Lawfare Archive: Juliette Kayyem on Dealing with Disasters

0:00I am Sarah Leverich, intern at Law Fair with an episode from the Law Fair Archive for September 5th, 2026. On August 26th, flash floods hit Nepal near its border with China, whipping out entire villages and causing over 1,000 deaths. Earlier this summer, wild hires swept through France and Spain. That sports 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 from March 29th, 2023, in which David Priests spoke with Juliet Kayam about her bulk, the devil never sleeps, learning to live in the age of disasters. They discussed traditional approaches to disasters, had to prepare and respond, and what we can learn from previous disasters ranging from airplane collisions to wild hires. I'm David Priests, and this is the Law Fair Podcast, March 29th, 2022.

1:10We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we still fumble when they occur, and we always see 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 Kayam 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, minimalization, the paradox of preparedness, and a variety of disasters in what we can learn from them, ranging from the Y2K 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

2:11in a way that stops the bleeding and keeps them from getting worse, even as they're occurring. It's the Law Fair Podcast, March 29, Juliet Kayam, 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 want to talk through that with you. 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 I've written in the

3:12last year. The framework that you talk about, and it's rather simplistic, I mean, we're sort of, I often say in the book or right 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 of 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 in the American public is that then when we think about disasters, 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

4:18also 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. It's going to be a catastrophe and we can't avoid them all. Is that right? That's exactly right. So one tentative title at one stage was, was assume the boom, but it was too, 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, oh, we failed factor. If you successes, whether those preparations for the boom, for the inevitable is I think the right framework led to less harm, whether those, those preparations actually led to less harm and destruction, then might otherwise have occurred.

5:21So and I tend to talk in bulk and it's not that I'm not sympathetic. These are just numbers. But you know, 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 you know, the difference between a million dead and if we had done this a lot better, a hundred thousand dead is significant, right? These are real numbers and the book takes us through centuries of disasters and crisis to show what went wrong and what, 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, you know, what we're encountering, of focusing on

6:22right 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 that's, 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 hour long coverage when there were the first cases identified in the US. And when there were deaths in the US, that was a large figure on the screen. I think of all three major cable networks. 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?

7:25And now we're talking, what is it now? We're still averaging something in the last few weeks, opposed 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? 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 like, it's like, oh, okay, well, we failed, right? No, no, no, no, like there's a difference between failing of a million dead and failing of a hundred thousand dead or whatever our number is. And it's that binary notion of sort of disasters, right? I mean, it's either good or bad, right? And, you know, I live in the grays, you live in the grays that what you're trying to do is sort of reduce the consequences.

8:25So I have some wonky terms in the book. But I talk about, so 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, and the book, and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm generally happy person and, uh, and optimistic. But, and part of it, I think it's because looking at all these disasters, right? We always are sort of surprised and oh my God, why us? And didn't think it could happen here. And what you realize is that while each of them is unique, right? They all follow their own patterns that really the, the consequences tend to be the same. And therefore the solutions are generally the same. And I wanted to, I wanted like to figure out that connective tissue of all of these disasters. I start with Greek mythology and, and, and the Trojan horse to, to surfside, I make it

9:27all the way to surfside. And, and what are those, those points of commonality that, that will make disasters sort of oddly familiar given, given that we always, exactly like that we always seem surprised. And then when it happens, we're like, oh, yeah, that was too bad. Never again. But 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, 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, well, people died, but to also figure out, you know, how they died.

10:31And, 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 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 recovery is 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 generators. So most U.S. deaths related to hurricanes and blizzards now are related to carbon monoxide.

11:33Well, that's a good thing to know because now, you know, when I plan for the, when someone plant 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. They're 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 the 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. Beginning, beginning where that left of boom kind of hits the boom, talk about the

12:36paradox 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 as 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 year 2000. They were not programmed to have to zero at the front.

13:36And 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. Everything lived through that. It was omnipresent in the year before, especially the idea was that this could be like a zombie apocalypse movie that everything could shut down if we didn't take proper, proper steps. And therefore a lot of companies, 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. Because of the successes, because of that preparedness of 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 goes down or something like that. But nothing of the magnitude that got people focused on it.

14:38So almost immediately a new narrative form that people like you and me and others were overly worried or panicked. And so that becomes, that's 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 we're not going to be given a date and 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 preparedness efforts are knowable now. They will not stop the bad thing from happening. I want people like you and the climate people and every one of you know, people who are who's careers may be more focused on left side of the boom to succeed. But then you do want these fail-safe systems in place to stop the cascading losses, the stupid deaths, all the sort of necessariness. 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

15:42inevitability of the boom that 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, you know, 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, you know, 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? So 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. This is a book. Someone described it as chatty, which I viewed as a compliment. I want average readers who are living a world in which they know there's more disasters

16:45to 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 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.

