Lawfare Archive: Juliette Kayyem on Dealing with Disasters

Malay, all the redness of longevity is from longevity. There are no more than our body.

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[MUSIC] I'm Sarah Loveridge. Interim at Loveridge with an episode

“from the Loveridge archive for September 5th, 2026.”

On August 26, flash floods hit Nepal near its border with China, waping out entire villages and crossing over 1,000 deaths. Early in the summer, wild hires swept through France and Spain. Experts warn that such natural disasters are likely to become more common in the coming years,

caused in part by man-made climate change. For today's archive, I chose an episode of March 29, 2023, in which David Priest spoke with Juliet Chiam about her book.

The devil never sleeps, learning to live in the age of disasters.

They discussed traditional approaches to disasters, had a prepare and respond, and what we can learn from previous disasters ranging from airplane closures to wildfires. [MUSIC] I'm David Priest, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, March 29th, 2022.

We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we still fumble when they occur, and we always seem a step behind. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal

to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do. Juliet Chiam has just written a book about it all, called the devil never sleeps, learning to live in an age of disasters. Juliet is a lecturer at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government

in a CNN national security analyst, and I sat down with her in the virtual jungle studio to talk about it all. We talked about the traditional focus of the disaster framework, consequence minimization, the paradox of preparedness,

and a variety of disasters in what we can learn from them, ranging from the why to K incident, to Super Bowl 47, to the shipping incident in the Suez Canal back in 2021. There's a lot here about disasters and how to recover from them, and how to deal with them in a way that stops the bleeding

and keeps them from getting worse even as they're occurring. It's the law fair podcast, March 29th, Juliet Chiam on dealing with disasters.

You have a remarkable new book out called the devil never sleeps,

learning to live in an age of disasters, and it really turns our thinking around about thinking about catastrophes and accomplishing a couple of things with it, and I wanna talk through that with you.

“But to do so, I think we need to start out with”

an understanding of what the traditional focus of crisis managers and planners has been. What is the usual way of looking at disasters? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm a listener, first time caller, second time caller actually,

but just thrilled to be here and to talk about a book I've been thinking about for 20 years, but have written in the last year. So the framework that you talk about and it's rather simplistic. I mean, we're sort of, I often say in the book,

or write in the book, you know, this is not rocket science, is that in disaster management, we divide the world into two phases, what we call left and right of boom. Now, the boom is agnostic, right?

It could be the cyber attack, the pandemic, climate event, terrorist attack, whatever it is. We're sort of agnostic on that. It's just anything bad. And left a boom is really the investments that we put

in both preventing and protecting ourselves to avoid the disaster or catastrophe. Right of boom is what we do to recover from it. And what that means, I think, for readers and the American public,

we tend to think of success is generally viewed as stopping, the bad thing from happening, and failure is when it can't. And the goal of the book is to rethink and reframe how we think about disasters and also success. So you're not saying that we shouldn't try to predict disasters,

that we shouldn't try to plan for catastrophes with a mind towards avoiding them. We should still do that. Yes. But we shouldn't be putting all of our eggs in that basket because guess what, there's going to be a crisis.

There's going to be a catastrophe and we can't avoid them all. Is that right? That's exactly right. So one tentative title, one stage was assumed the boom, but it was too hard to explain.

I'll explain the present title later. But yeah, exactly. So we need now to prepare for disruptions at moment of the boom, as a common phenomenon, rather than the surprise factor, or the O-We failed factor.

“And view success is whether those preparations for the boom,”

for the inevitable, as I think the right framework led to less harm, whether those preparations actually led to less harm and destruction, then might otherwise have occurred. So, and I tend to talk in bulk, and it's not that I'm not sympathetic, these are just numbers.

But as you and I talk, we are likely in the next couple weeks

to hit a million Americans dead from the pandemic,

that is a horrific number. But no one who knew that the boom was coming, believed that the number would be zero, let alone probably even a hundred. But the difference between a million dead,

and if we had done this a lot better, a hundred thousand, that is significant, right? These are real numbers. And the book takes us through centuries of disasters and crisis to show what went wrong and also importantly,

what went right, that helped to mitigate those harms. In the age we live in now, where it's not just because of climate change, although that's clearly relevant, but our globalization, our connectivity, cyber, pandemics, everything, and the pace and speed of what we're encountering,

focusing on right of boom investments, that moment of will save lives and will reorient our focus.

