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- [Narrator] Welcome to the Wiener Conference Call series. Featuring leading experts from Harvard Kennedy schools who answer questions from alumni and friends on public policy and current events.

- [Ariadne Valsamis] Good day, everyone. I'm Ariadne Valsamis from the Office of Alumni Relations and Resource Development at Harvard's Kennedy School, and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this Wiener Conference Call. These calls are generously supported by Dr. Malcolm Wiener and his wife, Carolyn, who support the Kennedy School in so many vital ways and we're deeply grateful. Before I introduce our speaker today, I wanna remind everyone this call is being recorded. It will be posted on the Kennedy School's website and on our YouTube page. So if you'd like to turn on the feature that provides a real time transcription of the audio, please use the meeting controls toolbar at the bottom of your Zoom screen and click on show captions. For the best view of our speaker, please select speaker view at the top right of your Zoom window. Today, we have a very special session. We are joined by Juliette Kayyem who is the Belfer Senior lecturer in international security at Harvard Kennedy School. She's a national leader in homeland security and crisis management. She served as President Obama's assistant secretary for Intergovernmental Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, and as the Homeland Security Advisor for Massachusetts. Professor Kayyem also serves as the Senior National Security Analyst for CNN where she's been described as CNN's go-to for disasters. She is a contributing writer to the Atlantic and a prolific commentator in the national media, as well as the author of bestselling books on crisis management and security. Thank you, Juliette, for coming here today to share your expertise with the Kennedy School's alumni and friends, and over to you.

