1106: Amanda Ripley | The Secrets to Surviving an Unthinkable Disaster

Spring is here, and so are the deals at DeeDee's Discounts.

From trendy outfits to home makeovers, DeeDee's has all the deals you need.

I'm talking everything from sandals and sundresses to spring throw pillows and scented candles.

You love a good deal? Get in your bag and get to DeeDee's Discounts.

This episode is sponsored in part by Vital Proteins.

I want to tell you about Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides.

That's a mouthful. It's a daily supplement that supports your hair, skin, nails, bones, and joints all in one in one simple step each day.

Collagen makes up about a third of the protein in our bodies, but as we hit our 30s, it unfortunately starts to decline. That's when you might notice things aren't working quite like they used to.
Your joints, your skin, maybe even your hair. Vital Proteins steps in to help keep those areas supported so you can stay active and keep doing what you love.
Vital Proteins is the number one collagen peptide brand in the US, so they know what they're doing. It's super easy to take.

Just add a serving to your coffee, smoothie, even water.

It doesn't even taste like anything,

so it blends right in.

The key is consistency.

Making it a daily habit is how you see the benefits.

Get 20% off by going to vitalproteins.com

and enter promo code Jordan at checkout.

These statements have not been evaluated

by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure,

or prevent any disease.

With reliable connectivity, enhanced cybersecurity, and advanced fiber solutions, Comcast Business helps turn today's small businesses into engines of modern business. Powering the engine of modern business.
Powering possibilities. Now through April 21st, new customers can get started with 150 megabit internet and security edge for $49.99 a month for 12 months with a two-year agreement.
Plus, ask how to get a $500 prepaid card on a qualifying gig bundle. Call today.
Restrictions apply. Equipment tax and other fees extra and subject to change.
Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show. It turns out that in most disasters, the people who will matter most, who will save you and who you will save, are regular people like you and me.
It's your neighbors, your co-workers, strangers on a bus. We can design all this great new forecasting technology and vaccines and what have you, and that's awesome.
But if people don't trust them, then it doesn't really matter. Welcome to the show.
I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional legendary Hollywood actor, astronaut, hacker, Russian spy, or cold case homicide investigator. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode Starter Packs is a great place to begin.
These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.
Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, author Amanda Ripley, she interviewed survivors after disasters for years and wrote her book about what they've learned and how they survived.
Today, we'll uncover the types of people who survive in disasters,

what they think and do differently, and how this helps them survive.

We'll also discover common mistakes and weird behaviors,

actually quite bizarre behaviors that people exhibit in disasters,

often costing them and those around them their lives.

In this episode, I rarely say this, but this might actually save your life

or those of others around you, and I hope you enjoy it. Here we go with Amanda Ripley.
It's a topic that I thought, oh, well, we don't get that many disasters here in the United States. And of course, now the week that we're recording this, the wake of what was the last hurricane we hit that has like historic levels of damage that's going to take years to rebuild that just happened.
Helene, I believe. Yes.
With another one on the way. Yeah.
And another one on the way, which hopefully doesn't hit the same spot, although I don't even know, is that better or worse? People post these photos and you go, oh yeah, down tree. But then you realize it's like hundreds of square miles of that.
And it's just mind blowing. Am I mistaken that disasters don't usually happen in America? Or is it just that our disasters don't seem as bad as one in Haiti, for example? Okay, this is actually a really interesting question because disasters happen quite frequently, and they've gotten more frequent since I wrote the original book.
So there's kind of an interesting paradox here, and it gets more hopeful. From 2011 to 2021, 90% of American counties went through a federally declared disaster.
So that's a lot of people. 90% of the population essentially lived in or very near a disaster zone.
So we have quite a lot of disasters and weather and geological disasters specifically have increased about 400% over the past 50 years. But going back to your point about Haiti, we've actually gotten much better at surviving them over the same time period, which is kind of interesting.
So the number of deaths has dropped by about two-thirds over the past 50 years. So disasters have gotten more frequent, more destructive, financially speaking, and less deadly.
But in there is a lot of hope and a lot of reason to do things differently. Because the reason the same earthquake can hit Florida and cause minimal damage and then wipe out entire cities and other places or the same storm, earthquake, you name it, It's because of the things we have done to protect ourselves, notably building codes, major ones.
So it's this really interesting duality where things are getting worse and better at the same time. Yeah, I noticed that.
So by the way, I think we should probably define the disasters we're talking about. So it's not like a train chemical spill.
We're talking about hurricanes, wildfires, pandemics, earthquakes. It's interesting because I used to think of disasters pretty narrowly, like you're saying, like weather disasters and that kind of thing.
Increasingly, the more I looked at the research, the more similar human behavior is across all those different things you mentioned. So we get into an evolutionarily designed state in these situations.
So whether it's a slow-moving disaster, like a toxic train disaster, hazardous spill, or a pandemic, right, or a fast-moving disaster, you do see people go through the same stages. And that doesn't mean that those differences don't matter.
They definitely do matter. Humans in general are much better at recovering from events that end quickly so that there is some safety to recover in.
But the behavior is surprisingly similar across really different kinds of events. Yeah.
So wildfires seemingly on the rise, climate change, any sort of climate change related stuff's definitely on the rise. Safe to say we'll see more disasters soon.
And I always hate to be negative, but we literally just said there's a massive hurricane that was historic in nature, and now there's another one. And it's been like a week or two since the last one, which is unfortunately proves your point really well here.
But on the other hand, we know there's a hurricane coming because I don't know about 100 years ago or 50 years ago, however long it took. They just found out when they were like, wow, this is a heck of a storm.
If it gets any, oh, it's getting worse. Never mind.
We're all going to die. I mean, are we getting better at this? You've literally captured the exact paradox, right? So yes, disasters are getting more frequent.
And we are talking about back-to-back storms. Right now, we were not a month ago.
So there is some cyclical seasonal variants. But just last year, there were 28 major weather and climate disasters costing a total of $93 billion.
So this is a recurring nightmare for many millions of people at this point, evacuating, worrying, recovering, rebuilding, all of this. And it's actually a massive tax on

our economy because this keeps happening over and over. So the bottom line is, if you haven't

personally experienced a disaster yet, you probably will, unfortunately. But the upside is

that the number of deaths has dropped. So to your point about the hurricanes, like in 1990,

the National Hurricane Center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance. That's all you had to get out of the way, which really isn't enough, just based on the way people make decisions about evacuation and also based on the design of dense urban places.
So now the National Hurricane Center can predict the path of a hurricane with pretty good accuracy 72 hours beforehand, which is actually a pretty big difference when it comes to getting out of harm's way. Because if you think about it, if you live in Miami Beach, they say you have 24 hours to get out of here.
It's like, well, I'm going to spend four hours debating with my family, four hours trying to convince my parents that they also need to evacuate because they're 80, even though they don't want to and they ain't scared in those storm. And then I'm going to spend four hours packing, six more hours in traffic, and then I'm going to make it out of Florida by the skin of my teeth before that thing destroys everything behind me.
And that's if I act relatively quickly. Exactly.
Which you're not going to do. You're asleep for the first six hours.
Then you hear about it. You're like, I'm sure it's nothing.
So we typically go through a period of denial

and disbelief in every disaster. And you have to kind of build that in and expect that'll happen.

But on average, before people evacuate in particular, they check with at least five

sources. So that deliberation piece you mentioned is really important, but also really time consuming.

So time is really important. And we have more of it than we did.
Not as much as we'd like, but there is more than we used to have. I've heard you say that unless we make major changes, more people will die of distrust than disasters.
Tell me what's going on there. That sort of seems to be the other side of the whole, I'm not leaving, it's my home and this storm's not going to be, they always tell me to leave and it's never a big deal.
Last time we got robbed or whatever, right? Yeah. One of the things I noticed in doing the new edition of The Unthinkable is that one of the changes that's happened is that we're just living in a very low trust climate for a lot of reasons.
And it's not just that people don't trust institutions or the news media. It's also that those institutions don't trust the people.
And it's also, which causes a lot of deaths in disasters because information gets withheld and so forth, but also that people don't trust each other, their neighbors as much. And it turns out that in most disasters, the people who will matter most, who will save you and who you will save, are regular people like you and me.
It's your neighbors, your co-workers, strangers on a bus. It's not first responders or the people you might think of because it just takes too long for them to get there.
But regular people really matter. So that trust piece is extremely important.
We can design all this great new forecasting technology and vaccines and what have you. And that's awesome.
But if people don't trust them, then it doesn't really matter. Yeah, that's scary.
I've done shows on pandemics and things like that. And it's OK.
How prepared are we for the next one? And it's like probably not that much better prepared than we were for COVID, except it could be way worse. And now nobody trusts anything because, well, they said masks were going to work and they didn't stop the transmission and they said to buy them and they said not to buy them and they said to buy them again.
It's like, OK, so when the next one comes, it's going to be toilet paper hoarding and half the people put on a mask and never take it off, whether you need it or not. And the other half of the people never put on a mask and never will, even if it's like this is the only thing that's going to stop the spread.
Like, it's just people are already in their camps, regardless of whatever the science says for that particular pandemic at that particular moment. Anyway, we'll get there.
I'm ahead of myself because I get a little spirited about this whole disinformation and mistrust thing. You've also said when it comes to worst case scenarios, the truth is usually better than the nightmare.
Tell me about that. That sounds like maybe good news.
I don't now. Yeah, let's do that.
So one of the things I noticed when I was covering a lot of disasters for Time Magazine is that the things that the survivors told me were very different than what I'd expected. They were very different than what they had expected.
They had specific lessons they wanted the rest of us to know, and many of them were actually positive. In other words, they had not freaked out in the way that they expected.
They had freaked out in much more subtle ways. And I'll get back to that.
They found that other people, including strangers, were all of a sudden much better behaved than normal. So rather than the kind of mob mentality, every man for himself that we imagine from movies, in fact, humans tend to become polite and courteous and cooperative almost to a fault in most disasters for, again, for evolutionary reasons.
But there's a good reason to do that. So those things are surprising.
And if you don't know to expect that, you're going to prepare differently. If you don't know that your biggest challenge will not be panic, but actually a total lethargy, like a shutting down, that is the biggest, most common mistake that people make in disasters, as opposed to punching each other out and just widespread mayhem.
So the people who are like stockpiling weapons and ammunition, okay, maybe not a terrible plan, but you also need to be prepared for other people being able to help or you being able to help other people as opposed to just like shooting people that walk on your property because they're definitely going to kill you. Having a default bias for hostility is going to not serve you well in most disasters because actually your best ally are the people around you.

