Episode 3: A Conversation with David Bray (Part Two)

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Insight brought to you by the team@ooda loop.com Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Oodacast. This is our second episode with Dr. David Bray of the Atlantic Council's Geotech Center. In this session, we want to dive a little bit deeper into the geopolitics associated with this current COVID 19 crisis and what it may mean for us in the future.

So welcome back, David, again, thanks for having me, Bob. Always great to be here with you.

So there's so many questions when you start thinking about the international world. And I think sometimes it's better not to make predictions but to ask questions so you can then collect information to test a theory out or look for new insights on what may happen in the future. And I'd just like to start with a few and see where you think the world is going because of this. Before the COVID 19 crisis hit, there was a wave in many countries of people call it nationalism. It is more about my country first, sometimes at the expense of others. And there was already that wave going on. Now with COVID there's a lot of reasons for people to lock down borders both inside their countries and between countries. And there's also a lot of stress when it comes to, you know, blaming each other. You know, this country did it, that country did it, this country could have fixed it. And all of that is very concerning. And so I wanted to ask your views overall on this trend towards nationalism and what the pandemic may have done for that.

Yes. So, Mike, and I love what you say about it. It's great to ask questions because you're absolutely right, any predictions we have, they're only based on what we know at the moment. And like you said, there'll be more data that we find and that will improve what we know and what we think. But that said, thinking about important questions regarding how nationalism might be impacted by COVID 19, you're absolutely right that we already had these trends going on. We also had, in my opinion, possibly correlated or maybe just parallel to this, increasing rises in the challenges of misinformation and misinformation not just associated with nationalism, but but misinformation associated with all sides of the political aisle in some respects, where people were increasingly dissatisfied in Europe and the United States and other parts of the world, including Australia, we've even seen as well, and Canada, to a degree with frustration with what they saw as the establishment, whether they were on the political left or right. And I think that was part of a larger Trend, which was globalization, frankly, did not benefit everybody. What the economists did not fully tell policymakers at the time is that yes, globalization will eventually rise. All boats, free trade and free markets will do that, but it takes time. And if you're in a country of a strong global currency, you'll see your manufacturing jobs, your manufacturing base leave your country until other countries around the world have a similarly strong currency. And that's just how economics plays itself out. And so what globalization probably got wrong was yes, free markets are good, yes, free trade is good. Yet the challenge is if you don't take the time to incubate education, incubate a skilled workforce, encourage entrepreneurship, encourage people to actually sort of contribute to that market, you will have parts that are left behind. And I actually had a conversation about two years ago with the chief economist for the bank of England who said, if there's anything we learned from Brexit, we should have asked the rural areas before we had a vote. And So I think COVID 19 is just now going to accelerate that dissatisfaction, because those places that were already not benefiting, mainly the rural areas, but a lot of subsections of urban areas as well, that were not benefiting from globalization yet are going to be now even more dissatisfied because the economy is suppressed. Who's going to think about them? And so you're absolutely right. With closed borders, is that going to result in, again, people sort of weaponizing the narrative of the virus, that it came from this country or it came from this location, it's your fault, or you're not going to be able to cross past that? And so what do we do about that? If this is the theory of the case, how do we explore it more? And how do we make sure we don't end up in a future in which we go backwards 50, 100 or 150 years in terms of progress as a connected planet? And I think that's where, again I keep on emphasizing with COVID 19 response, it's got to be the private sector working with the public sector, not just the United States, but around the world, because the private sector knows we all are better off if we're connected as a planet. And at the same time, maybe the private sector in the past wasn't thinking about these rural areas that were left behind or these urban subsections that were left behind as a result of globalization. And so maybe COVID 19 is an opportunity in the immediate response to think about how we can benefit everybody, not just a sub selected few, with what's going to be part of the economic recovery necessary here.