- [Juliette Kayyem] Thank you so much. I know it's being recorded, so I need to press okay, so I can see you all. I said on a different Zoom, I'm gonna excuse the hostage aspects of my room now. I am at the Harvard Faculty Club doing executive teaching, and it's raining here. And I decided instead of getting sopping wet for you all to get to my office, they found me a room that has this beautiful decor. So there is a basement at the faculty club. I'm so thrilled to be here and I wanna first just thank you all and the supporters and hosts of this recurring program for the Kennedy School and Institution that I've been a part of, and different pieces throughout my career, and just really proud right now to be a part of as we address and sort of maneuver around fundamental changes, not around, with fundamental changes going on in our environment, political, economic, climate, housing, all of them. And to keep the next generation engaged in that. And I'm happy to talk about what's happening on campus and all the crises that you're reading about as well in the Q&A But I was asked to talk a little bit about policy. That's where you all are right now or that's what brought you here. As alumni, as supporters. And what does it mean to be in the policy world in these times. So if I'm gonna spend about just 15 minutes just talking about my world, which is disaster and crisis management, and the reason why, you know, I'm in this space as someone who sort of assumes a harm is coming. And then, so how do you judge success in terms of preparedness and response capabilities? That's a lot of, that's under stress right now with, you know, FEMA and NOAA and other climate related parts of our government changing in terms of their resources. But it's also true in aviation, security, pandemics and other things like that. So, okay, so I'm gonna start with, okay, now I need to like, make sure you don't see my whole background. Hold on one second. I'm not gonna do chat. Hold on. Share. Okay, so I am gonna do this, but let me find, okay, this is it and now I just wanna share it. Here we are. Okay. Yay? Okay. That was good. That was smoother than in the practice. So anyway, so thank you so much. This is me and I wanna talk about disaster management. What our students are inheriting, those who go to local government, state government, even federal government, the stresses on that for obvious reasons. And then some of the fixes that we think about right now. And I talk fast and I want to leave most of the time for Q&A. Okay. But we must start at my home 'cause I need to bring you all back to Cambridge. I live in Central Square. As we like to say, the square that never quite made it between Kendall, Harvard, and others. But it's a great place. And we live in a single family house. My husband and I, he was a law professor. He's now a judge, raised three kids in a house that was built in 1840. And as many of you remember about New England, these houses are old and cranky. I was in preparedness and disaster management well before COVID. In fact, wrote my first piece for the Atlantic when they called me 'cause they could see that I was getting more and more stressed out about this COVID thing. My first column in early March was America, you have no idea what's about to happen. As I sort of looked at the metrics of what was happening before the shutdown. We're all home as we are, I'm teaching that semester. I'm teaching the crisis management class. The kids, two teenage boys and a college age girl are all home. And I'm working nonstop just given the nature of both my policy work and my media work. The boys, we buy the house, and I'll just explain this by hand gestures. We buy the house and as many of you remember, these New England has, they're like 20 different things like, you know, it was a single family house, a split house. It was at one stage a dorm house for Harvard. It had all sorts of nooks and crannies. We bought it as a single family house and we're not inclined to like, you know, check every wall. And we're told that on the third floor, overlooking the boys' bathroom, above the boys' bathroom, there's a closet and a back wall. And we don't, because most people don't break down a back wall of a closet. And we're told it's just crawl space 'cause the roof is a triangle. The boys, fast forward, a hundred and however many years. And my boys managed to, you know, destroy it in ways that hadn't been before. And the fan in their bathroom breaks, they don't tell me, continue to take showers, and the ceiling comes off. I go up, I put a ladder, I regret I did not take a picture of this crawl space and find a sort of closety space. It's more than a crawl space. You could fit a bed, a twin bed, so to speak. And maybe a little desk. And there's only one thing in it. And that's this picture. So this is found in May of 2020. And I put it on Twitter because Twitter used to be helpful. And I say, "Hey, you know, historians, when was this picture taken? And what the heck?" And based on records, public records, people determined that this was probably to Annie McCue who lived in my house from 1917 to 1919. And her husband, Charles, you can see like a mit in there somewhere. So I go to bed that night, kind of freaked out, you know, lock the door 'cause I'm afraid of ghost, lock the bathroom door 'cause I'm afraid of ghost. And wake up the next morning to a different story, which is they had a daughter who's 19 years old in 1919, the same age as my daughter. I don't mind you knowing my address 'cause it's public now, who lived on 30 Lee Street. She got sick in 1919, was sent up to what's called an infirmary room in these old homes. Now we know what that crawlspace was. She passed away there, the McCues closed it up. They were a well-known family. And even the governor came and visited them in the home. She dies there, the funeral is at the home. And then she's buried. The McCues move out in 1919. And Annie McCue actually lives into the 1960s. And Charles died in the 1940s. We learned from the death certificates or people who were sending death certificates, that the connectivity of disasters and that the devil never sleeps is that Letitia McCues died in the third wave of the Spanish flu pandemic that cut across New England in 1919. So when I learned this, my daughter's 19 at the time. It sort of reflected what I had been thinking about my own field, which was I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. And this story, I begin with this story 'cause it's the through line, right? The all sorts of things are happening. And the through line is 101 years later, almost to the date is another mother, trying to protect her child in 30 Lee Street from a global pandemic. And yet we're thinking, "Oh my God, we're so unique. This is so horrible." And I'm thinking, what's the connective tissue? It's not just my house. And that bred my work now that states and locales and others are beginning to absorb. I get opportunities to work with the National Government Association of all the ways that one tries to have policy and private sector impact. 