“I think in important ways so that we can judge success differently.”

You know, I think it's so fascinating that you bring up the pandemic case

first and actually refer to it at several places in your analysis,

because if you reflect back to the coverage in February and March of 2020, which I know you remember well because you were involved in a lot of the analysis at the time, it was breaking news our long coverage when there were the first cases identified in the U.S. and when there were deaths in the U.S. that was a large figure on the screen.

I think of all three major cable networks. Yeah. And as that number went up day by day and it was, oh my God, seven Americans have died. There was definitely this attitude of prevention.

How do we prevent it from becoming a pandemic? Yeah. And now we're talking, what is it now? We're still averaging something in the last few weeks, close to a thousand deaths a day, and no one's talking about that.

And yeah, yeah, that's because there are other crises in the world like invasions of European countries. Got it. But even before the invasion, it's almost like because of all the attention was paid on the, how do we prevent it?

“And as it's happening, what could we have done to prevent it?”

Yeah. That we've worn out our ability to focus on how do we actually deal with it and prevent it from getting worse while it's happening? Exactly. It says, it's like, oh, okay, well, we failed, right?

No, no, no, there's a difference between failing of a million dead and failing of 100,000 dead,

whatever our number is. And it's that binary notion of sort of disasters, right? I mean, it says it's either they're good or bad, right? And you know, I live in the grace you live in the grace that what you're trying to do is sort of reduce the consequences.

So I have some wonky terms in the book. But I talk about sort of just consequence minimization. It does matter, right? It does matter if you can minimize what the Haitians call. And I describe in the book what are called stupid deaths, right?

Those deaths that didn't have to occur if only you had done x, y, and z. And I go through x, y, and z in the book, and I'm a generally happy person and optimistic. But and part of it, I think, is because looking at all these disasters, right?

And what you realize is that while each of them is unique, right?

“They're all follow their own patterns that really the consequences tend to be the same.”

And therefore the solutions are generally the same. And I wanted to figure out that connective tissue of all of these disasters. I start with Greek mythology and the Trojan Horses to surf side. I make it all the way to surf side. And what are those points of commonality that will make disasters sort of oddly familiar

given again that we always exactly like that we always seem surprised.

And then what it happens were like oh yeah, that was too bad. Never again. That's never again is a, you know, really is a hard promise to keep. You mentioned the concept of stupid deaths. And I want to be clear, you're not saying that these are stupid people making stupid choices. But there are consequences of a system of reaction to a crisis.

So it is not the tornado outbreak. It's not the direct deaths from the tornado. It's the deaths from starvation because food can't get into the disaster zone. Is that right? That's exactly right. And we can learn from those deaths.

So one of the interesting, you know, I always say one of the interesting.

I find it interesting because I read the book. But you know, so one of our obligations in disaster management is not simply to say what people died, but to also figure out how they died. And as importantly, sort of why did this person die and not that person? So in the pandemic, for example, you know, vaccination is a sort of telling metric, right? And so or this person was, you know, too close to the, in an earthquake, this person was,

“was too close to the building. That's why they died. And that's sort of, that's really our obligation.”

And so one of the interesting statistics coming out of U.S. of the U.S. is hurricane fatality. So we've gotten so good at hurricane prediction and hurricane preparedness and management, especially in areas in the Gulf area. But we still lose too many people each year. But we're not losing them from hurricanes. We're losing them because the resources are often not being delivered. The preparedness isn't there. The recoveries too slow so that at least in the

case of hurricanes, what's happening is people are dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because they set up their own generator. So most U.S. deaths related to hurricanes and blizzard now are related to carbon monoxide. Well, that's a good thing to know because now, you know, when I plan for the, when someone, you know, public official plans for the next hurricane season or or or blizzard, you're, you're focused on that education and communication, which is what you started to see

in particular in areas that get hit by hurricanes. There are much more focused on those generators because people know what to do, you know, stay home or or evacuate. And to focus on that kind of