Right. And so you are at the Atlantic Council Geotech center, your very foundation was based upon. It's named after the Atlantic, and it kind of implies, you know, we're more than just North America. And at the time, it was very much a European focus. I'm sure that's why it was the Atlantic Council. Now, you read all your stuff. You are so global. You write about things going on on every continent, and you do track global things. So I know you're tracking all these issues, but back then, as you were being formed, NATO was starting to go strong, and NATO is still enduring and going strong. Will this put pressure on NATO itself to fragment that great alliance?

I think, if anything, we are definitely seeing the pressure because like you said, we're seeing a trend where borders are being closed. So what does that mean for the NATO alliance? You know, again, NATO has a thing called Article 5, which any member of NATO can say if they're having a need to defend that own nation, they can call on the other members of the alliance to help defend. And actually, we just saw. I think it was yesterday. It was either yesterday or before, but we saw Italy actually ask for assistance from NATO with the response to COVID 19. And we sometimes talk about COVID 19 as being a warlike event. So the question is, how will NATO respond and recognize the United States is part of NATO? Will nations that are already short staffed on hospital supplies, ventilators and doctors like that mobilize some of theirs to actually help out Italy? Or is this a case where it results in everybody going in it for themselves, which could actually be the death knell of NATO? And so I think that's a poignant thing we need to think about. I, for one, value our relationship. I think we are stronger together. And like you said, it's not just about just the Atlantic anymore. In fact, we've had conversations about whether we should change the Atlantic Council's name, but I'd refer to others on that. But, you know, thinking about South America, Africa, who is going to help these countries which will probably not be able to do the same response as what Europe, the United States is doing in terms of providing medical technologies and things like that, are we just going to leave them for themselves or is someone else going to step up and help them?

Yeah, these are all serious, serious issues. And now NATO, of course, includes the United States. There's another major organization there, the European Union, which is also under incredible pressure. What questions should we be asking ourselves there? Should it be, you know, Will other members peel off? Will the EU dissolve? Will it be relevant? What kind of questions do you think we should be asking there?

I think the first one we should ask is economic. I mean, I think if anything, at the end of the day, while EU is yes, technically a political organization, it was created to try and create cohesive economic strategy across Europe and to work together. And of course we saw with Brexit the conversation of where the UK did not want to be a part of that trade agreement alliance, be subject to that currency and things like that. So will when COVID 19 starts to move forward, will countries find that having the shared euro, maybe it benefits some members of the EU more than others? And will others want to peel off similar to the uk or will the EU display leadership in actually having a cohesive economic strategy across all those countries and, and will that attract investor confidence? I do feel like right now we need the G7, we need the G20 to step forward and say we need to do a cohesive economic uplift strategy, not just for ourselves, but for the world. And in that absence, there is no investor confidence. And so I would watch with the EU more on the economic side, which is what are they going to do about addressing financial support to rebuild their economy? Are they going to have a cohesive strategy or are countries going to figure out that they want to go back to their own currency? You're already seeing, not just in Europe and the United States too, people proposing, I'm not sure this is a good idea, but people proposing their own cryptocurrencies associated with localism with the response, because they don't trust necessarily what's going to be done with either national governments, federal governments, or the EU when it comes to currencies. I worry that we may find that the future of money gets very chaotic indeed. Post COVID 19.

Right, fascinating. I would also like your views on intelligence. I know you've been deeply involved with the community. You've helped advise the community on R and D strategies, for example, had a lot of professional time involved in the intel community. You know it very well. I'm wondering how their missions are being impacted by this. First of all, we know a lot of analysts are being told work from home. Well, you can't access all information from home currently, so analysts still have to go in to do that. And that's just one aspect. And then if you think about the human intelligence, human intelligence, you're supposed to be out there meeting people and interacting with them up close for long durations to create assets. So that's going to be impacted. And then I just wonder what is this going to do to America's ability to understand what adversaries are up to?