'cause obviously the private sector is relevant in this. And it's this, okay. So this is the old framework. This is Annie McCues is, you know, alone in her house and it's never gonna happen again and her daughter dies, right? And to think of it is that disasters is random and rare. And this is what we inherited as a public policy. Everything we do is under belief of there but for the grace of God, go I. And we divide disasters into two. It's more complicated than this, but I wanna make it simple for lay people. Two worlds. Left of boom and right of boom. Left of boom is you're stopping the bad thing from happening. The terrorists don't get on the airplane. The right of boom is you are managing the consequences of the boom. And notice how I'm agnostic about the boom. I don't consider myself a terrorism specialist, a cybersecurity. So like all these people are like, there's little specialists in all these risks. I'm just the specialist in the boom 'cause I'm just seeing the connectivity amongst all these things. And that's what the book does. So, and I want you to look at this from your public policy purchase. Those of you who are alumni or know the school is, this is really hard because it's binary. Success is left a boom, failure is right a boom. That's a hard place to be when lots of booms are happening all the time with whatever measure, right? And so the way we talk about disasters, why did this happen? Whatever. So thinking now about disasters as sort of standard operating procedure. I teach on crisis leadership, not gonna talk about that. You're happy to answer questions. I don't believe there's any such thing as crisis leadership. I just believe there's leaders in a crisis, right? Like we're all gonna at some stage encounter this and to think of our standard as success as different than binary. Because the more successful we are on response on that moment of boom, the more we keep the floor up, right? So think about, right? And we're inheriting all sorts of stuff from the previous boom. Think about New Orleans, you know. New Orleans, hurricane Katrina, category three. It wasn't a category five, but because its floor was so low from hundreds of years back. People always say, "Well why was New Orleans built that way?" Well, I'll tell you why it was built that way. 'Cause New Orleans was the center of our slave trade and they needed to build a city that boats could come up. Right? Now all of a sudden you're thinking about New Orleans differently, right? It was built for a different reason. So I'm thinking about what is that connectivity and I can't think of it as success failure. So I'm gonna skip this 'cause I'm running out of time. But anyway, I can come back to that. It's just a way to think about high consequence events. Those of you in the risk insurance world. High consequence events is what I'm looking at. I should say something like on this, which is I'm not worried about the low probability, low consequence events. I need a society that's solely focused on high consequence. The rest will sort of solve itself. So we do have a couple dozen selfie stick deaths a year of people who want the best picture on Instagram. They may be high profile. You know, think of the five billionaires who died in the submarine accident a couple years ago, right? That's very high profile. As a society, I'm not gonna like structure my preparedness around that. I know that sounds what, I mean, you know, I understand the intrigue of it, but it's not gonna make me wonder if the Coast Guard is ready. I wanna know if the Coast Guard is ready for the seawater rise. The stuff I know is happening. Okay. So what does that mean? And I'm just gonna end here. The challenge we have and I talked about earlier, the challenge we have then is if I'm measuring success after the boom, how am I measuring it? Is it lives lost? It could be, right? So what I do in the book is I look at the what worked in the disaster rather than the headlines we already know. Fukushima was bad, right? Of course, it was. Until I look at the nuclear facility 30 miles away from Fukushima and ask why didn't it have a radioactive leak, right? So you wanna look at the, from the policy perspective, you wanna look at the good news stories to tell you, well, what went right? Right? L.A. You know, you have a horrible L.A. fires, I have a fatality rate of probably only 25. Maybe 26, I'm not sure. Compare that to Hawaii and Paradise over 100 for each. Paradise, California. So we don't wanna say it, but something is letting me fail, as we say, fail safer. The challenge that you're seeing now in the world that we're in, especially in DOGE is what we call the preparedness paradox. Which is essentially the better we are at anticipating the disruption and responding to it, the harder it is to justify that investment. And that's what you're seeing in terms of DOGE and reporting requirements, right? How do I prove that my investment in being ready for when the bad thing happens, actually is an investment worth it when I'm not gonna be able to prove it until the bad thing happens and you're gonna think, I failed anyway, right? So I'm really challenging the efficiency metric in terms of the way that we're going about preparedness. So I just wanna end, I think that will be good. So my concept is the concept of learning to fail safer. I'm gonna end here. These are the title chapters. This isn't a book talk, it's just sort of like, you know, in terms of what's my connectivity between McCue, Abby McCue, as she opens my book to me, right? What is that connective tissue? Right? And I can start to see it 'cause I'm studying what worked. And so it's this concept of fail safer, right? That it is this concept of I'm gonna measure success by the delta between what could have really gone hard, and what happened. It's a challenge right now because everything we're looking at is through efficiency. Well, like, none of this is efficient until I have, you know, the catastrophe. Okay, so I that's sort of where my work is. I have Fukushima, I have various slides, but I wanna stop now. But I just want you to think about as, you know, you enter the world or thinking about the crisis that you may be encountering, those of you whom banking or finance or, you know, I was joking to my husband, I was like, "I'm a bond expert." You know, like a bond markets expert now 'cause we're all like experts in tariffs now. I'm not an expert in terrorists, but all the things going on is to think about time as the one commodity you cannot get in a crisis of the kind I talk about. Remember, lots of bad things are getting solved by public policy tools, are not solved by public policy tools. When we call them a crisis, it's not how people like me call them a crisis, right? This is the time aspects. And so what I always say to my students and what I say to leaders like you all, or those of you who who find yourself like is your runway is short. That is after the crash landing, your runway is short. And if you wanna fail safer, because I'm not gonna measure success by it didn't happen, it's gonna happen. Something's gonna happen. You only have two options. Be ready for the crash landing. So that's all the preparedness stuff that is under stress right now because of DOGE, or find ways to extend your runway. Those are your only two options. 'Cause the crash, I mean, yes, I wanna minimize the likelihood of a crash landing. I wanna, you know, stop bad things from happening. I'm not saying, I mean, you've been with me 20 minutes. I'm not fatalistic. I'm pretty gung-ho about the human species and our capacity to adapt. But you've got to be prepared to manage the runway after the crash landing. It's a conceptual way that I think about it for me personally, for my work, for my consulting, for my students, and for the headlines honestly. That seem to be cutting off our runway various times. You can feel a little bit overwhelmed by it. So I'm happy to answer those questions now or come back to some of the other slides, but it's really a pleasure and thank you for your time.