Yeah, that's interesting. I know a lot of people who are prepper-ish or prepper-adjacent,

and it's usually, they're coming for my cans of food, and it's like,

or they're coming to give you cans of food and make sure that your kids are alive, but okay.

There's just a lot of that. I guess it depends on where you live.
Cause of course people I know that are preparing for disasters in California, like us, we buy food, we have water and we have solar panels and we have batteries. And my wife's like, that's enough for us.
And I'm like, but the neighbors are going to come over and they're old and they're not going to have this. We need to be able to share with them.
We can't be like, sorry, 80 yearyear-old neighbors. Have fun dying of heat exhaustion in your house without any power.
We don't have enough room for you or whatever. There's literally people that we know by face and name and we're like, they are not going to be able to handle this.
They are too old. They can't be in the heat.
They have to sleep here. They're going to have to eat with us.
We're going to have to cook for them. We're going to need electricity for their phones and the lights in their room, like all that stuff we're preparing for.
Yeah. It's awesome that you're thinking about that because that is right.
We kind of have to. No one's gonna save Ildi across the street.
That's us. She's gonna walk over here if she's got any sense about her at that time.
But yeah, we're a little light on guns and ammunition over here. We don't have a whole lot of that.
I probably shouldn't say that. We're armed to the teeth.
Don't even think about it. But yeah, we focused more on the stuff we think will probably need, like more water as opposed to armor piercing rounds.
Yeah. And I mean, look, I can understand why some people are afraid of one another.
And some people have experiences that justify that fear. And a lot of people are consuming news, which my business is very much complicit in, that makes them afraid of their neighbors.
And I don't think it's a simple equation. And it does vary depending on the place and the person, all of these things.
But one thing I can tell you for sure is that people tend to behave better in disasters than we expect. And we really need each other very suddenly.
So yeah, pro-social preparation is probably gonna serve you better. I know you've said that our first responders are great, but the average person is clueless.
I also feel like this is me, like, okay, fine, I got some food and some water and some electric stuff, but I'm an Eagle Scout and I'm still kind of like, what happens? I'm probably not prepared for mostly anything. And I know that my neighbors and family are not.
They don't have anything. They'd be out of luck in a day.
Their food would spoil. Like I've taken those courses too.
And most of it's in one ear and out the other. So it's like, okay, but food and water only works if the purge doesn't happen.
Maybe I've got three to five days and then I'm hurting again. I think the food and water thing is fine, but I don't think it's very compelling.
I think it's like too small of a frame. For me, the best kind of preparation to do, and I actually, it sounds like you do do this, so I wouldn't undermine yourself.
You have relationships with your neighbors. It sounds like who needs help, who can do what, you know, and that is actually huge.
So one of the things that I've tried to change in my own life, having done a lot of this reporting, is to really get to know my neighbors better and take those opportunities, right? So it's not just about stockpiling water. It's about building relationship, understanding who has a generator, who is elderly, but also like just knowing each other so we can trust each other, we can call on each other.
The beauty of that is you reap rewards from that whether or not there's a disaster. And so I really encourage people to think about what they can do that's going to be good for them and their community right away, no matter what happens.
Because there's a lot you can't predict. Being in a relationship, being able to laugh at a shared joke and being able to share recipes and being able to call someone if your kid is sick, those things really matter.
And they make life better right now, regardless of what happens with the hurricane. I know people are thinking, but hey, there's emergency plans.
The government has a plan. If you live in a disaster area, you know that's probably not true.
But you mentioned in the book that emergency plans are designed to benefit emergency officials and not the average Joe. That's terrifying.
Yeah. You say it and I'm like, that's a little cynical, Amanda.
But it is the case that emergency plans are designed with the minds of emergency manager, right? It's like sometimes they're not thinking about the public and it's hard to get yourself out of your own head into the mind to the public. So let's give me an example.
Okay, you've heard of hurricane watches and hurricane warnings. Yeah, but I couldn't tell you the difference.
Right, because who could? That's a ridiculous way to communicate with humans. And yet it's actually a really big difference.
So watch means it might happen, it might not. Warning is beyond alert.
Like it's happening. Yes.
Yeah. This is particularly true with tornadoes, right? And this is a very big deal.
Like tornadoes are very hard to predict. They can happen anytime, anywhere.
So the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning is really important. And so if you were thinking about this like the public does or any human who's not an expert, you would not use a W word for both.

Right. Just like in any expert field, people have blinders on when it comes to what people need to hear and understand.

So there are exceptions to this. Right.
There are some incredibly creative, empathetic and open minded emergency managers all over this country.

But in general, yeah, I think that a lot of plans are designed not according to how humans actually operate in disasters. I grew up in Michigan and we had tornadoes pretty regularly.
I grew up there. I was there for decades.
I went to college and law school there. I don't know the difference between tornado warning and tornado watch.
And I've seen dozens of them, at least over my life. So if you move somewhere and this is the first or second time you're seeing that, you're just not going to get it.
And you're right. It's a W word for both.
I'm like, if it's a watch, are they watching for where it is? No, they're wondering if there is one. Okay, fine.
A warning. Are they warning us that there might be one or are they warning us that there is one? I don't know the answer to that.
They use the same logo in the news. It's just the tornado.
They use the same color. It's branded to the TV station.
It's not like one's yellow and one's red. It's just totally ridiculously confusing, especially for younger people or non-native speakers or literally somebody who has a high level of education and just can't remember the difference between warning and watch.
I wonder if my parents who spent 80 years there, I wonder if even they know the difference, honestly. So this is a great, a small example, but a great example.
Another one would be, I was on the subway in DC where I live and an alert, like a warning came on over the loudspeaker and it said, in case of emergency, do not panic and listen for further instruction. So it's like, first of all, anytime anyone in charge tells you not to panic, you know you're in trouble.
Because it signals that they don't trust you and that they also don't understand how humans normally behave in disasters, which again, is not to panic. But then to just say, you know, be passive, don't get in our way, listen, and we'll tell you what to do, again, is a total misunderstanding of how most disasters work.
So usually everyone needs to be equipped with some baseline amount of knowledge about their risks and their environment. And then you're going to be much better off as the whole collective.
But those kinds of warnings reveal a bias against the public and also just an unintentional ignorance about how people behave. You give the London train bombing example as how plans are designed to benefit officials and not the average Joe.
Tell me about this, because it's frustrating to hear examples like this, right? And you just think, oh, man, nobody thought of a better way to handle this. Yes, I think you're talking about the July 7th, 2005 terrorist attack on London buses and subway trains, which killed 52 people, I believe.
Afterward, you heard a lot about the city's extensive surveillance camera system, which helped with the investigation. But less well known is how unhelpful technology was to regular people on trains in the moment.
So the official report on the response found one overarching fundamental lesson, which is that emergency plans had been designed to meet the needs of emergency officials, not regular people. So passengers had no way, for example, to let the train drivers know that there had been an explosion.
Big problem. They also had trouble getting out.
The train doors weren't designed to be opened by passengers, and they couldn't find first aid kits to treat the wounded, which turned out all those supplies were kept in subway supervisors'

offices, not on the trains. So there's a lot of examples like this.
But the point is, unless you

are thinking about the public as your ally, as your first line of emergency responders,

you're going to make mistakes in how you plan for disasters, especially if you're thinking about them as the enemy, if you're thinking about them as like your adversary. I kind of get behind the logic of I'm going to keep the first aid kid in the supervisor's office because if anybody needs it, they're just going to come to me and I will help them.
If you kept it on the train, some kid's going to steal it and it's going to be a mess. There's going to be band-aids everywhere.
It's going to be chaos. But what if a disaster happens on the train? Oh, crap.
We haven't thought of that. We didn't think about that.
That's so frustrating. It's terrifying that there's a 28% chance of another pandemic before 2030.
Okay. I am relying on estimates from folks who do this kind of forecasting.
It's very difficult. MetaBiata is the one that I specifically use, but they do estimates of what are the chances we'll see another pandemic that kills at least as many people.
And actually, the chances that we'll see another pandemic that does that before 2050 is about 50-50. So that's terrifying.
We don't know, right? That's the bottom line. another big reason for the increase in disasters.
It's not just climate change, but it's also that we've changed where we build and how we live. So the way that we've become

so interdependent, the way that we've become so mobile, right, all of those things have made us much more vulnerable to pandemics. It's a complicated, perfect storm of different things.
And I agree that because humans always overweight their past personal experience when assessing future risk. So it's not a new problem for us.
We know that with hurricanes, for example, if there was a forecast for a really terrible hurricane and everyone evacuated or most people evacuated and then it didn't hit, right, or it wasn't as bad, then we know that the next hurricane people will probably under react. And the reverse is true, that people sometimes overreact if there was an unusually bad hurricane.
So this is a problem we know about, and that's the good news. It seems we know how to deal with that, but it is hard.
It is hard to undo the damage that has been done by the last pandemic. Of course.
Yeah, tons of people will deny it's even happening and relying on people to do the right thing to keep safe. It seems like a fool's errand at this point.
There's going to be so many people who decide to do the opposite of what people say to do just because they want to just flout it. I probably shouldn't entirely blame Twitter, but this is where it's so prevalent.
There's almost this weird contrarian movement where it's like, oh, I'm going to do this thing. Oh, wait, no, never mind.
The authority told me to do it. So I'm deliberately now not going to do it just so that I'm the guy who's not following the rules because I'm tough and independent or whatever.
And I see this with people that I know. This is not just like an online phenomenon.
I see this with people that I know who will call me and be like, oh, my gosh, this COVID thing is so scary. What do we do? And I'm like, hey, relax.
Maybe stay home for a while. See how it spreads.
You don't have to go hoard toilet paper. In fact, it's 2024.
Get a freaking day already and calm down. And then these were the same people that like a week or month later were like, COVID is fake.
I'm like, bro, I remember the call clearly. This was not your opinion back then.
It's almost like the machine shut down and they were like, the thing that makes me feel more safe about this is just denying that it's happening at all. That to me was shocking.
Yeah, I mean, and now we're talking about polarization. So political polarization means that a lot of people will tend to do the opposite of what their enemy says to do.
So the more former President Trump insisted that we reopen schools, the more entrenched you saw the resistance among some of the teacher union leaders.