17:47Sometimes 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 a 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

18:51are, 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 to many people in terms of that feeling of the misunderstanding between communicating the threat and the boom happening or not happening and how that affects people's thinking about crises. Right. It's, again, like what we were saying earlier, it's 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 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 all hazards, any boom

19:52stuff. But the etymology is fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. The 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 stars. 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 like, let's do it, right? And 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, you make the point that communication during a crisis,

20:57both 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. 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

22:00Vladimir 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 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 a side. I'm not here to make it better for Putin.

23:03But 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 a 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 basically, it had, it was not going to be nimble enough for the flight takeout. 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're reading the story and you're like, not only did they know

24:04like what were they thinking? I mean, the bad news is there. And they're just going to go forward as if fingers crossed as a strategy. And I see that a lot with Russia. And the thing I want to highlight here is information, if I were his strategist, put me in his shoe. So information is important 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 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 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

25:10have MREs, meals ready to go. They don't have turnicate kits. Turnicate kits are like your basic feature of modern warfare. And we learned this in the United States during the wars in Iraq, in which we got much more sophisticated. The Pentagon did in terms of, wow, too many of these soldiers are dying from wounds that they didn't have to die from. If only we trained non-medic soldiers. We used to have here in this country, we 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 left of BOOM, at first, the Pentagon invested in all this fortified arm or in fortified gear for the soldiers in the hopes that the IEDs wouldn't get them. Well, they kept getting them. And then the Pentagon pivotent said, well, we have to actually think about right of BOOM that you will have injured soldiers from IEDs, but we won't tolerate stupid deaths, so

26:12to speak. And so you saw this total change in tourniquet training and kits and blood clotting 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 his advisor, but you would not be seeing these challenges with a greater situational awareness of what was happening on the ground. 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

27:12in 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 dynamics 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, a major earthquake in the ocean leading to a tsunami leading to radioactive release at the Fukushima nuclear facility.

28:12So when you talk about history, I really do try to give some history to these disasters. Japan's interesting. It really had decided a made a policy decision early on that it did not want to be an energy import country. And so it built its own energy, satisfied its own energy needs through nuclear power. The problem was, of course, is 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 to 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 100 years ago or 200 years ago that said do not build

29:13below 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. I sort of take the world as it is. So yeah, they built. They built below where they were warned to build. But the counter story of Fukushima is actually, there was a nuclear facility down the street, Ona Gawa. We never hear the success stories built equally like Fukushima. Hit harder. It was closer to the epicenter. It was also suffered from the tsunami. But their team for a 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 the crisis. The response teams in Ona Gawa were empowered to respond in real time. They shut the facility down in time. There was some damage. There was no radioactive release.

30:15So 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 practiced for it. And 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. Or why bad 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, Juliet, is you don't just look at the disasters

31:17which, 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 dogs that didn't bark, right? The things that could have been worse. But in almost all of 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 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 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 stampedes and follow-on events.

32:21But instead, it became an afterthought to people's cultural memory. So what happened and how did we avoid the worst scenarios? It's exactly right. And any opportunity to write about Beyonce is an opportunity I'll take. But this was the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans. You just need her to blurb your book and you'll be in good shape. Oh my God, if she, if I could get her to tweet, I should probably tag. Try it. I thought of that. But and just going back. So this is the Super Dome that everyone remembers during her cane's Katrina in 2005. This is where people from New Orleans went to go evacuate. All the electricity was down. Horrible things were happening in the facility, the depravations of water and sanitation and safety. Just a horror story. It gets rebuilt. And in the rebuilding, the planners fortunately knew that the devil never sleeps and anticipated additional 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.

33:24And even if you think you have a last line of defense, actually look for more. And so they built it 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, their 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. It had a little bit of quirks even before that third, third quarter starts and someone described it and the Gremlins came out and 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 is the, the super dome goes half dark. So okay. We've got 117 million people watching over 100,000, I think in the stadium at the time

34:24are close to 100,000. You've got a problem because you're worried about, you know, is, 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 beefy would survive. So a stadium in half light is good. This is what I say, it's less bad, right? This is my standards less bad. 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 that in that moment, they're being told, you know, this, the lights, half the lights are off, but half the lights are on.