- [Ariadne] Thank you so much, Juliette. Now we'll open up the session for questions. Please turn your cameras on. And to ask a question, please use the virtual hand raising feature of Zoom and I'll call on you when it's your turn yourself and ask your question. And as we say at the Kennedy School, please keep your question brief and end with a question mark. And all of us on the call would really appreciate it if you can share your Kennedy School affiliation. And I will start us off while people are getting their questions ready with one that was submitted earlier by Sylvia Barragan Medina. Sylvia has an MPA 1994. And she would like to know, "In addressing the state of the homeland, how do we balance national security with protections for civil rights, especially when we're dealing with issues like border control, domestic extremism." And she adds climate-related crisis.

- [Juliette] Yeah, that's exactly right. So a couple things. So, you know, one of the challenges right now is what is homeland security, right? Because I think what you're seeing is such a focus on border controls and other risks will be neglected. You're seeing not just DHS, but you're also seeing the Pentagon getting engaged with a singular vulnerability. And trust me, I have my opinions about the Biden administration and how they dealt with immigration as well. And I was pretty publicly critical as well. So, you know, the exact policies, the challenge we have right now is by singularly defining what our homeland security is. There's gonna be other devils, right? Like, and the devil never sleeps. And so one of the things, you know, that I try to push back from is that singular focus on is on one risk. And that's what I'm worried about for the department is when you steer a department just in one way, which is clearly happy now and forget the, you know, the moral issues, the legal issues, the mistakes and stuff, that's a whole other conversation. But so that from a governance piece, we're looking in one direction and there's a whole bunch of stuff. So I think we're miscalculating on the risk. On the second thing is when I said what is homeland security? One of the interesting things is you're starting to now see how do you define America's resiliency? So we think about it in terms of like, obviously climate, like are we ready? Have we mitigated losses? You know. Even terrorism and stuff. But one of the things that my most recent piece in the Atlantic, because I'm trying to use my role with various platforms, is not to sort of chase every headline, but just like, maybe give like a larger thing. And I've thought long and hard about this because there's so many headlines, is what's the impact of that singular focus on homeland security, border enforcement on 10% of America's GDP? And I'm talking about our tourism industry. So, you know, define broadly, airline, hotel, restaurants, all sorts of things that cater to tourism, Disney, all that stuff. And the data is clear that that singular focus on essentially making the border experience for everyone who's not a US citizen less than favorable, I think that's fair to say. And the anecdotes that are going back to our European allies who are now, they're issuing travel advisories to their citizens about coming here that is unrelated to a terror attack or anything. I mean, it's just the general experience. So if you are a German or French and you're gonna spend money here this summer, guess what? You're not. I'm not even talking about workers. The tourism industry is such that 9% is down from France, 10% is down from Germany. We just know this from future flows. I mean, that's gonna have a tremendous impact on Airbnb. Everything from Airbnb renters to the big hotel change. And then the most recent data point for those of you who know aviation is the airlines. At the beginning of this year, we have this concept in travel called, it's called revenge tourism. And it's like everyone is traveling after COVID. It's been awesome years for travel. I'm sure a lot of you did it. And we call it revenge tourism. And the four major domestic airlines all were anticipating their best year this year. They revised it two weeks ago to flatline it to say, we just don't know what to expect. That was before the terrorists were put in place. And two days ago, Delta, I've never seen this before, Delta said, "We're not doing projections this year." A public company that is a major, you know, one of four major airlines. So when I talk think about Homeland Security now, I'm thinking about our economic security being impacted by our singular focus on border. We're not resilient in that sense.

- [Ariadne] Thank you. I'm gonna call on Tony Morris. Tony, introduce yourself and ask your question.

- Oh yeah.

- [Tony] Thank you very much, Juliette. I'm a member of the Dean's Council. We have shaken hands and I've attended every presentation of yours. And I thank you for your energy. It's infectious.

- Thank you.

- [Tony] My question for you is, where would you suggest this audience to direct its energy, whether to congress or whatever, as you look at the array of risks that are out there and the deltas you see between what could be done and what is being done. Is there any sort of low-hanging fruit that in areas where we could write our congressman or call our congressman and should do so? I'd be really curious to hear your response.