But it was almost like it's a diabolical problem, right?

Any kind of intractable conflict like that, because people will start to just react as opposed to trying to make an informed decision.

And I think, look, at the same time, I know for myself, if I look back at it, and I spent a long time looking back at it, it was not easy doing the update for this book. I found that I was frequently either underreacting or overreacting to the pandemic.
Like I was either in total denial and not doing enough, or I was overdoing it and yelling at my husband for using a public bathroom. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I know exactly what I mean.
It is very tricky to calibrate. And if there's low trust, then you end up maybe over trusting some people and undermining others.
No matter what they say, you're going to do the opposite. Yeah, that's interesting.
If I'm honest with myself, I think I did the same thing. In the beginning, oh my God, this is really bad.
Let's err on the side of caution. My wife really went off the deep end with being careful, and we had little kids.
And then after a while, I was like, okay, at some point, I've got to start living life and listen to the fact that life is still moving, and these people aren't all dying. But then I kind of got like, it's over.
But it wasn't, right? I was just like, I have a binary switch. It's either like, we are on lockdown, man.
Leave the door dash on, and I'm going to spray the whole thing with Lysol before I bring it in. And or screw it.
I'm just going to go out to a crowded restaurant because I'm an idiot. We're done with this.
Yeah. And I really had to come back down and be like, oh, wait, no, I just got COVID because I'm stupid and I could have avoided that.
And yeah, I know that's going to happen next time because I was aware of this process for the most part and I still screwed it up. So it's not like people are just idiots.
That's only part of it.

And we say screwed it up, but it also just objectively is hard. Like it's an unknown and it's constantly moving.
And the reality is we just don't make decisions based on cold, hard calculus of risk. That's just not how humans work.
I keep having to remind myself how social we are as creatures. And so much of our decisions are about what people around us are doing and what people in our culture or community are doing.
And I remember vividly, this is embarrassing, but I remember when I had to travel, which I did quite a bit for work during the pandemic, I would change my behavior depending on which state I was in. Like I'd fly to Florida and no one's wearing a mask.
We're in these like crowded rooms. And at first I'd be really freaked out.
And then by after day two, I wouldn't be wearing a mask. And then I get on a plane, fly back to DC where everyone was always pretty uptight about this.
And I would put my mask back on. You could actually see the hypocrisy in real time, but you're trying to fit in.
You're trying to like subconsciously or consciously do what others are doing. And that changes very quickly from place to place.
So we underreact when bad things happen because of looking for patterns and data, which might be social in nature. My favorite, by the way, is when people remove their mask to sneeze and then put it back on.
That's like that's chef's kiss delusional nonsense right there. Or remove it to talk to you.
Yeah. And I remember being on a flight and the flight attendant was like, you don't have to take your mask off to talk to me.
I'm not reading your lips. I can hear you.
It was a mess. It was just a mess.
I know the bystander effect is a thing when it comes to, say, like a car accident. Do we have that happening at a macro level with disasters as well? You know what's wild is it really varies depending on your role in the situation.
So let me give you an example. When they study building fires like theater fires or department store fires or stadium fires, people who are working for minimum wage as busboys or whatever servers in that restaurant, they will go to incredible over-the-top ends to help people and things that are just really not in their pay grade.
But because their role is as helper and their role is as host or what have you, that tends to extend the situation. But the diners or plane passengers or others will become very passive, typically, and kind of wait to be told exactly what to do, which can be deadly.
Every firefighter pretty much has a story about going into a crowded bar or a restaurant, and there's smoke just filling the ceiling, right? And nobody's doing anything. Everybody's just joking and laughing.
And so I think that it's an unsatisfying answer, but I think our behavior varies depending on our role in that moment. I probably should have defined bystander effect, but this is where someone falls on their face in a pool of blood in front of you.
And if other people aren't doing anything and you're looking at them and you're like, oh, they're just gonna keep walking. I'll just step over this person and keep walking.
But of course, as soon as one person breaks that sort of attention bubble and says, oh my God, you call 911 and you come over here and help me turn this guy over so he can breathe. Don't move his neck and all this stuff.
Then things start to happen, but it's quite shocking. There's numerous YouTube videos where you see an actor fall over or like laying down and they're like, help me.
And people are just walking over them and someone stops and looks. But since no one else is doing anything because the other people are actors, too, they just scurry away or they stand there staring and they're like, man, someone should really do something about this.
And that they're the only person, you know, who's not an actor in this scenario. It's almost like they just don't want to embarrass themselves by being the person who breaks the bubble of what everyone else is doing.
I don't know a better way to explain this. This is what I'm saying.
You defer to the people around you. Like if a smoke detector went off right now, what's the first thing you do? You look around.
If there's other people in the building, you look around and what are they doing? Like, that is the first thing we do. And there's good evolutionary reasons for that, but it can be a problem.
It's actually a great example what you talked about with the bystander non-intervention problem, because the same exact thing holds in plane crashes or other kinds of disasters. If you give people specific assertive commands, they will comply.
They will help. But it's very helpful to say very clearly and loudly, you in the green shirt, call 911.
Or get up and get out of the plane. So this is what the flight attendants are now trained to do.
Most plane crashes are actually survivable, which always surprises people. I did not know that because you don't hear about those very often.
It's usually everyone's dead because it blew up in midair. Exactly.
But it turns out most plane crashes end up the planes on the ground, but on fire. So you have very little time to get off before that smoke gets really toxic.
So the whole game is getting off quickly. And what they found is in the 70s, there was a series of passenger plane crashes where, again, people had time to get off.
And then they found them just dead in their seats with their hands crossed across their laps. And the reason I talk about plane crashes, by the way, is not because they're likely to happen, thank God, but because there's a lot of money spent on studying human behavior in plane crashes.
And the behavior is very similar in different disasters. So we can learn a lot from that.
So there are sociologists and psychologists who work for the National Transportation Safety Board and study plane crashes. And one of the things they learned is that if you give people very direct orders, then they will move.
So flight attendants, I did some training with them for the book, and they will literally scream at you, get out of the plane, leave your carry-on, don't take your bags. And that helps a lot.
So if you are in a situation and you happen to know how to get out or what to do, it is important to realize that if you step into that leadership role, people will follow. I know if I'm going to be incinerated alive, I'd want to be clutching one of the fine products and services that support this show.
We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network, the circle of people I know, like, and trust.
And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. The course is all about improving your relationship skills and developing relationships personally and professionally with other people in non-cringy, very down-to-earth ways.
Nothing awkward, nothing cheesy, just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer. And six minutes a day is all it takes.
Many of the guests on the show already subscribe and contribute to this course. Come on and join us.
You'll be in smart company where you belong. The course, once again, for free over at sixminutenetworking.com.
Now back to Amanda

