off the high seas. You cannot tell me right now other countries and nonstate actors have not recognized the power of the german and are trying to harness it the way we did during the Second World War and the cold war. We have an imagination gap right now. Bigger been developing a , better way of fighting desert storm while our enemies have been developing a hydra to go all the way around and get at us directly. Is the why now dhs primary frontline defense against our enemies. Think that is a fantastic way to describe it in a load of ways. Homeland security as moved from being in the rear to the front. It istouched on difficult to untangle domestic and International Threats now. Physical borders, physical boundaries no longer exist in the age of information that we are in. Formulatingt about solutions to tackle these threats . Is beingty abroad fought on the homeland, if our adversaries are taking advantage of our strengths, how can we rewrite our own playbook to tackle these threats . That is exactly what we need. We need a new playbook. We developed an entirely new grand alliance in order to defend ourselves from communism and an entire strategy of how to go about it. Things like flexible response and a deep nato alliance. We do not have any of that now. If you take the slimmer threat of cyber attacks, we have no grand cyber doctrine. If you look at the national noponse framework, there is delineation of responsibility and resources. We have no International Treaties for how to respond to a cyberattack. If, lets say, Vladimir Putin decides to shut off the power shut down an antiboudin rally to teach them a lesson, but in doing so that power grid shuts down the power for hospitals, and patients died, he is directly as if he sent a backfire bomber to drop a bomb on those hospitals. We have no legal framework, we have no flexible response, have no tiered response. So right now with cyber, we have left it up to the minds and the whims of whoever is in power. And as a citizen of the United States talking to someone with the british accent, between our president and your Prime Minister that is a very, very scary scenario. I want to give you the option to jump in, or i can ask you another question. Dont have ays, we playbook, and we need one. How do you have a playbook thats going to deal with these kinds of threats that can come from anywhere . Biased, so i will give you a creative idea. If you look at some of our enemies and the techniques they use, its like they hired some failed hollywood scriptwriter to come up with an idea of how you can take down america. Will i just wonder if an idea might become theres a lot of great, Creative Minds around the world and they put all their energy into creating entertainment. I wonder if you could take some of those best minds, put them in a room for a year with some washington folks, have them brainstorm just every possible, implausible scenario they can think of, and every time one of those scenarios comes up and you think, thats absolutely preposterous, that couldnt happen, then you know you are onto something. So you get all these ideas, and then you get the washington folks to say, how do they solve that . Get all the solutions down to all these things, look for the consistencies, that solution is the same as that solution. And then take a framework like that and try to figure out, lets do a radical rethink on how we are approaching Homeland Security. And of course the government is like a battleship, it turns very, very slowly. I think at the very least, that might inspire some thinking as to how things could be looked at a little differently. David and i both understand the creative process, and i think we both understand that creativity is the first link in a very long chain, in order to turn dreams into reality. I can tell you, working at west point, i met some of the most brilliant, Creative Minds in my entire life. However, good ideas are meaningless without the courage to champion them. You can have all the good ideas in the world, and we have. The United States army has reports of somalia that would have been the playbook in iraq if someone had had the courage to champion them, and they didnt. We had the playbook on fighting corona. It happened in afghanistan in the 1980s, but no one had the courage to champion them. This is one of the key problems, ideas need the oxygen of courage. And if you dont have a system that rewards that courage, it wont matter how creative you are. Things will never get done. This is an element that needs to happen. Innging the creative people is great, but then you need the people with the spine to stand up and say we need to champion this, and this may be my job, this may be my career. This may mean being ridiculed, because we know psychologically, the number one fear of most human males is ridiculed. Geneva convention. If we dont find the champions and cheerleaders that are willing to embrace and fight for these ideas, they will end up, as they say in hollywood, on the cutting room floor. More. Ouldnt agree the government has the agility of a petrified tree. What you desperately need in the situation is agility and people who can effect these changes. I think a quick video game example of what im talking , i used to be the cool father at school because of call of duty, and along came a game called fortnite, which took over the world. The most agile leader makes decisions very quickly, very smartly with the right people around him, and he knows how to take a battleship and turn it with agility. Its something thats absolutely crucial to these challenges that are coming forth. Lets just all remember everyone who is watching, that there was a plan for covid19. Its the biological annex of the National Response framework. It is not a failure of imagination. Ive been part of an exercise where weve seen responses. We are trained, prepared. What happened . That was not a failure of imagination. It was a failure of doing and done. Onthis report really focuses adapting to the challenges we face in 2020. Bureaucracy is slow to move. I would be interesting to know, what are the challenges of the in 2030 . He challenges you wrote about a bioterrorist scenario before we had the covid19 pandemic, and weve seen how that is playing out. I would be really interested in what you think we need to be adapting to now, those