“factor, avoiding the so-called stupid deaths, you, you need to accept that prevention will fail,”

that crisis will happen. But you also recommend a couple of things that I want to talk through in a little more detail. You, you talk about establishing mechanisms to listen and communicate as the disaster actually unfolds. You talk about creating structures to enforce for lack of a better phrase unity of effort to respond to crises. So I want to start walking through some of that, but beginning, beginning where that left of boom kind of hits the boom, talk about the

paradox of preparedness and how that can get in the way of this kind of planning. It is a challenge. I mean, you know, this coming from the intelligence world as well. It's a challenge of our professions that the better that you do, the likelihood that the consequences are less than what you were warning people about. And then they say what the heck were you worried about. So that's the preparedness paradox, right? That people will not get that it was the very

investments in communication, situational awareness, whatever it is that made the disaster less so

or less bad as I technically say in the book. And so this first came up in the Y2K incident or

moment. This is when the computers were shifting from December 31st, 1999 to January 1st, 2000, when computers were first built. They were, for whatever reason, they couldn't conceive of the world of the year 2000. They were not programmed to have two zero at the front. And there was a worry that without significant investments that the computers literally would crash. And these are computers controlling our aviation and rail and banking systems. And I would say you're even

lowballing that there to say that it was a worry. Having lived through that, it was omnipresent in the year before, especially, the idea was that this could be like a zombie apocalypse movie,

of government offices and individuals did take proper steps. So our memory of it is very different

than what it felt like a few months before. Exactly. And so because of the successes, because of that preparedness, the things that you were doing, the billions of dollars that were put into sort of reprogramming, there were little blips here in the areas like a ticketing station in Australia, it goes down or something like that. But nothing of the magnitude that got people focused on it. So almost immediately a new narrative form that people like you and me and others

were overly worried or panicked. And so that becomes the preparedness paradox. We have to

“constantly fight against that. That's why we have to be in a stage of sort of perpetual preparedness”

because now, you know, we're not going to give and be given a date in time. It is any potential moment

you're going to encounter the boom and the good news is because I always like to focus on the good

news is these these preparedness efforts are noable now. They will not stop the bad thing from happening. I want people like you and the climate people and everyone, people who are who by whose careers may be more focused on left side of the boom to succeed. But then you do want these fail-say systems in place to stop the cascading losses, the stupid desks, all the sort of necessaryness. So that's exactly right. And the only way to do that is to accept, as you said at

the beginning, is to accept the inevitability of the boom. I give a lot of examples from both my public sector life and my private sector life. I do a lot of consulting. And I one of my favorite

examples of just sort of, you know, responsible people, not seeing how irresponsible they are is I

do a lot of training or board briefing. And one of the CEOs of a Fortune 200 company. So this guy is not an idiot. I asked him casually how often do you see your COO and he says multiple times a day. And I said well what about your CFO? He says about chief financial officer, about twice a week and

“I said your lawyer, he goes when I have to. And I said what about your chief security officer?”

And he says to me without any sense of anything, right? He says well he's former FBI. He knows what he's doing. And I'm like no, exactly. Like that would be intolerable about a budget or operations or law. So this is a book. Someone described it as chatty, which I viewed as a compliment. And I want average readers who are living a world in which they know there's more disasters to also have a much greater sense of what the profession looks like. That's all we are. We're just a

profession. We're not, you know, it's not anything specialized and to, you know, open the curtain to that profession so that so that they can see both their responsibility within it, but also also how it works. Well, I certainly felt that while reading it and it took me back some 20 years to the period before September 11th when I was at CIA and working in counterterrorism. And I can't tell you how many times. I mean, I literally can't because my memory is fuzzy from lack of sleep and

stress. How many times we would issue warnings, threat warnings, due to some high quality terrorism related intelligence. Sometimes exquisite intelligence coming in that was talking about a likely terrorist attack. And sometimes we had a limited sense of geography that they were talking about a particular country, often in the Middle East, sometimes a particular facility. Sometimes a particular timeframe without that geographic narrowing, occasionally both, but usually

not. And we would issue a warning. And time after time, we would have depending on the nature of the sourcing and the specificity of the threat. We would have embassies shutting down or measures taken to harden the defenses to mix up the security routine around the certain facility. And the attack wouldn't happen. And what happens when you do that five times? Well, that paradox of preparedness kicks in, right? Which is people say, well, you're warning all the

time that something's going to happen. And it hasn't happened. And you would just want to bang people's heads against the wall and say, do you realize that you took measures because of the threat reporting, which then changed the actual trajectory of that timeline in the universe so that the bad guys didn't attack because of the very defenses you took. That's a hard message to get through

“until something happens like 9/11 and then the questions are, well, why didn't you do more to warn us?”