Yes. Well, and I think implicit in your question, you have the same concern I do, which is we are going to increasingly not be as aware and we already are seeing actions being done by those that we have disagreements with. I'll say politely where there's been both flybys and as well as ship approaches involving Taiwan by a large nation of 1.4 billion people. And so the concern is with COVID 19 as it continues. And I think it is going to be, unfortunately, a longer haul than some are claiming to get through this, that there are going to be those that see this as an opportunity to do strategic grabs, much like what we've seen before, say in Crimea or in Georgia and things like that, where it's something that's not major, but it's enough that it's been worth the power grab. And it's something that's done so quickly that the world can't come back and repeal it. They can't move it back. And so it's sort of like death by a thousand cuts. And so I worry about what we might see in Eurasia, what we might see in Southeast Asia, but also what might happen in Africa if things really start getting a little bit more turbulent there or even in South America. And so are we going to see those that think that right now everybody is so focused on a COVID 19 response that they can do these strategic grabs and that the intelligence community will not necessarily be able, even if they do find out about it, they'll find about it too late. They won't have the early warning signals to actually mobilize an appropriate response. And or our own Department of Defense might not be able to mobilize a response to repeal it and push it back. The other thing I would actually say is we have early indications and again, that country of 1.4 billion people that there may have been some cases where the Hong Kong protest where, you know, if they had done a crackdown on some of the dissenters before COVID 19, that would have created world ire. There's been a crackdown since because everyone's focusing on COVID 19. So that's just a small example. Now, I will say with the Atlantic Council, we are trying to engage everybody. And so I actually am supported by the Rockefeller foundation to have ongoing conversations with Chinese officials, not just in China. And now, obviously, we're going to be doing it by video. But we did have meetings with them both in Europe and in China. And now we're actually going to have conversations in India and Africa about China's approach to data and AI in each of these global regions. And that's just a recognition that if you don't talk to them and if you don't try to hear their views and what they're saying they're doing, then you can't find any common ground. And so even though there may be differences, and I know, I'm sure other nations see what the United States is doing and see it either in a poor light or think we've got not necessarily benign intent as well. And that's probably a misunderstanding. We need to recognize that it's what President Lincoln said, which is, I do not like that person. I must get to know them better. What we're trying to do is make sure we get to know what people are doing better.

Good. And I know as you do that you'll do it with your eyes wide open. That's one thing I know about you.

Eyes wide open. Yes.

Let me ask another question, and maybe this is a bit further away from your charter, but still, I'd like your view on this. Right now, there's 50 states in the United States of America. And for your lifetime. For my lifetime, it's always been that way, but it wasn't always 50 states. There used to be less. In the future, it might not be 50 states. There might be less, there might be more. And we're sure seeing this Covid crisis put a lot of pressure on. On the states. You know, just a few years ago, there was a movement in California to create a Northern California didn't take off, but still it was a movement before the crisis. And I just wonder if you have any thoughts on that dynamic. How many states do you think there will be going out of this crisis? 50? Less than 50 or more than 50?