- [Juliette] I think about this all the time. I mean, I, on a personal level and, you know, amongst friends, I don't mind, you know, like, and it's not even Democrat Republicans, as I said, I had issues with immigration issues that weren't harsh enough in the Biden administration. It's more like, what's the value add? So I'm glad you're asking this question, like, how do I engage in something that just seems like I'm not sure and our students are going through it. I mean, you know, I teach my class is now like over 100 people, 80% of my office hours now are just, I lost my job. I can't get a job. I no longer wanna go into the federal. I mean, we're feeling it as well. So a couple, so what's the value add? So I have now come to believe there's a couple things that those of us who believe in effective policy, whether it's on the social or government, really bad at telling our stories. And I think we need to take this opportunity to amplify the success stories. I think we, at least in my space, I can't speak for like social policy or whatever, but like, you know, I mean, that people don't know why you want NOAA to function, right? Like effectively, like, okay, well that part of that is just has nothing to do with policy. But the other part is we have to use this opportunity to begin to explain why good data-driven data, data-driven policy matters in all of our different realms. And I think, you know, this centers ties to, you know, stakeholders that are maybe larger than mine, like in the sense of communities and people impacted and red states and red cities. The second is, there is still room for bipartisanship. And I see it in a little bit of my space. I think, you know, there's a lot being done now that I think when we stop looking gets put back into place. So there's a lot of bipartisanship on disaster. Like, you know, like Republican governors know that it is FEMA and the disaster relief funds that they need when the tornadoes come through Oklahoma. The reddest state in the country. And I actually co-host a documentary series and we go to communities that have been impacted. And I was in Oklahoma this summer. Oklahoma is more progressive in its resiliency and mitigation building than California. Reddest state in the country. And that's because there's common, I mean, we can fight about vaccines, but there's like common unity on like that. Yeah, you wanna survive the tornadoes. So I think about that a lot. So in terms of the bipartisan, you can get bipartisan coalitions. And I think let's stop... I mean, this is a Wiener Center's expertise, not mine. But, you know, I think, let's stop talking about resistance. And I don't mean this Democrat, Republican, I mean it like people who want to protect important equities in their life, like in terms of whether it's a university, whatever, however Harvard's gonna respond, that's not a Democratic thing. It's a equities thing, right? We're gonna assert our equities. I think we should stop looking at this sort of assertion of the rule of law and stability and all that stuff as a resistance with a capital R. And we should probably look at it with like a lot of lowercase r's. So all in everything, I'm all in. I mean, and it took me a while to figure that out, honestly. I was like, you know, I don't need to respond to every tweet. I mean, my politics are well known. I don't need to, it is what's my value add? People come to me 'cause of my expertise and then how can I help guide? So I'm working with a lot of Republicans to save elements of FEMA 'cause they love it.

- [Ariadne] Absolutely. Dan Munoz, please unmute yourself. Introduce yourself and ask your question.

- [Dan] Thanks so much. Thanks, Juliette. Dan Munoz, I'm MBA class of 2005. I am in healthcare. So Juliette, I'm particularly grateful for your thoughtful voice through COVID. And so my question I think relates to probably all sectors, which is, you know, when you talk about preparedness and also effective management of crises, it depends on among other things, having people's attention and engagement. And I wonder if you might reflect a little bit about how we best protect against folks becoming sort of desensitized to crisis and given kind of the age or era of chaos that we find ourselves living in really since COVID just interested in your reflections on that engagement.

- [Juliette] Well, thank you so much. And I thank you for that 'cause as you know, I didn't turn on the public health community. I was just like one of those people saying like, we're not getting it anymore. Like if you say follow the science, like, you know, and I think that's why it's important to have different voices in these, you know. As I say, you know, we're all crisis managers. Like, the pandemic can't be run simply as a medical thing 'cause it was impacting all of society, right? And governors are worried about other things than others. And those of you who didn't follow along, I got pretty aggressive about opening up after the vaccine was available, much to the chagrin of a lot of people on the right and left. And I was for mandates, I was for like mandates where no one wanted mandates. So I was like, "No vaccine, no airplane." I was like, "I'm done with this thing." But I also was for pushing for schools opening much earlier than they did. Okay, so you've got two different pieces. I mean, I think that the misinformation and the misinformation at the top of government is stuff that we haven't seen before. In particular, you know, it's a no hide, you know, Secretary Kennedy's large skepticism 'cause put it this way about vaccines. And the vaccine is a perfect example of the preparedness paradox, right? We don't know how good the vaccine is because I've never seen a child with polio. I haven't, right? I mean, I've never seen, you know, I don't know what it was like, right? So we've got a real problem there and that's gonna mean a lot more burden on subject matter experts outside of government to, as I said, to create that narrative. You can't beat it, but we gotta be out there. I mean that's, you know, one of my worries about all these crises is people will receive 'cause they can't sustain it. And one of the ways to think about our engagement, you know, from a social perspective, not a political. From a, what do we care about? Like what what do we want to work is to pick our lanes. That way then, you can be engaged. So I think you also are seeing changes in Kennedy's skepticism as, you know, as vaccine skepticism isn't gonna save children's lives, but there's measles outbreak. So this is where different voices become very, very important. So you've got the misinformation thing, which I don't know if I have an answer for. Misinformation by non-governmental entities. there's tools to deal with it in terms of media, in terms of saturation and stuff like that. It's a little bit different now. But in terms of engagement on this stuff, and I apologize is let me just turn this off. In terms of in engagement and in particular in your space, I have two thoughts. I mean, I do think that a honest, I think accounting of how the public health community might be thinking about the next pandemic is in particular the stresses it got on it with the opening up is probably good. And what language will we wanna use as the next pandemic comes. We're not gonna wanna use follow the science. It ran its course and people became skeptical of it. And then I think, I mean, look, people still trust their local doctors, they still trust their mayors. Whatever's going on in the world, they still trust their local emergency managers. So I think it's buttressing the trust where it now exists 'cause it's so hard to build now.