Exactly. So I understand the frustration and the book spoke to me, like I'm sure it does too many people in terms of that feeling of the misunderstanding between communicating the threat

Right? It's again, like what we were saying earlier is just this binary notion, right?

“Did it happen or did it not happen? And there's a gazillion things that are at play on both left and”

right side of boom, of which we have agency over. And that, I hope that is a way in which my book is not fatalistic, but at least empowering one of the one of the things I realize. And when you

write your books, you probably go back and go, where did that word come from? And so I had never

looked up. The word disaster. I've been in this field for at least since Hurricane Katrina. I started off in counterterrorism and then my focus now is more on, you know, all hazards, any boom stuff. But the etymology is fascinating, isn't it? Yeah, it all hazards, right? It's any boom. And so this of course signifies a negative force and then this will be obvious to people now that I break it down and then astro means star. So that's implying it implies or makes you think

that a disruptive event occur only because of the stars, you know, only because the stars were

“aligned against us, that's how people traditionally thought about it. So think of star-crossed”

lovers. And it's so passive, right? And I think it wrongly excuses us from the obligation to plan

for failure, because we do have agency. And, you know, we just, we are despite our daily attempts to prove otherwise, like a species worth fighting for, right? You know, so let's do it, right? You know, we know these bad things are going to happen. And so we started talking about what some of those things are, but obviously is the preparedness is a key factor on communication, on structure, on reporting, chains, and things like that. In terms of the communication,

you make the point that communication during a crisis, both in terms of information gathering, that will be triggered and followed through the entire crisis is important as well as the awareness being shared with all relevant parties. Yeah. Reading that section of the book was was almost chilling because you didn't know that Russia was going to invade Ukraine at the time that your, your book was coming out. And yet you wrote this, which strikes me as extremely

relevant to a Vladimir Putin situation right now. You wrote that any institution, big or small, can build a communication system that absorbs and processes information successfully during a crisis. And you write how to do so. Don't quote other information. Our comfort zone has to be gloom and doom. This rather admittedly dire information flow has to be embraced, accepted, if there's going to be any chance for it to be acted upon. And what we're hearing instead

from Russia is in a case where without knowing what's in Vladimir Putin's head, we can safely assume that the military progress is not what he anticipated when he ordered the invasion. We're hearing from people like the former foreign minister of Russia saying that Putin's spy chiefs and security officials would sooner overthrow Putin than deliver bad news to him, that the culture is so averse to giving him the objective truth during a crisis that he is not

getting the kind of information flow that you are directly calling for during a crisis here. And I'm wondering what how this crisis fits in with other natural disasters and the full range of potential catastrophes to show you that building in those processes of information gathering

“and dissemination of information are so crucial. It is exactly right. I had sort of forgotten”

that and I'm a little bit overwhelmed by it when you think about what's happening in Russia, obviously, I've chosen aside. I'm not here to make it better for Putin. But when I wrote that in the context, just to say how common this is of what Russia's experience in the context of our own disaster here, the Challenger disaster in 1986, which I tell the story of a contractor who knew who literally knew, like knew exactly what was not going to hold, it's called the O-Ring because

it had the temperature was too cold, it's technical, but it had basically, it was not going to

be nimble enough for the flight. He refused to sign the final go document, ready to fly, ready to launch document. He's overruled because NASA does not want to hear it because Ronald Reagan, there's a teacher on the shuttle that was a big deal. Ronald Reagan is set to give the state of the union while the Challenger is in the air so they didn't want any more delays. And you kind of think, you know, you're reading the story and you're like, not only did they know what were they thinking,