Ripley. I remember a long time ago when I was in law school, my friend's dad came to visit them.
They were going to a concert and he stands out on the porch and I'm studying on the porch with my girlfriend and I go, oh, hey, how you doing? You ready to go? He goes, Ann Arbor in the summer, so nice. And he stretches his arms out and he's standing at the top of the stairs and the walkways in front of him.
And I hear a groan, like a guttural groan. And he falls completely passed out face first onto the concrete.
And his son and their friends are all behind him and they just stand there and like, oh my God. They just keep saying, oh my God.
And I was like, okay, they probably just rolled a joint or something like that. Nobody's doing anything.
So I told my girlfriend to call 911 and she goes, okay, but she couldn't find her phone. So I told another guy, you call 911.
And he goes, what's the number? And I was like, 911. And then the other kid was like trying to push him over, roll his dad over.
I'm like, don't touch him because he just smashed his face into the concrete from an elevated position. The last thing you want to do is move.
And of of course, as soon as the ambulance got there, they're like, did you move him? And we're like, no, nobody touched him. They're like, oh, thank God.
They said that's what usually people do wrong is they're like rolling him around. And they're like, are you OK? And they're slapping him in the face with a broken neck.
And that was a shocking level of panic from people who barely saw what happened. Right.
Exactly. Yeah.
What happened to your friend? His dad? Yeah. So he broke his jaw, which is why blood was coming out of his ears, which was really scary.
And he had to have it wired shut. And what had happened was he went upstairs.
He was drinking. He was probably like 60 years old, this man.
And maybe they smoked something. I don't know.
And then he came down stairs, stood up, stretched and maybe pushed the air down in his diaphragm just a little bit or took too deep of a breath. And he just passed out and he fell forwards, which is really unfortunate.
It wasn't like a heart attack or something. No, no.
A I don't know if head rush is quite the right word. If you force air in your abdomen too much, like when you're meditating, you just pass out.
It was probably just something like that, like almost like a headlock. Well, and Jordan, why do you think you reacted the way you reacted? Do you have a theory on that? I've seen some ish before, like worse than that, for sure.
I'm not entirely sure, though. I didn't panic in those situations either, probably because I actually knew what to do.
Also, this is going to sound awful. It didn't hurt that I just met the guy.
My emotional response was like, oh, my God, that man just passed out. Not, oh, my God, my dad fell.
It wasn't like your world is imploding. His son was like, oh, my God, dad.
I understood that reaction. For me, I was like, oh, he fell.
Not, oh, my God, he's dead. I just thought like he fell.
And but the blood coming out of the ears that I saw later, that one got my heart rate up. That was like, oh, my God, he's dead.
Why is blood coming out of your ears? And the reason that happened was, I guess, his jawbone had pushed through that tube that connects to your ear and then blood came out of it. That was just obviously terrifying.
Yeah. You never want to see that.
And how did people react when you did give them assertive orders? Well, aside from the guy asking me what the number was for 911, they did it. And I remember afterwards, they were like, wow, that was really cool, man.
Thank God you did that. And my girlfriend was like, wow, she was very impressed.
I was very happy about that. That was quite interesting because it doesn't seem that complicated.
Maybe I am wired a certain way or I was in Boy Scouts for a decade or something. I think they trained us to do all that stuff early in the game.
And that might be why. I don't know.
It's probably a combination of things, right? Like you said, you had some distance from this particular person so you could look at it without as much shock and awe and that kind of thing. But also maybe you had experiences like this so you know that things can go upside down really quickly and you're not stuck in that denial phase as long as others might be.
So that's something that we know that people do spend a good deal of time trying to fit what's happening into their like brain's library of everything that's happened before. So if it doesn't fit, right, then that's gonna really slow you down.
Yes, okay, so I have something definitely to say about denial. Again, I've told this story a zillion times, so I will not belabor the point.
But when I got kidnapped by a taxi in Mexico 20 plus years ago, and I remember looking out the window and thinking, I'm not getting kidnapped because I've never been kidnapped before. So this isn't what getting kidnapped probably feels.
And I was just like, that's the dumbest line of thought that anyone has ever had. Of course, I've never been kidnapped before.
It doesn't mean that I'm not getting kidnapped now. And I had this whole dialogue was going on in my head.
And this is pre smartphone. So I wasn't like, let me look at Instagram and distract myself from this difficult conversation.
I was like, nope, I'm just stuck in this car, looking out the window, getting further away from my destination. But the denial was really strong.
And only when I finally realized that I was in denial actively and my brain was fighting

me every step of the way, only then was I like, this is a very dangerous situation and I should

do something about it. But I don't know how long that was.
That could have been like 15 minutes

or longer. I really don't know.
It was a long time. Wow.
Yes. That's a great example, right? Where

your brain will come

up with every possible creative explanation for what's happening to normalize it, to make it seem

like a normal time. And this happens even with trained, experienced pilots whose plane is about

to crash as they report saying afterward, you know, I'm not a person who crashes airplanes,

just like you said. I'm not a person who gets kidnapped.
So this is something we should expect.

Now, the good news is if you know that denial is definitely going to happen to you in almost every scenario like this, then you can sometimes notice it happening and push through it more quickly. I know I've done that myself.
For whatever reason, been in a couple of different gunshot incidents recently, gunfire incidents. I was fine.
But because I know that other people around me will, depending on the situation, deny and disbelieve what's happening, I know not to trust their cues necessarily. If I hear a gunshot, I know what that is.
So I'm going to take action. This is the kind of thing where just a little bit of knowledge can be really helpful.
Otherwise, you can really get stuck in that phase. That is quite insightful.
When I was in the denial phase of this taxi kidnap thing, which for people who don't know, I've told it on the show, it's called Kidnap Me Once, the episode. It's quite old.
But one of the things that happened was I was making excuses for the driver. I was like, oh, maybe there's traffic or maybe there's an accident.
And then I said, hey, why are we taking this way? And he said, I need to ask for directions. And I was like, yeah, we're going to the center of town where the presidential palace is.
That answer is like the wrong answer. If he had said there's traffic because I just came up this way, I would have been like, OK.
But he said something that just I knew in my heart of hearts was not true. But if he hadn't said that, if I'm honest with myself, I probably would have just believed his excuse because I was so uncomfortable with what was going on.
Right. And, you know, you're not driving.
No. And I couldn't open the door.
Yeah. It's very delicate.
You want everything to be OK. And you also don't want to create friction with this person.
I've definitely been in a situation with Uber drivers or cab drivers. It's pretty terrifying.
And it's good that you realized it because you're right. Today, you'd be on the phone and you would just be not even noticing..
Right. You just look up or unless you're using Uber or something like that, you just look up and you'd be like, this doesn't look right.
My brother-in-law took a cab in Istanbul and he wanted to go somewhere to a certain neighborhood and he likes to get to know the area where he is. So he was following along on Google Maps and he's like, we missed the turn.
And the driver's like, no, we didn't. And he's like, you missed the turn again.
And he's like, no, I'm going this other way. And my brother-in-law was like, no, there's three other opportunities for you to have made this left.
And now it's routing us in a totally different way across a bridge. And he was like, it's fine.
And then the guy stopped at a light and my brother-in-law just jumped out of a moving cab. And the guy spent a half an hour looking for him and my brother-in-law hid in the dark.
Wow. Yeah.
That is wild. I'm amazed your brother-in-law had the conviction to do that.
You know, I think it's easy to think, you don't know from Istanbul, right? Right. He said if he wasn't looking at Google Maps trying to figure out where the neighborhoods were and how everything was laid out, he would have just sat there and he was in the hood.
When he finally found a car to take him back, the driver was like, why are you here? This is not a place where you should be. Because he was already in like seedy, dodgy, whatever area of Istanbul where tourists just don't go, especially at 9 p.m.
That is wild. So he must have like a sixth sense.
There are stories from on 9-11, people who evacuated the trade center, like Elia, who I write about in the book, she remembers vividly being in the staircase. So you spend a lot of time.
It basically took people at least a minute per floor to evacuate. So if you're on the 20th or 30th floor, we're talking a while.
And then most people didn't leave for at least six or seven minutes after the impact for a bunch of reasons. But she's in the stairs.
She hears that the reason that there had been this very dramatic shaking of the building was that a plane had crashed into it. So her first thought, she comes up with a story just like that, right? That's how the brain works is we are story processing machines.
And the first story she told herself was, oh, the pilot must have had a heart attack. And she remembers feeling sorry for the pilot.
And so then the second plane hits. And then she decides that it must have been two pilots and they were racing.

And she's annoyed with them now, right?

So you see how she's coming up with different stories, all of which are actually more benign than the reality.

Finally, as she's descending and spinning on this and talking to other people in the stairwell,

she realizes they wouldn't have hit that far apart if they were racing. And that doesn't actually compute.
And then she had the thought, we are at war. That was the first story that entered her mind.
And so one of the reasons your brain doesn't want you to always grapple with this reality is because it's overwhelming. And shortly after that, Elia lost her sight.
She literally couldn't see. She stopped moving.
Yeah, this happens in extreme events where people lose their sense of sound, their sense of sight. And our best theory, right, is that your brain is trying to control the inputs so that you can survive.
And it becomes overwhelming. She had at that moment walked out onto the mezzanine outside of the World Trade Center and seen that this was not a small event.
There were bodies on the ground. And so it was too much for her to process.
So like a lot of people, almost everyone I interviewed who evacuated on 9-11, it was a stranger who came and took her by the elbow and said, we're getting out of here. And to this day, she never saw her face because she lost vision, right, momentarily.
But it was because of her. So this is important because it leads to the second phase after denial, which is deliberation, which we've talked about.
But this social piece of it can be very powerful. And that is most people have a story like this on 9-11.
They did not get out alone. This is crazy.
Shitting yourself, I get that. Going blind, though, that sounds like something that is not a good thing.
You're evolved to what, evacuate youruate your bowels because you're like your body's ready for fight or flight. Going blind is the opposite of what probably anybody needs to do when they're like, we got to get out of here.
Okay, I'm going to make it so you can't see anymore. Thanks, brain.
Thanks a lot. I've interviewed police officers who fired their guns and never heard it, never heard the gun go off and didn't have their ears ringing, even though they weren't wearing ear protection.
So it's totally counter to our understanding of hearing. But it reminds you that all the time your brain is censoring the input and syncing them up and deciding what you will and will not notice, so to speak.
In extreme events, things can get pretty wacky pretty quickly as your brain tries to figure out how to survive. Gosh, the airplane thing, what is it called? It's called gathering or something.
People try to like get their carry on and they put their shoes back on even though they're wearing high heels or something like that. This is why you get the safety warning when you sit in the exit row.
They're like, I want to make sure that you are focused enough to pay attention for five seconds because otherwise you're just going to be the way. You mentioned the World Trade Center.
I heard people were trying to take their office stuff with them. I sort of get it like, oh, I want the picture of my kids.
But I guess people were taking anything they could grab. It just felt natural.
It's like this weird quirk. Yeah, I think it's less sentimental, although I'm sure that was part of it, and more a delay tactic.
What Elia described was she did not want to leave. Like every fiber in her being wanted someone to tell her to chill out and go back to work.
So she remembers walking in circles in her cubicle, looking for things to take with her. Luckily, in her case, another co-worker yelled, get out of the building.
Otherwise, who knows if she would have made it out. But she took a novel she was reading.
She was like, it's a way to kind of normalize a situation, default to what you normally do, right? You normally, when you leave an airplane, you first get your overhead bag. And so this is how we normally behave.
And we will default to that sometimes without some clear guidance. David Eagleman is a neuroscientist.
He's been on the show. And one of the things I discussed with him in episode, I think 929, he's been on like five times, but I think it's 929.
Why the brain slows things down when you're in an emergency and like what things it thinks are important. And it's not always the things that are actually important, which I thought was kind of funny.
It's like, I remember the smell of the car seat as the crash happened. It's like, that's not exactly relevant information, but OK.
And I think if I remember this started for him right when he was a little kid and he was playing on a construction site and he fell, right? Yeah. He fell like 12 feet and he remembers that the fall