crazy ideas that could play out. Reabsorb the hard truths about soft power. United states used to be the master of soft power, and we have completely dismantled that our enemies are ramping up. The chinese have become the masters of soft power. This is why they are buying up Media Companies like theres no tomorrow. Its why the back why they buy Companies Like binder so they can control all of the on anyone inse it a position of power. Its why the pressure hollywood movies to parent their agenda. They tried to censor my book because i was critical of the government, and therefore i lost access to a potential billion readers. I remember videogames in the play for orcould against the Peoples Liberation army. Where are they . Where are they now . So soft power infects every aspect of society. If you want access to chinese markets, you have to play by their game. And western companies are by nature global companies. So they are much more vulnerable to manipulation than we believe. Weve seen it with the nba. We see it now all over the world with infrastructure programs. So i think we need to really get , howus about soft power our enemies are using it, and what its going to mean for a free and open Democratic Society to remain free. Clementine so we should keep going. That we askke sure one or two audience questions in here. We have one from the embassy of costa rica. Is the increasing use of cryptocurrency something that could be catalogued as a threat . What can be done about it . Cryptocurrency is a fascinating space, and its based on a technology called block chain. The technology itself is actually extremely secure and thats part of the reason why its been so successful and prevalent in these new currencies that have come out. In terms of how that can affect i dontre and security, think anybody really knows. I can tell you the Financial System in itself in its current form feels to me very, very fragile. Is essentiallyt run 60 70 by ai now. See the madness of where the stock market is versus where the country is right now. Stillnancial system is based on thousands of years old , andms of trading things who knows how long that can last . So i think these cryptocurrencies are going to be very important for the future. We just need to be sure that we have the right people in control of it. Max i think its part of the bigger issue, the old National Defense model of 1845 is that everything was connected. Had avery institution National Security element to it, and therefore even in the Business World there was always the idea of how do our transactions affect our safety . Of venereal disease, when you had to think of does every transaction affect National Security . You look at small things like on , farmers havento to buy the seeds now every year, which means that monsanto was sold to a foreign country that could sell it to china. If that happens, the United States, for the first time in of history the idea analyzing all our systems and seeing what the National Security risk are has to be part of dhs. We could go on, but we are at time. Question is about disinformation. Our enemies are taking advantage of the principles of the open society, freedom of speech, and disinformation is prevalent. We know on social media. How can we address undermining the foundations of our own lifestyle, and ill tack onto that, how can we use novel communication tools, given that communication is such a crucial part of this, what do you both the challenge thats at the heart of the issues we face today . Information the American People is americas red greatest strength. What we need to do is we need to develop a defense first strategy, where we build strength from within. The American People are strong. Everything else will follow. I think what dhs needs to pay very clear attention to, because the American People right now are very fractured. Need to Pay Attention to the conditions that breed internal threat. Things like poverty, identity, them. Zation, us versus all of these things are things that we see clearly identified and reinforced. You talk about potential future threats and what they would be. What we were talking about earlier, most preposterous ideas, if things it worse, it i saw a guy in l. A. On tv just a few months ago with the shotgun strapped around him talking to police and they didnt arrest him. Strength from within is what we need to do. This information, i was most shocked by an Atlantic Council meeting, the council broaden someone from a Previous Administration who is transitioning from government to a social media company. Sort of the way the military has generals go and work for the militaryindustrial complex. His defense was, and im not kidding, when it comes to disinformation, were just the cart, we are not responsible for the eggs. Thats absolute full crepe. Thats the defense the Auto Industry thats absolute bullcrap. Their attitude was, we just make the cars, we are not responsible for how you drive them. Because just like our social Media Companies, i dont want to spend the money. We can vet every user on facebook or twitter or any platform. Its very easy to figure out come is this an actual person,s it a bought, is it a bot is it a russian troll farm . We can do this. They can do this. But they are simply greedy and dont want to spend the money. If the dhs forces them the same way they force the Auto Industry in the 1960s, they will kick and scream, then comply. Time. Tine we are at we could really go on for max andhalf hour, but dave, thank you. This has been a tremendously fruitful discussion. Max, as you pointed out, how the dhs can help to meet them. , one ofd it over to tom the codirectors of the project. Tom come over to you. Tom thank you very much, clementine, and david max, for starting us off. I want to thank our senior Advisory Board, secretaries chertoff, napolitano and the others for their guidance and leadership. Thanks also to the more than 100 homeland and National Security experts who helped us formulate our ideas, many of whom are in the virtual audience today. So i really do want to say thank you very much. This really was an enormous team effort to be able to put together the report, the full version of which is now on the Atlantic Council website. What we wanted to try to do first was to take a step back and take a perspective from january 2021, regardle