And I see that a lot with Russian and the thing I want to highlight here is information,

you know, if I were his strategist, right, put me in his shoes. So information is an

“important because because you just need to know it's because it drives resources. So if you're”

putting in your being and you have a better understanding of what you're about to encounter in Ukraine, which is, you know, clear signs that this is a country prepared to defend itself and not ready to fall to its knees. And you would not be seeing the logistics challenges that you're seeing with the Russian army. There's so many ties to my book of what's happening, but, you know, one specific example, all sorts of logistics challenges and wars are one or

lost on logistics, but one story that is coming out of Ukraine is that the Russian soldiers, not only don't have MREs, meals ready to go, they don't have turnicic kits, turnic kits are like your basic feature of modern warfare. And we've we learned this in the United States after the during the wars in Iraq, in which we got much more sophisticated, the Pentagon did in terms of wow, we too many of these soldiers are dying from wounds that they didn't have to die from of

only we trained non-medic soldiers. We used to have here in this country, used to have such a formalized vision of battlefield medicine. We literally even during Vietnam would take a bleeding

soldier to attend or to a medical facility. It's not doable in Iraq. And so at first,

“interestingly enough, if you want to talk about the boom at first, the Pentagon invested in”

all this fortified armor and fortified gear for the soldiers and in the hopes that the IEDs wouldn't get them. All they kept getting them. And then the Pentagon pivoted and said, well, we have to actually think about right a boom that you will have injured soldiers from IEDs, but we won't tolerate stupid deaths, so to speak. And so you saw this total change in turn-a-kit training and kits and blood-conning devices. Absolutely normal for any modern army

and the fact that the Russians don't have it is a sign that they did not think that they would

be fighting urban warfare. And that's just one of a million pieces of evidence of why communication

“opening up to the outsider to the naysayer is absolutely essential. Once again, I'm not,”

I'm not his advisor, but you would not be seeing these challenges with a with a with a greater situation or awareness of what was happening on the ground. I'm talking about the smart kit of my own, a specialist for automatic equipment and a number of them. It's an algorithm or not. It includes either a u-roming, or in the shitheads. You bring up the NASA case with the Challenger Explosion, which is, if not the most studied

disaster, it's one of the most studied because the documentation is there. Like you said, we have the employee reports and all of that. But yet that lesson wasn't learned by many others. And we can talk about cases for, and I'm thinking right now of, you know, you don't put in the o-ring under these conditions, especially when this expert says you really can't, just like you shouldn't build a nuclear plant in a tsunami zone. And yet, planners in Japan went ahead and did

that. What are the, what are the dynamics that that lead to that? Is it cultural? Is it organizational? Is it political? Or a combination of those that lead people to go ahead and make similar mistakes in different domains? It is because we're not talking. I mean, part of the goal of this book, of course, is that we're just not talking about ways in which we can fail safer. And so the Fukushima is one of my favorite examples in the way horrible things are favorite examples. But because I

think there is an alternative narrative of what happened. This was just to remind listeners in 2011

nuclear facility. So when you talk about history, I really do try to give some history to these

disasters. Japan's interesting, it really had decided made a policy decision early on that it did not want to be an energy-import country. And so it built its own energy, satisfies its own energy needs through nuclear power. The problem was, of course, Japan's also the only country that has suffered two nuclear attacks by us in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So they were only able to do that politically by essentially selling the government and the industry selling to the public and to their

employees, this idea of perfect safety, right? That we didn't have to worry about failure because failure wouldn't happen. We had enough safeguards in left-of-boom. Well, fast-forward nuclear facilities are built in areas where they had been warned not to not to be built. There were stones left behind from a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago that have said do not build below these levels