took forever. And so it was really slow.
And you hear this from people who've been in life or death

situations is that it feels like everything is in slow motion. So he's trying to figure out why that

is and what's going on in your brain. Just imagine how smart he would have been if he hadn't had that

fall. The man's a genius.
He would have researched something much more pleasant. Exactly, yeah.
The other thing I've heard about happening with these folks is tunnel vision. I don't really actually know what that is.
I do remember driving home 20 years ago when I first got a cell phone and getting home and going, how did I get here? And that was the moment I was like, I can never talk on this phone while driving again. That was terrifying.
I was like, did I drive home? I did. And I wasn't drunk.
It was literally just the cell phone. I had to think about, yeah, I drove home.
Wait, was that today? Yeah, that was today. I was on the phone with Tim.
Like I was completely absent from that mentally. Yes.
This is wild, right? Like people tend to lose 20 percent of their peripheral vision when they're on the phone and it actually stays offline for them for like 5, 10, 15 minutes after they hang up or after they put the phone down. It reminds me of, have you read about how the car accident rate seems to be higher in the US right now compared to Europe? And one of the theories is because when you drive with a stick shift, which is most cars in Europe, you can't hold your phone.
You just can't. Oh, totally makes sense.
Yeah. So you're like a little bit more focused than you might be in the U.S.
with an automatic transmission. I mean, I do see a lot.
I'm on the highway and I see a ton of people. Whenever anyone's going under the speed limit by 10 miles an hour, drifting in a lane, I'm like, I know that dude is fricking looking at L.L.
Bean on his phone while driving 60 miles an hour down the highway. And sure enough, there he is.
And I'm just like, that better be really important, but I bet it's not. Yeah.
And that's one thing on the freeway. But we know from the research that in disasters, people's field of size shrinks by about 70 percent.
So it's literally like they're peering out of a keyhole. They can describe the gun that was pointing at them in intricate detail, but not the person pointing.
Your brain can misfire in these situations and some of your powers will get stronger and some will disappear. We must have evolved that for a reason, but I can't for the life of me think about why you would want to see less things, fewer things in a disaster.
Yeah, I think the idea, the theory at least, is that you're fixated on the threat. If you were being attacked by a tiger, you would want to know where that tiger's jaw is.
That makes sense. The thing is, focusing on a gun, the gun itself isn't necessarily going to help you as much, particularly identify the person later.
So it's about modern threats usually versus primitive, primordial threats. But all of this is because we're under the influence of stress hormones.
Stress hormones are like hallucinogenic drugs at this level. And no one I've interviewed has gone through an ordeal like this without some kind of altered reality.
In one study of shootings of civilians by police officers, 94% of them, these are trained, allegedly trained police officers, 94% experienced at least one significant distortion. But very few of them knew to expect that.
So they lost their vision or sight or sound or something was weird, like things slowed down. Sometimes things speed up for people.
Sometimes things get distorted in different ways. We don't really understand why that is, but it seems to be a kind of haphazard, ham-fisted attempt by your brain to help you.
Yeah, I was in a situation where somebody got shot near me, and I remember very few details, but the details I remember are mostly irrelevant. Like, I remember hiding behind the engine block of a car.
I remember my boss shooting the guy because it was a security situation. The guy was shooting at my colleagues and then I remember washing my uniform because it was covered in pieces of someone but I don't remember like driving home.
I don't remember the precursor to the disaster. I don't remember the aftermath.
I was definitely at the place for hours. The police came.
I don't remember any of that stuff. It's just it was like zip.
It's gone. It's all in one little kind of like one minute snippet in my brain.
But I remember how long it took me to wash my uniform and I pre-soaked it and then I had to rinse it off and then I had to throw this stuff away. And I remember all that really clearly.
Wow. I'm starting to see why you reacted pretty quickly.
Yeah. Between the kidnapping attempts and the gunshot at close range.
That's right. The gunshot at close range was before the guy fell off the porch.
You're right. That one was like a two out of 10 compared to the other stuff that I had been through by that time.
That's a lot. Yeah.
You have an interesting counterintuitive point about how denial can actually help us in disasters. Yeah, it depends on the situation.
But sometimes there's a way in which your brain is trying to figure out what is the best response here. And for most people listening to the show, they're probably not in an instantaneous life or death situation.
And so sometimes denial is evolutionarily appropriate. It's a way to make sense of the world.
We have no other way to make sense of the world except pattern recognition. We wouldn't have evolved this way if it didn't help us.
But it's always in retrospect that you know, oh, I'm so glad that I didn't overreact and it just turned out to be fireworks. But then if it is actually gunshots, you're like, why am I such an idiot? Yeah.
When I was at LAX a few years ago, many people thought at the time there was a shooting. But to me, I immediately said that was a suitcase or a bag hitting the ground.
But the TSA guys all ran away. They said shooter, shooter, shooter.
But I didn't hear any follow up shots. I didn't hear anybody yelling other than the people like screaming to leave.
I didn't hear any aggressive yelling at it, but mostly I didn't hear anything that sounded like a gunshot and I only heard one. So I definitely left, but I helped other people get down the jetway first.
And then it turned out to be what? Oh, some idiot dropped a suitcase at the TSA thing. And one TSA guy panicked and scared everyone else out of the terminal.
That was interesting because I remember thinking to myself, what am I doing? I should get out of here. But then I was like, it's definitely not that.
I just happened to be right that it wasn't a shooter. But if it was, I would be like, screwed.
I was behind a ton of people who were clogging up the jetway. Right.
Like it's only in retrospect. Yeah.
But it could also be that you already experienced close range gunfire. You have like a muscle memory for what gunfire actually sounds like.
Sure. And it didn't trigger that, right? No.
So you maybe had some reason to downplay that threat. But yeah, it's only in retrospect.
These things are very easy to look at in retrospect and decide who's an idiot and who's not. But in the moment, it's very tricky.
It's very tricky. Why do people's risk profiles often fail? I should say, why do our risk profiles often fail us? Because mine failed there too.
I guess it didn't because I was right, but I wasn't right because I made some expert calculation based on data. I was right.
My gut instinct was to help other people and then realize this is a bunch of crap. The one thing I will say is everyone ran down the terminal towards the end and they all got bunched up and I just ran to the left to get out towards the gate because there was no one there.
That sort of herd mindset, I feel like that must kill so many people. Yeah.
And people will often go for the exit they came in on. It's like you have to have some situational awareness to even know that there's another exit.
And you often will find people who've been in fires in the past tend to notice where exits are because they're aware of that problem. And people can be trained on this pretty quickly.
You've been in theaters before the play or whatever they'll say, just so you know, there's an exit here, there's an exit here. There's small things that you can do to give people a little bit of an advantage in that situation.
But my only thought would be when you say, you know, my risk calculus failed me.

I think the reality is we are never as rational as we want to think. That's just not how we make decisions.
In fact, the technical term for how we decide what is a threat and what is not is dread, which I think is a great word because it so aptly fits the emotion it describes, right? So if you think about dread, it's all our evolutionary fears, hopes, lessons, prejudices, distortions in one kind of X factor. And if you break it down into its pieces from what we know about how humans experience dread, it's the function of about six different variables.
Whether a threat feels uncontrollable to you, right? Whether it feels unfamiliar, whether you can imagine it, even if it's unfamiliar, you've seen enough movies about it, for example. Whether there's a lot of suffering and the scale of the destruction and whether it's unfair.
None of those are about the probability and the cost and the benefit analysis. They're all about emotional things.
So if this is why we feel safer driving technically, then we probably should because it feels controllable. My wife drives, so I know that's the way I'm going.
That's how I'm going to leave this world. My wife driving.
She's a great driver, but let's just say I'm a little more risk averse than she is. Oh, me too.
My husband does more of the driving. I'm glad to see that we've got the genders reversed here.
At least we're mixing it up. She's a better driver than me, but it might also kill me one day.
Same. Exactly.
I'm with you 100%. And because I'm more aware of the risk, which in this case, I feel like I am more rational, like just for the record.
But yeah, typically when things feel like we're controlling them, we're less afraid of driving typically than we are of being in a plane crash because we're not flying it, right? And we feel out of control. Or if something feels like there's going to be more suffering, even if it's the same amount of dying or risks, like cancer is much scarier to people than heart attacks and that kind of thing.
So there's this complicated alchemy that we are subject to when it comes to dread and it's never as cut and dry as it seems. I think I spent the next decade after 9-11 telling people that driving was more dangerous than flying because I had friends who were like, yeah, we're going to drive to Miami.
I'm like, that's a 22-hour drive. Why don't you fly? It's $79 on Spirit or whatever.
You know, and no, my girlfriend doesn't want to fly or I don't want to fly. It's dangerous.
I'm just thinking it is so much safer per mile. And I had to look up all the data.
And I remember trying to find this. This is like pre smartphone, right? So it was harder to find stuff like that.
There wasn't an AI telling you this was safer, but it just took me forever. And it wouldn't have mattered though.
It didn't matter. I spent like 10 years doing it.
And the number of people who listened to me, it was like a single digit number of people

changed their mind as a result of me telling them that. I know.
I'm with you, man. I had the same reaction.
But it doesn't help. We have to workshop this at another time.
But how do you tell this to someone so that they will hear it? And that's the real question. Because after 9-11, the chance of dying on a major domestic commercial airplane flight, putting aside the actual terrorist attacks