That's a really good question. So, yes, you're right. I mean, California has had proposals to split into two. I think I even saw a proposal to split into three. And I think it was, I think, up until Bush 41, President Bush Sr. He was the last president to actually have lived in which there were multiple states at it in his lifetime. And so it's worth noting that, yeah, we're now facing a generation that's probably not aware of the number of states can change and can increase or as you said, possibly decrease. I would be surprised if they increase because I think, if anything, we're seeing the Challenges of mobilizing at scale is difficult in an increasingly connected world in which the good news is people are being empowered to do things that were only possible by large nation states 30 or 40 years ago. And I think that's impacting the national security community as a whole, public health community as a whole is you can do things now that were only possible by large nation states 30 or 40 years ago. Now, what does that mean for the future of open and free societies? I think the only way that we sort of get through this is we have to recognize you have to empower the edge. Otherwise, if you try and do things in a monolithic structure, it's really hard to create a cohesive set of goals across 300 million people, let alone 1.4 billion people. And you're usually going to end up with some people that are going to be dissatisfied significantly because you're not being able to set cohesive goals across them. So if I was to predict maybe the long term, maybe it's not immediately after COVID 19, but maybe the longer term is that we may see smaller regions and or states, not just the United States, but in parts of the world where they are able to focus on our immediate issues. But ideally what we do is we maintain the US's value, which is you can move freely across states that you don't have to show a passport to cross borders or things like that, that there is mobility. Now, I will say, as you mentioned before COVID 19, all the trends were going the opposite direction. Two years ago, 47.5% of all the jobs in the United States were created in just the top 10 most populous regions of the United States, which is very disproportionate. A year ago it was 49.5. So almost 50% of all the jobs were created in just the top ten most populous cities. And at the same time, we were at about a 40 year low in terms of mobility of people. And so those that were in areas that maybe were seeing jobs disappear, you would hope they would have the mobility to actually go where jobs were, but they were finding they couldn't. Whether it was because of cost or just their ties to their community or things like that, they were increasingly getting frustrated. Now, of course, obviously employment is going to change dramatically as a result of COVID 19. I think we may actually see a recalculation on some people's part about, yes, I like living in urban areas, that's where jobs are, or everything's close nearby me. But hey, everything's next close nearby me and so maybe I actually want to have some social distancing, dare I say it. And what does that mean for the future of suburbia as well as rural areas? The other thing I would say is that we've seen with the future of work, technologies that are accelerating. I actually have been working for a company called Nanotronics with the Atlantic Council, but other companies as well, where it's the ability to do things that used to require a centralized factory can now be done distributedly, whether they're in your home or they're in a local manufacturing base that maybe it can't do 100,000 parts, but it can do 1,000 or 2,000 on a daily basis instead. And so we're moving more to this distributed way of manufacturing, which is a good thing for rural areas and the country as a whole and the world. However, you need to have quality control, because at least when you had a centralized factory, you could actually check each of those parts and make sure the 100,000 had the same level of quality assurance. If you're doing distributed, how do you do quality control? Well, that's interesting, because computer vision, AI can actually watch what you're doing, whether you're doing it as a person or you're doing it as a machine, and watch each step. And if something actually falls out of sequence in terms of it wasn't done exactly right or something was off kilter, the machine can either a. The computer vision can actually say, okay, for this next step, here's how you compensate for it, or it can send alert and say, this is outside the normal tolerances. Yes, I know you were trying to help make N95 masks for others, but that one mask that you did, you did something wrong, put it to the side, because it's not at the level of quality assurance. And so this might be a future in which we produce things much more in a distributed fashion, which actually may uplift those parts of the country and still have quality assurance across them all.

Yes. Also sounds like a good way to improve agility of manufacturing. Like one day you are making filters, now you're making masks or whatever.

Yes. I actually think it's the future of intelligence and national security. I mean, think about, think about what if in the future, the Department of Defense, instead of having to ship something from a warehouse half a world away, can do, just in time, manufacturing for a part that they need for a ship or for a tank or something like that. Right.

David, I want to ask you another series of questions, and that is about biology. We've been writing@ooda loop.com about the biological sciences. And we write about that for a lot of reasons. One is we just knew there's going to be a lot of breakthroughs and, and there are. It's just an exciting area if you haven't been tracking that closely. And it's impacting a wide range of other industries besides just the biological sciences. For example, food production is being done better, there's medicine development and there's manufacturing of materials is being done better. And there's, you know, fuels can be developed through, you know, tailored life sciences. And there's just so many things going on now with this crisis, there's even more impact going to be made on biology, which I know is going to spin out into so many other sciences. But the first thing now is about health and outcomes and understanding how you beat this certain virus. But it seems like it's just going to be an explosion in other related health sciences and medicines and biology writ large. And do you have any views on the future of biology as a science and what it may do for us?

Yes. Well, I mean, it was back in the 90s when I was doing my undergrad degree was both computer science and biology and people said, why are you doing those two fields? They're not related. I'm like, I think they will be related.

Prescient.