- [Ariadne] Gary Grim, please introduce yourself and ask your question.

- [Gary] Hi, Gary Grim. And Carr Center Board Dean's Council. You just touched on something that I'm very curious about, which is, for me, data-driven solutions are pretty obvious and should be able to convince anyone. But what we find now, and you touched on missing disinformation, that people do not respond to data-driven solutions. They don't even respond to historical solutions in the pandemic prior epidemics. We immediately quarantined everybody. And that helps save lives. How do we get people, and your comment about doing this locally might be the way to do it. How do we get people to respond to suggestions supported by data, supported by experience when right now we seem to be too polarized to listen to experts?

- [Juliette] Yeah, I mean, one is just keep producing because I don't think that overall that's true. I mean, I think even some of the mistakes that DOGE made they're reassessing in light of policy. And so I think, you know, we're still in the sweeping nature of all of this. And then find your audience. Because as I said is like, you know, I think of this mayor in Oklahoma or people I work with in Texas, like, okay, I'm not gonna call it climate change. They still know that their electrical grid is vulnerable. So I think that that is what the challenge is, is just where are we finding the receptive audiences? And I think one of the things is we need to drive, I don't know about the case, but we need to drive our research to the user. You know, like in other words, like we really need to drive it. And that's gonna mean greater engagement. The kind of, I think, you know, I think in some ways, this center is way ahead. So I've got someone. I just wanted to let you know, I've got someone in direct messages that is like, sort of sending some stuff that's like not cool. So like you, I'm happy to talk about vaccine mandates publicly if you wanna identify yourself, but, you know, I'm like too old to be afraid of nasty direct messages. I'm sorry to do this, but I'm happy to talk publicly about vaccine, about that. I won't call you out, but if you could just stop doing that, that'd be great. Thanks. Charlie. See, I'm...

- [Ariadne] Charlie, need to unmute yourself, introduce yourself, and ask your question. Thank you. Sorry about that.

- [Juliette] No, that's okay. I lived a life finding vaccine mandates. I'm happy to have a conversation with this person, but the nastiness is just not appropriate for this forum. You can take it to Twitter. Thanks.

- [Charlie] Hi, Charlie Guffin from MPP from the class of 1991.

- Yeah.

- [Charlie] In the first few months of the Trump administration, I've been thinking a lot about Michael Lewis's book, "The Fifth Risk."

- Yes.

- [Charlie] You know, trying to assess the incremental risk to security of what we're not doing that we should be doing. Research that has stopped, you know, leaders that have been taken out of their positions. What do you think is sort of the most risky area in terms of health and pandemics, food safety, natural disasters? What are you most worried about that we're not doing that we should be doing?

- [Juliette] Yeah, so I mean, I think, look, we're gonna constantly have risks. And I hate saying like, you know, it's gonna be this and then it's gonna be something else. But I think the thing that's like a systemic challenge for how we live and how our children will live will be climate and climate disasters. 'Cause it is gonna impact everything from military readiness to life, to how we build, to whether we live, to our children's health. And I think that if I thought about like, you know, I could worry about electromagnetic, like whatever. But if I thought like the data is showing me that we need to adapt our public policy pretty quickly to this. So I tell my students, I think with two of the most interesting public policy areas right now, or areas, one is insurance. Everyone laughs at me when I say this, but like, you know, it's like plastics in the graduate, like insurance. But you know, how we're valuing risk and how we're, you know, valuing, putting money signs to where people live, money dollars, how they should live, what materials they should use. Like that is to me, like a very interesting area because whatever you think of insurance companies and people can hate them or love them and have good experiences with them or bad, they wanna make money. So they want to do risk in the right way. The other area is something known as managed retreat. It's a concept in the climate climate, which is like communities now figuring out ways in which they will retreat from the extreme vulnerability. And we're seeing it, I mean, globally, it's one of the most interesting things that is happening. And one that I think is an interesting area. So while I think it's the biggest threat, I also think some of the most interesting sort of public policy problems, the things that we're supposed to do are also in this space.