was roughly eight in 100 million, okay, between 1992 and 2001. Driving the same distance as an average flight segment is about 65 times riskier.
And we saw the same thing, by the way, the same people make the same mistake during the pandemic, where flying remained dramatically safer than driving, it didn't feel safer, right? The dread factor was much higher. So as of September 2020, the probability of dying of COVID-19 after catching on an airplane was less than one in 4.7 million.
But getting onto a crowded airplane felt more dangerous, right? Yeah. You're always bunched up next to somebody and you're like, OK, if I can smell the guy behind me's farts, I'm going to be able to get COVID from him too.
This can't be safe. Right? This can't be safe.
Exactly. They said something about air ventilation, but we all know that's not working.
We all know. Yeah.
Beliefs really seem to drive us here. For Hurricane Katrina, the narrative, and I'm not saying this is a false narrative, I just mean the narrative was that a lot of people were too poor to evacuate.
And I know that's true, but maybe not the whole story. And the beliefs that people had were maybe more important than the economics.
Can you tell me what you mean by that? Absolutely. So once the research was done, often the research doesn't get done until way after the headlines, right? So that's why you get this disconnect.
But there was an analysis of 486 Hurricane Katrina victims that found that they were not disproportionately poor or black, that in fact, if you're looking at all the variance and evacuation behavior, income accounts for some of it. So does race, but no more than five or 10 percentage points.
What really accounts for the differences, and this is going to sound squishy, are people's beliefs. So it's their beliefs about how dreadful the threat is, how solid their house is.
Also, can they trust that it will be safe if they leave it, right, going back to trust? And also, how terrible will the evacuation experience be? So basically, age turned out to be very important in determining who left before Hurricane Katrina, because elderly people had lived through a bunch of hurricanes, some of which were in fact worse than Katrina, but many other things had changed, making Katrina more dangerous. And they knew that they would have to get into a crowded car with their grandkids and the dog, and it would be terrible.
And so they were weighing these risks and obviously preferencing their own personal experience, which is pretty normal. We kind of like to think the more life experience we have, the better we're going to be in a disaster, but it's not necessarily the case.
I know there's a story of a child essentially saving lots of people during a tsunami in Thailand because the kid was like, I think I saw on TV that when that happens, you're supposed to get to high ground and not go down and collect shells off the beach or whatever. Yeah.
I mean, kids can be incredible messengers for this kind of stuff. This is why firefighters are always showing up at schools, right? Because kids get into this if you do it the right way and they'll remember and they'll become evangelical about it.
And so Tilly Smith is who you're talking about, who was on the beach in Thailand on vacation with her parents. and she saw the indicators, the warning signs, the natural warning signs of a looming tsunami, which most people in most places don't know.
But she knew them because she learned them in her geography class. I think she was 12.
She had just learned them in school. And so she saw that the ocean receded, got very shallow and weird.
Fish were flopping around on the sand and people were all going towards the water, staring at this or marking on this. I have photos of people

gathering on the beach, staring at the water. And she said to her parents, I think there's going to

be a tsunami. And so they did what most parents would do, which is to be like, it's fine.
But to

her credit, kids aren't as worried about being embarrassed until they get a little older, I guess. But she wasn't worried about that.
And so she really insisted. She sat down on the beach.
She said, there's going to be a tsunami. And so her dad took her back to the hotel and said, yeah, I'm a little embarrassed.
My daughter thinks there might be a tsunami coming. What do you guys think? And there happened to be another guy walking by.
And he said, you know, there was an earthquake earlier today, so it's not impossible.

And they cleared that beach and they saved many people's lives as a result of that little girl's warning. That's pretty impressive.
Well, I guess it's a kid saying something, right? So zero

authority. Kids say so much, you know what I mean? And they don't always get the respect

that they deserve. I know if I'm going to be gathering my crap on a burning aircraft,

thereby hindering the evacuation of myself and others, causing their untimely deaths. I would want to be gathering something from one

of the amazing sponsors that support this show. We'll be right back.
If you like this episode of

the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment

and support those who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes, and ways to

support the show are searchable and clickable over at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Our AI chatbot can also surface promo codes.
That's over on the website at jordanharbinger.com slash AI. You can also email us.
I'm happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show.
Now for the rest of my conversation with Amanda Ripley. You mentioned in the book, and I thought this was interesting, certain disasters are more dangerous for men than for women.
What is that all about? And which ones? Yeah. Yeah.
Do you want to guess? Should we play a trivia game? I really feel like I have absolutely no idea what could be more dangerous for men than women. The only thing I can think of is like a shipwreck.
And it's like women and children first. And guys are just like, yeah, we're never getting off this damn thing.
We're done. Some of it will be kind of unsurprising, but some of it is surprising.
So men are more likely to be killed by lightning, hurricanes and fires. Nearly twice as many men as women die in fires, according to the U.S.
Fire Administration. So why is that? It is a bunch of reasons.
Typically, more men doing more dangerous jobs that are at risk of fire. Right.
But it's also because men take more risks overall. This is a generalization, but on average, men are more likely to walk towards smoke and drive through floods.
So a lot of people, how they die in disasters is driving through standing water. If people remember nothing else from this conversation, please know this, that driving through standing water is very dangerous.
You can't tell how deep it is. Whereas on average, not always, women tend to be more cautious.
So they're earlier to evacuate. They're less likely to drive through standing water.
They're less likely to stay outside when there's lightning. And this in some ways is a luxury, right? If you don't think you're going to be called weak and made fun of for going inside in the lightning storm, it's a lot easier to go inside.
Or if it's not your job to be outside in a lightning storm. So it's complicated.
Interesting. So the answer to the questions, which disasters are more dangerous for men than for women is all of them, especially if you have a big ego and you don't want to look like a woman.
Got it. Especially put it more charitably if you're living in a culture that doesn't give men a lot of leeway.
But yes, yes, Jordan, that is right. I think we're hitting on the reason I didn't run away from this quote unquote gunshots at LAX.
I'm like, ah, I don't want to look like a wimp if this isn't a gunshot. I don't think that's why, because everybody ran.
But there was probably a little bit of that. Unless I'm really sure this is a gunshot, I'm not going to run.
You don't want to be that person, right? I don't want to be that guy, along with all the other thousands of that guys who are now in the tarmac while I'm in the terminal with a potential terrorist. Yeah.
But I bet in a different situation on a different day, you would react differently. I mean, we've seen that, right, from your stories.
It depends on your mood, right? Are you hungry? Are you annoyed? There's a bunch of things. But we do know that there are some cases where it's better to be a man than a woman in a disaster.
So here's a ridiculous example, but it does matter, which is on 9-11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating. And that was because of their shoes.
So they were wearing shoes that were uncomfortable, and you do a lot of walking to evacuate a skyscraper. And so they would take off their shoes, and then they would step on on glass and people would trip on their shoes and different things.

So that's one thing.

And another thing is in countries where women are not typically encouraged or allowed to learn how to swim, which was a lot of countries that were hit by the tsunami, they had wildly worse death rates, women.

So women and girls.

There's a lot of ways that the culture and biology can inform this, but not always the ways that we expect.

I know that I'm going to get in trouble for this, but I noted that you said obese people have way lower chances of survival. And I'm going to ask why, even though this is such a sensitive subject for people, because I think it's important.
Anybody who's looking for a good reason to lose the last few pounds might listen to this. Certainly one of the reasons I wanted to get in shape was to live longer.
I just wasn't thinking because of a disaster. I was more thinking like blood pressure and triglycerides.
Yeah, it sounds like I'm being really harsh, but the statistics are pretty clear that on average, obese people tend to move more slowly. They're more vulnerable to secondary injuries like heart attacks, which you can have in a disaster.
Many people do. Many firefighters die that way.
And they have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. On 9-11, people who had low physical ability for many reasons, including obesity, were three times as likely to be hurt while evacuating the towers.
Even though like many people were helped, there were lots of co-workers who carried disabled co-workers out of the towers at great personal risk and effort. Yes, it is true that these things can conspire to make it much harder for you to survive for a lot of reasons and also harder to recover.
We talk about surviving, but we also want to recover. We want to have a full life again, and that really matters.
And there's a lot of factors that can make that harder or easier. Do they make it harder for other people to survive as well? Because it sounds like if someone has to be carried out, okay, but I don't know, if you're obese, you move more slowly.
I feel bad asking this, even though it's just data. But I think on this show, I could say something that is actually horrifically racist.
And I would get thoughtful emails from people telling me why I'm wrong. Not that I've ever done that, of course.
But if I say something on the show that indicates something negative about overweight people, even if it's literally science or backed up by data, my inbox is a total shite show for the rest of the month with this. But yeah, so I'm asking you to take the flack for me by bringing it up and covering this.
Yeah, look, there's so many different dimensions that we bring to these situations. Like if I'm obese trying to evacuate a skyscraper, yeah, I'm going to slow that process down.
But maybe also I know where the stairs are and I have helped my office prepare for, unlike most offices in the Trade Center, we've done some actual training on where the staircases are. We know how they work.
Like, maybe, yeah, I'm wearing heels. And so then I take them off, which makes me more likely to get injured.
But then in other ways, like, I'm incredibly compassionate and cooperative. There's not just one way in which we show up at these things, just like every day.
But it is true that we know safety engineers have had to adjust for the size of Americans. The size, as Americans have gotten bigger, it changes the crowd dynamics.
When people walk down the staircase, for example, they sway slightly from side to side, which takes up more space than our actual body width. So the heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway.
And that means fewer people can fit down the staircase. This is just a physics problem.

And the answer to that is not to shame people,

but to say, look, this is the reality.

This is a heightened risk.

