What a Counter-Terrorism Expert Taught Me About Empathy
We rarely associate counter-terrorism experts with champions of empathy, but perhaps we should. Recently, I interviewed Daveed Gartenstein-Ross for Quality Matters, a podcast that asks industry experts to share their lessons for pursuing quality. Some of that conversation’s most powerful insights were not about militarily pushing back against violent extremism (a topic Gartenstein-Ross has written about at length) but about building soft skills and better relating with one another. He’s advised government officials and written extensively on jihadist networks, but it’s the virtual worlds he builds that may hold the greatest hope for the future.
Gartenstein-Ross is the founder of Valens Global, a risk consultancy, and more recently, Valens Games, an initiative using immersive simulations to teach strategy. At first blush, it sounds like something out of the Pentagon or a defense contractor’s think tank, and to be fair, the simulations are used in those spaces. Despite his history in global threat analysis, when discussing Valens Games, Gartenstein-Ross quickly veered into territory that is relevant for anyone thinking about relationship communication, the future of education, and even democracy itself.
From Counterterrorism to the Classroom
With all due respect to my 350-day streak on Duolingo, that type of “gamification” is a glorified set of digital flashcards compared to what Gartenstein-Ross conceived while teaching at Georgetown University. To force students to grapple with real-time decision-making in a low-stakes environment, he started building interactive simulations. These games aren’t built around a topic, say a quiz game to learn U.S. capitols. Instead, these “serious games” are story-rich, complex worlds where participants are rewarded for taking a careful look at the game’s component parts. A student might take on the role of a national security advisor or foreign diplomat to navigate a crisis in the near future.
In one game, for example, students might play as competing governments trying to form a climate alliance, while a third team spreads disinformation to sabotage negotiations. The simulation runs on a platform that feeds participants breaking news, intelligence briefs, and communications—all fabricated, but all eerily plausible. Teams must react, make decisions under pressure, and face the consequences.
“It’s like a four-dimensional choose-your-own-adventure,” he told me. “But instead of reading about history, you’re writing it—badly or brilliantly--depending on your choices.”
The goal isn’t to game the system. It’s to understand it—and, more subtly, to understand one another.
Simulations That Build Empathy
Eleanor Ross (no relation to Gartenstein-Ross), the Director of Game Design at Valens and a recent Duke University graduate, experienced this firsthand. As a student, she played one of the simulations and led a national delegation in a fictionalized crisis. She found herself not only immersed in the mechanics of policy but drawn into the human psychology behind every interaction.
“You have to think not just about your goals, but about what everyone else needs, fears, and wants,” she said. “You’re constantly asking: Why are they behaving this way? What are they protecting?”
This, she realized, was the development of cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s reasoning and motivations without necessarily agreeing with them. In an age of ideological silos and hyper-partisanship, it’s a skill that feels both endangered and essential.
For Gartenstein-Ross, cognitive empathy was baked into the design from the start. “I wanted students to feel the complexity of decisions. Not to moralize from a distance, but to sit in the messiness. Once you’ve lived through a simulation, you’re less quick to condemn, more inclined to understand.”
But in Valens’ world, empathy isn’t a feeling. It’s a faculty, one that must be exercised, sometimes under pressure. And like all forms of strength, it grows through use.
Rewriting the Role of Games
It’s important to note that these games are often set in the future. This helps them to avoid being deterministic. For instance, at some point in your formal education, you may have been assigned to a particular side of a historical policy debate.
As an adjunct professor I’ve had my American Government students debate the merits of political representation based on a state’s population vs geographic area. The problem with this approach is that we already know the outcome. The inability for students to be fully immersed is even more fraught with ethically challenging situations that have already been resolved (who among us wants to enter a hypothetical debate about chattel slavery in the 1850s?). Positioning simulations in the future allows a teacher to establish guardrails without pre-determining the outcome, and it allows students to engage in a low-stakes environment where they still feel their blood pressure rise while seated at the negotiating table with an uncooperative peer.
Valens Games’ “Providence” platform has been piloted with high schoolers, college students, and Department of Defense trainees. In all these cases, the results have been consistent: deeper engagement, improved problem-solving, and perhaps most importantly, a stronger sense of personal agency.
In one classroom survey, 30–40% of Duke students said the simulation was the most meaningful experience of their academic career. Many stayed hours after class, strategizing into the night—not for extra credit, but because they felt what all learners crave: engagement and agency.
Even as the world of higher education is embroiled in battles about the limits of speech and the proliferation of harmful ideas on campus, Eleanor Ross notes that college students report wanting two things from their classroom experience:
1. Connecting the classroom with the outside world, and
2. Getting to know fellow students better.
In an era when students’ highest form of interpersonal relationship is maintaining a “like streak” on social media, many long for something tactile. Simulations can teach people how to communicate more effectively, read a room, think about short- and long-term consequences, and reflect about how changes in their own behavior could have generated a different outcome.
Best of all, a well-crafted game gives students “[t]he sense that I could actually do something. That my voice mattered in solving real problems,” according to Ross.
The Broader Stakes
We often think of education as a defense against ignorance. But maybe it’s also a defense against cynicism and provincialism.
Our conversation concluded with discussion about artificial intelligence, agentic AI, and the skills that will most benefit humans in the years to come. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross worries, as many of us do, about our civic institutions buckling under the weight of complexity. But what he’s building is a quietly hopeful project: a way for people to understand each other more deeply, to make better decisions together, and to disagree without dehumanizing.
If, while educating the next generation of leaders, Gartenstein-Ross increases their capacity to explore difficult topics while simultaneously growing their propensity to humanize (not demonize) one another, he might usher in an early retirement for all the other counter-terrorism experts in the world.
Fingers crossed.