“but they built. And I'm trying not to be too blameworthy in the book because I think there's other”

books that can do that. This I sort of take the world as it is. So yeah, they built. They built below where they were more into build. But the counter story to Fukushima is actually,

there was a nuclear facility down the street. Onagawa, we never hear of the success stories built

equally like Fukushima, hit harder. It was closer to the epicenter, also suffered from the tsunami, but their team for variety of reasons had planned to fail safer. When they first heard the alerts, all sorts of actions were put into place. They had a delegated management system. So culturally in Japan, you tend to have to go to headquarters. Well, you can't do that in real time during crisis. The response teams in Onagawa were empowered to respond in real time. They shut the facility

down in time. There was some damage. There was no radioactive release. So here I have two nuclear facilities. One, this horror, Fukushima, that then creates a narrative that nuclear energy is

somewhat inherently unsafe. That if something bad happens, you can't stop the harm. But I've got

another story for you, which is down the street. Actually, they learned how to fail. They were hit. The tsunami came. The earthquake came. And they had practice for it. And there wasn't,

“you didn't have a worst case scenario there. And that's really important. As I said earlier,”

you want to know why people die, right? Or why fat things happen. And to know about the two nuclear facilities, then should change our narrative about how we think about nuclear energy, which should be, in my opinion, part of a conversation about green energy. And getting out of the dependence, for example, of Russian energy. Right. That's one of the things I like about your analysis, Juliette, is you don't just look at the disasters, which for all of their horror

are the shiny objects that people look at. So of course, you do highlight lessons from those disasters. But you also look at the, the dogs that didn't bark, right? The, the things that could have been worse. But in almost all those cases, what you're looking at is what happened to slow the cascading losses that happen after the boom, like you said earlier, stopping the bleed. How do you focus on not making things worse? Right. In your disaster response. And you have

a great story, which I had actually forgotten about. And it was great to hear it again, because you, you talk through what happened so that the effects of something going wrong

“did not go catastrophically wrong. And I'm thinking here of Super Bowl 47, I believe, in New”

Orleans, remind us of what happened, because everybody knew at the time what happened. And it could have been a true human tragedy with with stampeds and follow on events. But instead, it became an afterthought to people's cultural memory. So what happened and how did we avoid the worst scenarios? It's, it's exactly right. And it is, and you know, any opportunity to write about beyond say is an opportunity I'll take. But this was the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans. You just need her to blur

your book and you'll be in your book. Oh my god, if she, if I could get her to Twitter, I should probably tack. But, and just going back. So this is the super dome that everyone remembers during her Cain's Katrina in 2005. This is where, you know, people from New Orleans went to go evacuate all the electricity was down horrible things were happening in the facility. The deprivations of water and sanitation and safety. Just a horror story. It gets rebuilt. And in the

hurricane. So what do you want to do in that instance? You want to make sure that you can stop

as you noted the cascading losses. So if I have, you know, that there's no last line of defense. And even if you think you have a last line of defense, actually look for more. And so they built and under with two, what we, you know, two feeds is what we call it in terms of the electrical grid. It wasn't just all on one. So this is pretty simple planning, but but very important because fast forward to the Super Bowl there. Beyonce does a half time. She's great, of course. But

and she has her own generator. So she's not on their grid. She leaves, but there's smoke everywhere

“because of her finale. And so they have to put fans out to get the smoke off because you need to”

get the players back on. The facility had a little bit of quirks even before that. Third, third quarter starts. And if someone described it and the gremlins came out. And then anyone who's like gone through a blackout like that sort of knows that. And what you see on air, I just actually rewatched it the other day. What you see on air is the the Super dome goes half dark. So okay,

you've got 117 million people watching over 100,000. I think in the stadium at the time we're

close to 100,000. You've got a problem because you're worried about, you know, are they going to think this is terrorism? Are they going to think X, Y and Z? So they had planned for a potential scenario like this first. They built it in a way that if the A feed went down the B feed would survive. So a stadium in half light is good. This is why it's less bad, right? This is my

“standard. It was less bad because, but the other was in the moment they had pre planned”

communications to people in the stadium. They could care less about the TV. They actually, their orientation was not towards the TV audience because we could wait. And what we didn't know

watching on TV is, is cell phones are going off with alerts. People are being notified through

sound systems, people stuck in elevators because there were people stuck in elevators and escalators are being notified. So then in that moment they're being told, you know, the lights, the lights are off, but half the lights are on. And you're avoiding the worst of it, which would have been of course, all dark super full nervous population. They didn't know what was going on. And then of course, the stampede, which is what you worry about most of any place like that, whether it's an