We need to maybe make staircases and escalators wider.

That would be one thing.

But we also need to help people prepare

for the risks that they face,

regardless of their individual challenges.

Yeah, it's an incredibly difficult problem. I never even thought about the shoes.
You got to take those things off and smack people with them if they're moving too slowly. Move it, pal.
You know what? It's funny. I just found under my desk, because I lived in New York City on 9-11, I was covering a lot of disasters, so I was probably a little tweaked, but I would keep, you know, extra old pair of sneakers in my desk.
And I just came across him because I moved out of that office and I realized, you know what, there's been real progress, which is I no longer need to keep sneakers because all my shoes are so freaking comfortable now compared to like 2001. So hopefully that will change and has changed over time.
Yeah. You would think like the person who had their yoga shoes or their gym shoes in their office on 9-11 and just went, oh, I'm going down the stairs, let me change into these, would have literally had a survival advantage because of that at that point.
Yeah, it's wild. You mentioned this earlier, like panic episodes and crowds.
Tell me about the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. You always hear about people there dying in these massive crowd crushes of thousands of people.
And I might be out of line here, but I know there's some chatter like, oh, it's OK, you go straight to paradise if you die on a pilgrimage to Mecca. That maybe doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about people dying there avoidably.
For sure. Yeah, we should definitely do something in all situations, including the Hajj, which is a very interesting test case because we hear about crowd crushes.
Sometimes people call them stampedes and often the crowd gets blamed.

This is a recurring theme, how regular people get blamed and the people in charge don't trust the public and so forth.

But in this case, the very good example, because the Hajj has been around, this pilgrimage has been around for more than 1400 years. This is not a new situation.
Muslims have journeyed to Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad, and it's required of every Muslim who can manage it. But the deaths only started recently.
Starting around 1990, you started to see these crowd crushes happen, right? Now, why is that? It's because of the cheaper cost of plane travel. More and more people were coming to the Hajj.
And it's a physics problem, ultimately, right? Like the people couldn't fit in the space. But it's even more interesting than that, which is so in 1990, a crowd crush in a pedestrian tunnel at the Hajj killed 1400 people in minutes.
Just horrific. people from all over the world.
And it's just, it's a very peaceful, harmonious crowd in general. So it's not like chaos.
But here's what happened. By the way, this kept happening at this exact same spot.
Four years later, another crush killed more than 270 people. And then 1998, 118 people, 2001, 35 people.
It went on and on and on. And they all happened in the same area around these three pillars that all pilgrims must throw stones at as a required ritual of the Hajj.
And so this beautiful holy place somehow had become a killing field for over 2,500 people. Terrible.
So it turns out that what happened, so people who study crowd dynamics, it's a lot like studying water flow. There's a fluid dynamics.
Because I always wonder, how does this work? I'm pushing a little on someone who's pushing a little on someone else, but then suddenly it adds up to hundreds or thousands of pounds of pressure on some old lady between all of us. It's really wild.
And for me, it's been really helpful to understand how that works. Because I think we imagine, at least what we see in movies and in our nightmares, right, is people just like climbing all over each other.
And that's not at all how it happens. Like in a way, it's more chilling, but in another way, it's less scary.
But here's basically what happens typically in most crowd crushes in stadiums, in clubs, at the Hajj. So the density gets to a point where it's very dangerous.
And the density of the crowd means that one person way ahead of you can lose their footing. And the crowd behind doesn't know.
So they keep pushing forward, unless there's really good communication, that kind of thing. So you can work around this.
But the crowd is just moving forward. And they don't know that someone has fallen.
And then other people try to help that person, which then creates more of a barrier, right? And they become obstacles for everybody else. And most people who die in crowd crushes, they die from suffocation.
They don't die from being trampled on. They die because they can't breathe.
It's horrible. But basically, it's the compounding pressure of all of these people moving forward, not knowing, tragically, that someone up front has fallen.
Right. Because you can't feel it unless it's happening to you, right? Because I'm imagining just gently being pushed against someone else.
But when there's hundreds of people doing that and then it goes into some narrow tunnel, those people are getting hundreds or thousands of pounds of pressure on their chest cavity. Yeah, exactly.
The biggest problem here, right, is the density, but also the lack of communication. Like the people in back, we have no way of knowing someone's fallen.
All we see is a small space opens up in front of us where that person used to be. So what do we do? Just like we always do, right? We fill it up, which puts more pressure on the fallen.
You're suffocating people, but you just you don't know, which is terrible because it turned out that pressure builds up exponentially. So a crowd quickly picks up the same amount of force as a 18-wheeler, as a Mack truck.
And humans can lose consciousness after being compressed for just 30 seconds and they become brain dead after six minutes. They can die without ever falling down just from that sheer pressure.
It's the walls are literally closing in. So it's not the kind of panic that we imagine, right? It's not like that at all.
That's important to understand because then that indicates how you would prevent crowd crushes and they are all preventable, right? This is the thing that is really important to understand because there have been many crowd crutches after which officials, including officials at the Hajj, have blamed the public when, in fact, it was the crowd management that was to blame. Yeah, of course it is, right? How are you going to blame 100,000 people instead of the person whose job it is to make sure that 100,000 people have a place to go and aren't going to get bottlenecked.
That's government deflection at its finest. I will say some of the heroism stories in the book are really inspiring.
I don't think I'm cut out to jump into freezing water or run into a burning building anytime soon, especially now I have little kids, maybe pre-kids, pre-wife I would have. I'm not sure.
I don't know if you've studied that at all. But before kids, I stopped to help with a car crash with a baby and a woman trapped inside.
And there was a burning car another time on the highway. Pretty kids, though.
Once I have kids now, I'm like, OK, no more figurative or literal bungee jumping of any kind at all. Yeah, absolutely.
And the research on heroism is like really slippery. But I did try to find as much as I could.
And what I found is that there definitely is a profile. You're right that the phase of life that you're in really does seem to matter.
And this is a fast generalization with very imperfect data. So, you know, don't freak out, everyone listening.
But people who become celebrated as heroes, which is different than people who are actually heroes, right? It's a smaller subset, tend to be more likely to be men and more likely to be childless. So that could be for lots of reasons.
That could be because they don't feel the fear of leaving their children alone on this earth, or it could be there are evolutionary theorists who would say it's because they are trying to make sure their reputation is called your hero. That's awesome.
That's so funny. I don't have kids, but you know who loves a hero? The ladies.
Yeah. Maybe men face more pressure, especially in certain places and times, to jump into the freezing water or because maybe they have more experience in swimming in open water.
So it's really tricky. But I will say, just anecdotally, the heroes that I've interviewed, first of all, they all hate that word.
Like, they all really resent that word. And what's underneath that? I think it's because their experience of it was very different from the way we tell the story.
So all the time, people will ask heroes, why did you jump in the water? And their thinking is, how could I not? What does it say about you that you're even asking me this question? And typically, they explain their behavior by saying, I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't done this. So it's like a values thing, maybe, from their parents? They're weighting different fears for whatever combination of reasons.

They dread having to live with themselves knowing they didn't try more than they dread the threat in that situation. So I think for them, they're more afraid of what would happen if they didn't take action to their own identity and their sense of themselves.
And Roger Oleon, who's the one that I profiled, who jumped into a freezing river after a plane crash, he said, basically, you're doing it for yourself because you wouldn't want to not do it and face the consequences internally. So in his case, he did not have children.
He knew that he was a big, strong guy who was a good swimmer. He knew he wasn't going to reach those people, by the way, because of the ice and the water.
But he had military training, which is also very common. Just anecdotally, a lot of the people who engaged in heroics tend to have military training.
Who knows if that's causal or not, but he had a kind of bias for action. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life wondering if he should have done something.
And so he did everything he could do. And even though he didn't get to those passengers, they saw him coming.
And that was very important to their survival. He survived.
Most of them survived because it turned out a helicopter made it through very unexpectedly in this ice storm. I know something that makes for at least the special forces guys, not necessarily like the hero that you just mentioned, but there's something called neuropeptide Y that I've never heard of that I'm super interested in because I want to inject it immediately.
But what is this and how does it work? Yeah, so it's a compound that it appears special forces soldiers tend to produce significantly more of than other people. And it helps you stay focused on a task under stress.
So even 24 hours after a mock interrogation, say, or some kind of very intense simulation, Special Forces soldiers had returned to normal levels of neuropeptide Y while other soldiers remained depleted. So it seems like they have this kind of stockpile, maybe, for some reason that we don't understand.

Whereas in civilian life, people with... while other soldiers remain depleted.
So it seems like they have this kind of stockpile, maybe,

for some reason that we don't understand.

Whereas in civilian life,

people with anxiety disorders or depression,

they tend to have lower levels of neuropeptide Y.

So this is some research that has been done specifically for the Army on why some people,

especially Green Berets, under certain situations

tend to stay relatively calm and perform well. And basically, yeah, they found that they seem to remain more mentally clear, and we don't fully understand why, but it could have something to do with literally their chemical makeup.
That's interesting. Supplement dealers and sketchy pharma companies are just glamouring to bottle this.
And maybe not even sketchy, because I would imagine the military would just want to inject this into everybody and then see who makes it through training. Yeah, I'm going to not recommend any of that.
I don't think we know how to create this. And what we do know, the best way if you want to inject yourself with some calmness for extreme events is to train for them.
That's the way. That's the thing we know that helps.
I like that. But your warning is not going to stop biohackers or the military from trying to inject people with brain chemicals to make them into super soldiers.
And we both know that. No.
Gotta try. Every 20-something guy is Googling where they can buy this online right now.
Oh, I have an even better one for the 20-something guys. Oh, please.
This is the thing that also special operators train on, which is practice rhythmic breathing.

I know it doesn't sound as sexy as injecting yourself with some very sketchy chemical.

Yeah.