35:26And there's this, you're avoiding the worst of it, which would have been, of course, all dark, super bowl, nervous population. They didn't know what was going on. And then, of course, the stampede, which is what you worry about most in any place like that, whether it's an active, caused by an active 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, for that super bowl. And he said, they had to be 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 had the lights able to go back on within 12 or 13 minutes. That additional 10 minute delay was because they wanted to do additional re-chacks because their fear was that there would be complaints about the refereeing, about fairness.

36:32And they didn't want there to be a whole narrative that somehow this was planned or the NFL didn't judge it right. So I try to be sympathetic that 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

37:33preparing for an emergency and you don't have the right people in the room. 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, 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 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, no. So we did a table top. It was not uncommon for states to have governors and lieutenant governors from other parties and it's completely dysfunctional because there's no communication. And yet their constitutions have, if something happens to the 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 was any communication between the two offices. And we were like, this is a freaking nightmare. Whatever's going on with these two people is not of relevance to us. So we designed purposefully designed knowing that the lieutenant governor was not invited

38:35to this table top, designed it where we drowned the governor 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 God now. And we essentially kill him off. 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 that's sort of a fun example. There are not fun examples as well. But even like even that one little takeaway will change the dynamics of how those governor's 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

39:37alcoholic. 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. Black box, the chatbots, a new series from the Guardian Investigates about the strange things happening between AI and us. Search for black box wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jonathan Fields from Good Life Project in Pay Partnership with Rinse. So I think a lot about what it actually takes to build a good life. And honestly, some of it comes down to what you stop spending your time on. Laundry is one of those things. It's necessary, it's never ending, and it rarely connects to anything you actually care about. Rinse picks up your clothes, cleans them exactly to your preferences, and delivers them back ready to wear. So that time and attention can go towards your passions, your people, your community, whatever it is that actually moves you forward. It's reliable, it's consistent, and it's built for real life. Sign up today at rinse.com.

40:39Rinse, it's time to be great. Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here, and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden, or maybe on the golf course, can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where liquid IV comes in. Its science-backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heatwave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV. Hydration that goes wherever life takes you. Let me close with one topic. We've discussed it length in the past couple of years here 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.

41:40We're not talking about the similarly named ship that ran aground in the Chesapeake Bay recently. The one that became the source of hundreds, if not thousands, of memes as the Suez Canal was blocked and hundreds of other massive cargo ships and other vessels were 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 table top 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 right of boom in this crisis in a relatively effective way?

42:45Yeah, it's, 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 closed before. It had closed. Most parts of it had closed between 1967 and 1975, between the Six Day War and the Yom Kapoor. 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. So how they respond is they then head to the Cape of Good Hope, which is Africa. That planning and having to do it remained consistent for decades. That shipping companies are really old. They've been mercenaries. They've been around a really long time over a century in most cases. So they head to Africa because they got to deliver their goods and they take into 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, right? I mean, the boom, as I said, the boom could happen.

43:46Who would have thought 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, no 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, 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 price is increased because it's more expensive. Whatever we can absorb that for some period of time. And so when, when people think about the Suez Canal and the, and the ever given being stuck in the bulls house, those are trying to go out. They all go out. What a disaster. What a disaster. People like me think, wow, that's, that's where the planning and the pivoting and the, and the real time sort of situational awareness got these ships to turn what people don't

44:53know 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 know, you're just stuck there until the end. 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 that, I can build that adaptability, that planning into, into my personal life, just as the cargo industry did anticipating the devil once again. Let me, let me actually allow you to close with, 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.

45:54So 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 at your 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 we, I recognize we have finite resources. We're all doing other things, but just thinking about what, what do I wish I had put into

46:56place in anticipation of the boom. And what I say to that person and what I, what I say to different groups of people is 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 devil's return. So this is just a cost-benefit analysis. I've got the numbers to prove you otherwise. But I do, 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, and institutions and elsewhere. If we owe other populations this duty, in other words, the more that we can relieve the

48:04stress on public officials on, on systems, when the boom happens, the, the better off other communities that may not have our luxuries will be. So, so I can't fix and I say this a lot like I can't 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, Juliet, I want 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. Thank you so much. The Law Fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Please do share the podcast, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or just running down

49:06the street shouting the virtues of the Law Fair podcast. Help us spread the word and help us produce everything we do at Law Fair by becoming a material supporter at our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Law Fair. This episode is edited and produced by Jen Pachahawal. Hamza Shatou was our audio engineer and Sophia Yann performed our music. As always, thanks for listening.