act of caused by an act of shooter or a blackout. Instead, we have a situation where, as I recall, nobody was even injured. No, not simply injury. People were stuck in elevators. I just talked just last week, just a coincidence, I was talking to the event planner for this and for that superbowl. And he said, they had two big concerns. It was so interesting because from their perspective, and I'm sympathetic to businesses and institutions having other priorities. They obviously had

people stuck in elevators. That was a big deal, but easily cured within 20 minutes. The lights were back on in 27 minutes. They have the lights able to go back on within 12 or 13 minutes. That additional 10 minutes delay was because they wanted to do additional reach acts because their fear was that there would be complaints about about the referee, about fairness. And they didn't want there to be a whole narrative that somehow this was, you know, planned or the NFL,

you know, didn't judge it right. So I'm, I try to be sympathetic that, you know, the NFL doesn't wake up every day thinking about this, though it should, but it needs to, it was smart to embrace it in terms of their planning and other high risk industries need to do so as well. One of the ways that any government office or business enterprise can get ahead of some of these right-of-boom issues and communication during and immediately after a crisis is through exercises. You know,

everything from red teams to table top exercises with the actual decision makers at the table. But you can have who you think is going to be the decision maker at the table. And then find that it really doesn't help you plan for a real-world scenario. Tell us what happens when, for example, you do an exercise with the governor of a state preparing for an emergency. And you don't have

“the right people in the room. Oh, you remember these table tops, my favorite thing with table”

tops now, especially in the private sector, less so in the public sector. I mean, less, I get this less in the public sector table tops with the private sector is, you know, the CEO or whoever's at the top will, will fight the scenario. Oh, it wouldn't happen that way. No, it wouldn't happen that way. Oh, I'd be here. I was like, no, no. So we did a table top. It was not uncommon for states to have governors and lieutenant governors from other parties in a completely dysfunctional

governor, you better have the lieutenant governor available. So this was a state of which I don't disclose

of which there was, I don't know if there's any communication between the two offices. And we were like, this is a freaking nightmare. Whatever's going on with these two people. Like, is not of relevance to us. So we designed purposefully designed knowing that the lieutenant governor was not invited to this table top, designed it where we, we drowned the governor in the, in the hurricane scenario.

“So that then when that happens, when we essentially kill off the governor who's in the room, right?”

We say, okay, you're gone now. And we essentially kill him off. Everyone, his whole staff is looking around and being like, oh, I guess I'm not in charge. No, you're not. You better get the lieutenant governor here. So there's something as simple as that, right? Where people are in their political lane, right? And they're not thinking about, oh my god, I have a constitutional responsibility that if I'm not healthy or if I'm dead, I better pass off to the lieutenant governor. So so that's

sort of a fun example. There are not fun examples as well. But even like even that one little take away will change the dynamics of how those governors' offices will think about their emergency management training. Right. I could see that I was transitioning from being a functioning alcoholic to a non-functioning alcoholic. A desperate man turns to his chatbot for help. Can it convince him to change? This interaction probably did push me to thinking, I have to quit. Blackbox, the chatbots, a new series from the

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playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquidiv, hydration that goes wherever life takes you. Let me close with one topic. We've discussed at length in the past couple of years here on on law fair, which is the global supply chain and the national security issues that relate to it. We all recall the images of the ever given and the massive cargo ship that was stuck in the

Suez Canal in March 2021. We're not talking about the similarly named ship that ran a grand in the Chesapeake Bay recently. We're going to the one that became the source of hundreds of not thousands of memes as the Suez Canal was blocked and hundreds of other massive cargo ships and other vessels. We're not able to get through the Suez Canal. Given other global supply chain issues during the pandemic up to that point, this should have been an absolute disaster

for the global economy. One could easily envision a scenario in which this event and this event alone because of just in time shipping and things like that could have taken the global economy down. But it didn't. What had the shipping companies, perhaps? Maybe they did tabletop exercises, but at least we know they studied the lessons of the past like earlier crises. What did shipping companies in particular learn from the past that allowed them to deal with the crisis and the

rate of boom in this crisis in a relatively effective way? Yeah. I always say, oh, I love this story,

but I do love this story. This is the story of the yellow fleet. As you're describing, the Suez Canal had close before. It had close. Most parts of it had close between 1967 and 1975 between the six-day war and the young couple. I hope I have that right between Israel and Egypt in terms of the order. These 15 ships get stuck and the shipping industry has to respond.

and having to do it remained consistent for decades. That shipping companies are really old.