- [Ariadne] Thank you. Juliette, I wonder if you would talk about some of the intriguing titles that were up on your screen from-

- Oh.

- [Ariadne] The book that are concepts I'm sure. One that caught my eye was, "Avoid the Last Line of Defense."

- [Juliette] The book goes through both, you know, sort of the, if you're thinking of my infinity loop, right? What do I wish I had built? And so I focus, you know, like, because my runway is short. So one of the things you wanna do is buy time. Most complicated systems, well not no, no complicated system should have essentially what we call the single point of failure, right? That last line that like, you know, if it goes down, everything goes down. So I study systems that had clearly had single points of failure. And why are we building that way? Once again, you need to just buy time. Something bad has happened, a disruption in the system. So and you're buying time, right? So the thing that I look at is, so I say what I try to do is also, it's such a depressing field, you know. My last class, we went over the theories of how you count casualty rates 'cause there's a big debate. Those of you who know Puerto Rico, those of you following Myanmar, you know, and what's happening? Like, did you know Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria? Why is it 60 versus 3,000? Right? Who's right? Who's wrong? And so I'm gonna give you a fun example, which is the Super Bowl. In New Orleans a while ago, many of you remember in the third quarter, the New Orleans Super Bowl went half dark, right? Because there was a... They called it a gremlin. That's how technical people like me get. There's like a gremlin in the system. But one of the things that we measure in terms of failing safer is were you able to stop? Did you avoid a last line of defense and were you able to stop what we call cascading losses? And in that instance, that's a good news thing because obviously a Super Bowl and all dark is much worse than one and a half dark. And so I went back because it was rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, what did they learn, right? And one of the things they learned is bifurcated systems where you don't have a single capacity to bring the Superdome down, which was what happened in during Katrina and then a capacity then, were they were ready for it. Then you communicate to people what in fact is happening. But imagine that. So I always say, you know, how do I measure success? A Super Bowl and half light.

- [Ariadne] And tell us about "Listen to the Dead."

- [Juliette] Oh, that's the one we did. So I mean this is a little bit on the public health side. Once again, happy to help talk publicly. But I think, so one of the things we need to do is have an honest accounting of what happened. COVID is the best example. I don't think that's happening. I think it's happening in those things. Like, and so we have a phrase that's called or the history is written in the tombstones. And the basic thought is, or the basic reason why in disaster management we wanna push for in the military really strong after action reviews or whatever is because in disasters, people die. Right? That's a sort of a given. I'll focus on, you know, terrorism or climate disasters, right? That's a given. How they die is our obligation to them. Because those two things can illuminate a lot. So for example, in terms of how we wanna respond, so one of the examples, so in the US before Hurricane Maria. 'Cause that was in continental US so this is a big aside, but just so people know it is. Is in hurricane season, there'd be a couple dozen dead every year. And the data would be this hurricane season, a couple doesn't die. But when you drill down, how did they die. That they died is obvious. How did they die? Over 80% die of carbon monoxide poisoning because they are putting generators in that they don't know how to respond to or know how to work. So what those of you who live in hurricane country have seen this. The society has adapted its response fund. And once the hurricane is through, the messaging changes, right? And it goes all to carbon monoxide. Because you're losing most of your population there. Those of you who remember the big blizzard here in Massachusetts, Governor Dukakis talking from the FEMA. So about 100 people died in that blizzard. And we say 100 people died in the blizzard. Well, that's a given or that's horrible. How they died, why we study the dead is 80 something of them died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Why? Because the governor did not institute a driving ban in time. So people got into cars. So those of you who get mad at governors in New England who sometimes call a driving ban when there didn't need to do one, they are doing that as precautionary. 'Cause if you get people out onto highways and then the blizzard comes quickly, there's almost nothing you can do.

- [Ariadne] Linda, please introduce yourself and ask your question.

- [Linda] Thanks. Hi, I'm Linda Dakin-Grimm. Oh, am I unmuted? Yeah. Hi, Linda Dakin-Grimm. I'm on the Carr Center Advisory Board. You've talked a little bit about cooperating or influencing the current administration working across parties. I wondered if you could say a little more about that with the idea of people that maybe don't have your access. And I'm thinking of you talking about, you know, working with governors and congress people who, you know, know that we need FEMA. And you know, what can those of us do to deal with the excesses of doge and things like that?

