Welcome everyone to the Modern War Institute podcast. This week on the podcast, we're going to talk about something a little bit different than we normally talk about.

This week we're talking about zombies.

Well, kind of. We'll be talking about zombies as a metaphor.

Insert real plague here.

What we're really talking about is how small things in seemingly insignificant places can turn into big global security issues.

We're talking about connecting the dots and understanding the big picture.

Bring people together in a connection and see how what could be an environmental

crisis or a medical crisis or a social crisis of today

will become a national security crisis tomorrow.

That's Max Brooks, author of the bestseller, World War Z.

He'll help us connect those dots.

So stay tuned while we talk about interconnectedness, security, and zombies.

This is the Modern War Institute podcast.

So how do we get from zombies to real world security?

Well, today on the podcast we're talking to Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide, World War Z, and Harlem Hell Fighters,

and now a new non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute.

When I sat down with him, I asked him, why zombies?

Yeah. I mean, I think what zombies, what's great about zombies is they are big. You know,

it's to my knowledge, other than maybe an alien invasion, it's the only sort of mega crisis that you can do. I mean, we grew up on Godzilla movies, but the guys who made them, those were the

generation that grew up being bombed by B-29s, and they couldn't make a movie about being

bombed. So they invented Godzilla, and it was a way to talk about what it was like to live

under that kind of unstoppable terror coming to their shores. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer

...