“They've been murk and they've been around a really long time over a century in most cases.”

So they head to Africa because they got into liver their goods and they taken to account cost and time and safety. It's more dangerous to go that way. But they know how to do it. Under the worry that the Suez will close and they don't know why. I mean, the boom, as I said, the boom could happen. Who would have fought in 2021? It would be the ever-given, you know, turning the wrong way at the wrong moment and getting stuck. So the ever-given shuts down the Suez. No one can

know ships can pass. It's not at all clear when it's going to reopen. As you said, it didn't

look like they had their act together. It reopened within a week. But what you saw almost immediately,

especially with the major companies that are part of this global supply chain economy,

“is they just shifted, they just did. And we didn't even notice it. I mean, there were there were”

disruptions. But they weren't disruptions of the magnitude that a shipping industry that was just backed up at Suez would have been. And so they start heading to the Cape of Good Hope. The prices increase because it's more expensive. Whatever, we can absorb that for some period of time. And so when people think about the Suez Canal and the ever-given being stuck in the bulltot, those are trying to go out. They all go out. What did disaster? What did disaster? People like me think,

wow, that's where the planning and the pivoting and the real-time sort of situation awareness, got these ships to turn. What people don't know is if you look at the Suez Canal, once you're in the canal, you cannot turn around. So there were about 40 ships behind the ever-given that literally, you're just stuck there until you can only go one way or one way in that part of the canal. And so that was just a moment that the world sees one way. But if they understood disaster

management better, they might actually come to see it as, okay, that I can build that adaptability, that planning into into my personal life, into my professional life, just as the cargo industry did anticipating the devil once again. Let me actually allow you to close with something else here. All of our listeners have some role in their life, whether in their business life or their overall

“life of crisis management, because life is about navigating crises, whether it's of a health”

nature or an organizational nature or something else. So talk to the person who's the skeptic now, Julia, talk to somebody who says, you know what, I only have finite resources, whether that's time or treasure. And I, if I'm going to spend 100 units of my time or treasure focusing on thinking about

bad things, I'm going to focus on keeping them from happening in the first place, because I don't

want to have to deal with it. What is your pitch to that person to say, you know what, you need to shift some of those 100 units of your resources. You need to shift some of that to to learn how to use the tools that you're disposal to minimize the consequences when the boom comes. How do you make that pitch? Yeah. So when you're describing as an exercise, I do at the end of the book, right, which is, you know, take 100 pennies and make sure enough of them are on both sides of the boom, right? So

because I recognize we have finite resources, we're all doing other things, but just thinking about or what, what do I wish I had put into place in anticipation of the boom? And what I say to that person, and what I, what I say to different groups of people, what I say to that person is wish all you want, you will be spending more time and more resources if you don't begin to to prepare for the doubles return. So this is just a cost-benefit analysis. I've got the numbers to prove you otherwise.

But I do like that you raise this other issue, which is, you know, that there are populations in the world, let alone in our country, in which this seems like a, you know, I don't know. This is, this is, this is nice to think about, but you know, who has the time when I can barely pay the rent and what I, and I recognize that. And so part of the message is for those who can, right, for people like me and you and others like our responsibility and also people presumably

who also may have leadership positions in their offices and, and institutions in elsewhere, if we owe other populations this duty, you know, where it's the more that we can relieve the stress on public officials, on systems when the boom happens, the better off other

fix income inequality through the disaster management framework, but I can make the impact of a

“disaster maybe better for communities that can't get better prepared if I relieve the stresses”

if people like me and others begin to think through how could I do better at the moment of the boom.

Right. Well, Julie, I'm going to thank you for writing the Devil Never Sleeps. It's a remarkable

“book. I want to thank you for joining us here on the podcast to talk about it. Oh, I'm so grateful.”

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Homes us should too, was our audio engineer and Sophia Jan performed our music, as always. Thanks for

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