So I think it's that is that the future of biology is increasingly doing things digitally in parallel, in series. Whatever you need to do to do massive simulations, maybe to find a new molecule to actually serve as a antigen to a pathogen or a new way of actually creating a new therapy, you'll do it digitally because you can do it much faster and then you can sequence it or develop it in the laboratory physically. And it's going to be this bouncing back and forth between what I call the in situ world of biology and the in silica world of computer science. And they're going to be bouncing back and forth. It is actually I still have the slides from a pitch that I made in 2013 and then I did it again in 2016 and again in 2019. About we could, this was a pitch to DARPA that we could develop an immune system for the planet. And what do I mean by that? We actually now have the. And with some more R and D, we have the capability through data analytics, through Internet of things sensors, IoT sensors to always be sensing what's in the air, what's in the water, what's in the ground, and to do so in a fashion that's Anonymized. So we're not, we're not identifying specific people, but we're doing this to monitor what's going on. And if we see a novel new pathogen, whether it's viral, bacterial, whatever, the sensors could actually extract it and start to sequence it and say, what's different about this DNA that I haven't seen before? And then actually start running it about and saying how similar is it the things I have seen before? And do I actually have therapies that could come to bear to help this out? If not, can I start running these computer models on these high performance machines to identify new therapy? And this is all happening in a autonomous fashion behind the scenes around the world, which alleviates some of what we've seen with COVID 19, which is nations may be reluctant to admit they have a outbreak problem until it's too late in some respects. And this could be going on in the background. It could also be something for force protection with the Department of Defense. You run it around your military bases. I raise that because we now are at this front hold and what you said, with all these advances, with what's possible, we're going to be able to have increasingly tailored precision medicine, which is a great thing. But I think this is going to create also a whole set of challenges for national security, because as you and I know, congratulations, there's personalized medicine. Oh, wait, there's personalized medicine, which could also be personalized poison. And who's going to be the person that's going to respond? Or how are you even going to know if someone manufactures something that gives you and I Bob the cold, but maybe somebody else, it makes them deathly ill because it was tailored just for them. And the way they actually did the targeted attack was they shook their hand. And in shaking their hand, they got their DNA and they were able to extract that. So what do we do to protect your DNA to make sure it's not an attackable surface? What do we do to make sure that if something is targeting just you or targeting just a subset of a certain type of people, whether it's they're trying to take them out for genocide purposes or other weaponization purposes, we know about it. What field is that? And is the future of law enforcement being able to actually assess a crime scene and say this was a case in which something was targeted to the person? So I don't want to dwell on the pessimistic side because at the end of the day, I'm an optimist. And I think most of These technologies will be used for good or for mundane purposes. But we do need to get ahead of the curve now and say in a future in which precision and personalized medicine is coming at us very, very fast, one, how do we make sure everybody has access to it? And then two, how do we make sure it's not abused or misused as much as possible?

Right, great. That's good context. And it does make me feel that although I don't know with precision what's in the future, this is going to be a coming age of biological sciences. And I think that I'm just certain in we all need to pay more attention to the biological sciences. I want to ask you another thought and that is. So if you look at the long term like you can see a chart like from low to high of the stock prices and if you look at the 30 year view, this is just a little blip, you can see a similar chart that kind of goes the opposite way of going down of people in poverty in the world for 30 years. This has been 30 years of just great prosperity for humans. And now we have a tiny little blip here. I hope it is a tiny blip. When you take that long term view, we are really on a progress forward. We are making a lot of progress. So now things are bad because of the crisis, but I feel like it's like somebody's holding a balloon underwater and they're going to let go of it and it's going to go right back up. Because you know that's our destiny is to keep making progress. The stock market will go up, our health will go up, our productivity will go up. Businesses will be doing business now. I want that to happen sooner, Vice later. I really want to reboot the economy quickly and I'm sure you do too. So what I want to do is ask your advice for any of our OODA loop members. What should they be doing right now to prepare to accelerate their business as soon as the economy comes back? Because I think that's a very patriotic thing to do. Let's get that GDP back up there. Let's start hiring more people. Let's get the economy going again. So what would you advise our members to do? To do their part to get the economy going right.