But literally, you know, I interviewed a police officer who he was a rookie cop.

Every time you call in on his radio responding to something serious, his voice would go up like two octaves and his voice would shake, which is a totally normal fear response signal when you're under too much fear. But it was embarrassing, of course.
So he started doing this very clever thing, which we could all do in our own different ways, which is he would play a recording of his siren. And every day for 10 minutes, he would practice doing rhythmic box breathing, which is like in for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale for four, hold for four, and repeat.
And so it got to a point where every time he heard a siren, he would just automatically do this breathing thing, right? And within a few weeks, all of a sudden, his voice was normal when he called in on the radio, which is actually a very big deal. It's not just that it was less embarrassing.
It means that he's not likely to degrade. He's going to keep his eye-hand coordination.
He's going to make better decisions.

He's not going to lose his peripheral vision.

All the things we talked about earlier

are likely to be under control.

So that's what I would recommend

for everyone listening

is practice box breathing

or any kind of rhythm with breathing,

especially in stressful situations

so that you can do it automatically.

Oh, that's interesting.

I took a kidnap evasion course,

whatever it's like,

an urban survival and evasion course.

And they like bag your head and put you in a van handcuffed. And they were like, they said, when this happens, box breathing, because you're going to have this crazy panic reaction, if anything similar ever happens to you.
And you need to stay calm because you need to count things or listen for auditory signals about where you are or see how many right turns you made, if you can do something like that. like all these little things that you're not doing when you're panicking and, I don't know,

soiling yourself or whatever else,

or going blind in the back of the car.

So did you practice that?

I did, but you know, it sounds so easy,

but when you are having any kind of anxiety,

in for four, hold for four, out for four is an eternity,

and you're really like,

you're really just gasping for air

after one or two rounds of this. It's very difficult.
It's very difficult. And it feels like this can't be right.
You know, I used to try to practice it every time I was stressed when I was in traffic. I should do that again.
But you don't want to practice it under duress, right? You want to practice it in a low stakes stress situation. So if there's certain things like your kid crying or your wife driving, whatever, that's a good time to practice.
That's a good idea. Yeah, my wife's going to be like, why do you always breathe weird when I drive now? Because Amanda Ripley told me to.
Thank you so much, by the way, for doing the show. I like to highlight when us humans rise to the occasion, not like magically meet our expectations or whatever, but meet our higher moral virtue, perhaps.
And frankly, being useful in a disaster is something we should all aspire to, in my opinion. Maybe I'm still an Eagle Scout at heart, but I really think that one of the best things you can do is at least don't be a burden to everyone around you.
But ideally, you are the person who grabs the other person by the elbow and says, we're getting out of here. Yeah.
Or maybe you're the person who leads everyone in a sing-along when you're in a tornado shelter. Like there's all different opportunities, but if you do want to learn more about how to be helpful in a very tangible ways, I would encourage people to check out their local CERT organizations.
Every county typically has one. These are ways to get free training in emergency response.
And so that's one thing you could do. And also just understand what to expect so that you won't be shocked if and when it happens.
That was the course I took where I went, this is really good. I'm not going to remember 90% of this, but I still think it's a good idea.
And you're right. They're taught well.
They're taught by people who know what they're doing. So it was a certain course that you took.
Yeah. And I want to say it was like a fire marshal or some fireman who taught the course or retired fireman.
And he was really good. And he knew a lot about a lot.
But I remember also being like, wow, am I going to be useless in a disaster? Because this guy knows so much and I'm going to pick up maybe like too much. Yeah, it's a bit much.
But you know what? Even if you just remember anything, because I really think that most of us, like we talked about at the top of the show, are quite useless when it comes to a disaster. At best, we're useless.
And at worst, we're actually making things worse for everybody around us, which is, you know. In our modern world, we've become very interdependent.
We don't know how to do things that we, for most of our history, knew how to do. So yeah, I think it's helpful just to have some sense of your own agency.
So for people who might be interested, the CERT stands for Community Emergency Response Team. So that's what you want to Google.
And again, they're locally run. Some are much better than others, but it's worth checking out if you're interested.
Amanda Ripley, thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Jordan.
It was fun. Appreciate it.
Join us as Adam Gamal, a Muslim Arab American and former Egyptian refugee, recounts his rise to become a key operative of one of the U.S.'s most secretive military units in this two-part podcast series. In part one, Adam delves into the high-stakes world of counterterrorism and covert operations, revealing the personal and ethical complexities of fighting terrorism from within the shadows.
I came to the U.S. to give me the right to dream.
In Egypt, you don't have that option. It's not cliche.
I'm not trying to recruit people to join the Army, but I was like, here is a key, actually,

to be as American as anybody can argue with you.

And it was joining the military.

You end up there by pure determination,

by having grit, and by being a bit lucky.

So we were basically getting our tasks from Secretary of Defense level.

Join Special Operations Command in charge of three main missions. Counter-otic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue.
I believe myself, if my dad did not push me towards getting the right education, then maybe I would've went in the wrong direction. So education gonna help people prosper.
They're gonna help people actually critically analyze the information they are receiving. So when somebody's bullshitting them about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you're going to hell.
If you have an educated person, can they look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I believe to educating women is crucial because they are raising us.
A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things. So if we have a population of educated women in the Middle

Eastern and any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper. And it will be harder

to convince these guys to become terrorists. Business is war and business is good.
When we

give people the proper education, we all live a better life. Tune in to uncover his unique journey

and critical insights only he can provide on episode 978 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. I found this fascinating.
A lot of weird behaviors, the whole gathering thing, and that's just creepy, but I can also see why people just do what they were going to do when they got off the plane normally, but try to do it faster. Still, though, the fact that people die doing that is really sort of screwed up and sad.
Sometimes people panic even when it makes no sense. Trained divers and firefighters panic.
They rip out their air source underwater or in a burning building. There's a lot of accounts of this.
People with certain base levels of anxiety are actually more likely to do this. I don't know how they measure that, but it makes me realize I'm not cut out for diving and probably not for firefighting.
Not everyone panics, of course. Some people just freeze and go catatonic.
You see those videos on Reddit or whatever where somebody just freezes and is completely useless in any kind of high-stress situation. Many animals also seem to have this mode.
Humans especially do. Again, we see that in those videos.
Why do we evolve this, though? What a weird reaction. Well, predators are actually less likely to eat sick prey.
They want to avoid poisoning. Animals maybe have evolved to utilize this.
And unfortunately, victims of sexual assault often have this reaction and then they blame themselves as a result. So I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you froze during something like that, it is an evolved trait and you don't need to beat yourself up about it.
Although I'm sure my words are cold comfort for you. This might add another layer of forgiving yourself if that's the case.
We think a lot of these things, these disasters, the panicking, the fight-flight freeze, that won't happen to us, right? But this is the Lake Wobegon effect, where everybody thinks that they're above average. But it's important to remember, we don't rise to the level of our expectations.
We default to the level of our training. And this is why a lot of people freeze, even though they're a black belt at some McDojo in a strip mall somewhere, or even actually trained in certain situations.
If your training is not actual combat-ready type stuff, like you would expect from people who need to do this for a living, you might freeze. And it's going to be very disappointing when this happens.
And you should be prepared for that psychologically. Training, of course, helps the stress response.
Even something called micro training, like knowing where emergency exits are in hotels and airplanes. When I go to hotels, I make sure I know where the stairs are.
Are they left? Are they right? How far down are they? Airplanes, I usually count the row of seats in front of me. If there's six rows and then I turn right and that's the door because if that thing fills the smoke and you can't see and you can't breathe, you're going to want to do one, two, three, four, five, six, turn right and end up outside, not one, two, three, four, five, and then you end up in row C over some dude who's trying to pack his MacBook Pro and get his shoes on.
The strongest thing you can do in any disaster is have a plan for an emergency and be determined to execute it. There's more in her book on this, but as a kid, my mom and I drew up a map to get out of the house in case of a fire, and I got some sort of rope ladder thing to get out of my window on the first floor, but that made me feel safer, and I knew that if anything happened, I would just jump up, open the window, and get out of the house if my door was blocked by fire, and I think I would have been able to do that, honestly.
Or I would have frozen and cooked to death. Whatever.
Never had to find out, thankfully. All things Amanda Ripley will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show.
Also, our newsletter, We Bit Wiser, I'd love to see you there. The idea is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships in under two minutes a week.
And if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is a great companion to the show.
Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking as well over at six minute networking dot com.
I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. And this show, well, it's created an association with Podcast One.
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.
The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.
So if you know somebody who might need a little disaster planning, who's interested in this kind of training stuff, maybe they're a first responder. Maybe there's somebody who needs to listen to a first responder.
Share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn.
And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like podcast.

Have you ever wondered how it feels to watch your house burn down,

be attacked by an alligator,

or learn that your spouse hired someone to kill you?

What Was That Like is the podcast for you if you're that person.

Real, not the person who got hired to be killed,

but the person who wondered, more thankfully.

Real people come on every episode to explain the unbelievable situations they've been through.

I think it's a funny concept for a show.

I kind of wish I'd thought of it because I always get crazy stories from people. Not everything turns into a Jordan Harbinger episode.
But what was that like is hosted by my friend, Scott Johnson, who's naturally curious and gives his guests the opportunity to share how they've really felt during some of their most surreal experiences, what they did in the morning before an earthquake, what song was playing as a gunman entered, what is their stomach growling as they hid. Guests share everything they remember about

their crazy, crazy experiences. So if you want to hear some disturbing slash inspiring firsthand

stories about the thoughts that go through your head while surviving a kidnapping or winning the

price is right, what was that like is the podcast you've been looking for. Every story is thoroughly

researched and fact checked so you know even the most unreal stories

are actually someone's reality.

Listen to What Was That Like

wherever you get your podcasts.