And I agree with you. I mean I think what we're seeing is going to be a temporary lull. It is not the end, despite what people say. And I do think we need to recognize that all of us as humans, in some respects we're biologically we have a Preference, unfortunately, biologically, to dwell more on the pessimistic side of things versus the optimistic side. We feel loss much more than we feel gain. And so you're absolutely right that we will get through this. And what can individual businesses do? I think, if anything, again, it's reassessing. Why or what do you want to be doing as a business? Go back to first principles. Why are we here and what do we want to do? And then reevaluate, because it may very well be what you were doing was appropriate for the 2015 period, or the 20, even the 2019 period, but it's not appropriate for the COVID 19 period, because we are moving, as I mentioned, already moving to more distributed ways of doing technology, distributed ways of doing biological sciences, things like that. And we need to rethink new models. And so, if anything, I almost think about it as. Not that we're all being sent to our rooms because of bad behavior, but we've all got this chance to reflect and say, okay, the world is changing. It was already changing. So it's not just COVID 19. It was already changing. How do we want to operate as a business in this new world? Can I come up with new ways of serving people that are going to be in isolation for a while or need to have things delivered to them, or. Or I need to have services that are much more virtual. For example, think about conferences. How many of us spend a lot of time flying to a conference, being in a hotel? Well, what if somebody could improve the conference experience, where a day or two before your conference event happens, you get something in the mail, it's an Oculus Rift or VR extended reality headset, or maybe it's even a hologram. And it comes also with your beverage of choice that you selected online. It's an alcoholic beverage, beer, wine, whatever. And during the event, you put on the extended reality experience, or you watch the hologram, you have a drink with others, and you socialize as if you're there. But the nice thing is, in the virtual world, you can immediately jump to any of your friends. So I don't have to look through the crowd of 15,000 people to find Bob. I can just say, where's Bob? And send you a note and say, can we meet up in this virtual room? And it could actually. Or it doesn't have to be a room. It could be. We could pick our setting of choice. It could be a volcano or whatever. And so take this as a chance to reimagine your business model amid all this and hopefully what's going to be happening in the background? The other advice I would have for world leaders is yes, we need to actually put currency to work, we need to actually put funds to work to actually help bring back this disruption. But make sure you're putting it to people to work. You're not just throwing it out there, but you're actually saying, where do I want to place my strategic bets? I want to place strategic events on the advances of the biosciences. Think about cybersecurity. As you and I know, cybersecurity that remains a growth industry because unfortunately the threats aren't going away. I mean, we're doing our best to keep up with them, but it's not going away. Maybe actually what we need to start thinking about is what can we learn from biology in terms of how does biology evolve an immune system and responses like that to also inform what we do with cyber security? So it's actually advancing that state, so it's actually creating eventually maybe just like an immune system for the planet, an immune system for organizations or enterprises and what advances will happen there and can we do that in a distributed fashion? I raise that because I think just like you look at what happened with World War I, you look at what happened with World War II. Yes, those were awful events and they did have short term economic downturns and there was huge loss of life. Hopefully that won't happen here. But what they also did was they actually cut through some of the BS that's present when we're in peacetime. Because there is unfortunately a lot of noise at the time and misinformation. But when there comes a clarity of purpose to focus on how do we get through this, that helps those in business, that helps those in world leadership positions, that helps those who are innovators in any part of the world and in the public be able to crystallize their thoughts to say, how can I make the world better as a result? And so I would say for all the OODA Loop members, the ask is what can you do, whether it's locally or globally in your activities to help make the world better and rethink your business models to actually make that happen.

Great. Thanks, David. David, I really appreciate the time today. This was fantastic. So thanks.

Thank you, Bob, as always and thanks to UDA Luna membership, I would still continue to extend the offer, which is what things do they think, whether it's with OODA Loop or with the Atlantic Council, we should be looking at in the area of new technologies and data benefiting people prosperity and peace. If you were to try and actually sort of plant that flag and say these are the pragmatic, implementable choices and things we need to do, what does that flag look like for those that value a free and open world? Great.

Thanks, David.

Thank you Bob. Thanks for listening to this. OODA Loop Production for the latest analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.oodaloop.com.