- [Juliette] Yeah, yeah. I mean, as you know, as I said, like I think, you know, it's sort of an all in way of thinking about, and once again, it is, what are those alliances? And don't lose the stakeholders you already have. Like, it's a like sort of a combination of both of them. So it's what alliances can you build at the local level? So what is your issue? And then like for example, like Nick Kristof, like it's one thing to say USAID is gone, right? It's like, I can't conceptualize that it's just a number, right? It's like, oh, 2,000 people lost their job. It's another to travel with someone with his access and then tell the story of what does it mean to end USAID. Its direct impact, right? That people are dying. So I think part of that, I mean, you know, I don't have that access. You don't have that access. But in making quite personal and/or amplifying those stories, why something is meaningful either at the local level, your institutional level, your friends and family level, right? I mean, in other words, beginning to convince people that this system wasn't like, it had flaws. No one was pretending like it didn't have flaws, but that the dismantling of it creates greater flaws. And I think honestly, I think the tariff thing is a little bit that people will be, at least in the commentary so far, people see a system that may not have been perfect, but the dismantling of it is really imperfect. So it's, you know, as elections it is giving money where you can supporting NGOs and social justice, institutions that may need it. Those of you, for example, who are worried about immigration now or the excesses of it, that's something that a lot of right and left can agree on in terms of civil liberties. You know, give to these organizations that are supporting or defending in court and stuff and support them that way. But I really think like all of us have a story to tell now. And I think we had assumed a lot of things for too long.

- [Ariadne] It's so profound how you think about this world, think about this work, how, Juliette, when you are doing threat assessment. I'm ripping off a question someone, a couple of questions people asked in the pre-submissions, How do you survey? What's your lens? What do you look?

- [Juliette] So it's interesting. So I mean, okay, like I'll I'll disclose like, you know, part of my other work. So I work a lot with what we call mega event planning. 'Cause those could be high casualty, high consequence events, sports, entertainment, world sports events, stuff like that. I was in Paris, you know, we'll probably be in Milan, stuff like that. So I look at it from, in some ways, maybe my legal training. I look at it from a sort of a liability perspective. And I don't mean like how do I save the client. It is more like, what wouldn't I be able to defend if it wasn't done? Because we live in high risk industries, right? Or we live in a high risk world. Like what wouldn't I be able to defend? And then if I don't have that, fill in those gaps, right? 'Cause then you can begin to then see where the gaps in planning are. I'm not in the world anymore. I had been of like, you know, do you want your wall this high or not that high. It is more from the perspective of the impacted entity, right? What is indefensible? So I mean like, I mean it is sort of funny. We could have different opinions about Alan Garber's letter to our community about, you know, called my resolve after we learned about the threat against Harvard's finances. The only thing I cared about was did he get the letter out that day? I mean, I cared about other things, but. Because if we weren't ready, shame on us. We knew. I mean, come on, right? He did get that letter out. We can debate that letter. But that readiness I think is key. And it's gonna depend on the issue.

- [Ariadne] Absolutely. I wanna give one last moment if people have questions. Otherwise, we'll give Juliette the last word before we let go. Juliette-

- [Juliette] No questions about Harvard. I'm safe, I'm safe. I know, I know. So I was saying in the other one, if you ask my crisis management advice about what's going on in Harvard, it is totally not substantive. In crisis management, we learn about tactic or we talk about tactics versus values, right? What's our tactic? What's our value? And I would argue that I think our is too in the tactics. I think we need to reserve him for the values and you know, there's gonna be legal challenges, political challenges, whatever. I think we need to think like crisis managers at the university level. I will just end with this. I know there's a lot going on and all the questions are based on some variation of, "Oh my god, a lot is changing." Right? Or how do we defend it? So I'm gonna end with the three questions that are part of crisis management training in terms of situational awareness. Like what's happening in real time because your runway is short, you don't have much time. So we spend a lot of time thinking about situational awareness. And then I do this personally too in terms of, I think I answered a question to someone about like, how do you engage in part of the era that we're in is like, maybe we engage where we have our value add. Like I have a lot of opinions about reproductive rights. I have a lot of opinions about Meghan Markle. Like whatever. Like, no, you don't need to know them, right? Like, what I wanna contribute in my, you know, short time on earth is like my value add. So we ask our ourself three questions about a disaster with you're leader. It's "What?" "So what?" "Now what?" So what is in fact happening? So don't react to everything, right? Look around you, right? Is that actually happening or someone just trying to get you angry is my friend here just trying to throw me off my game? Like, you know, like what is actually happening? Two is, so what? Which is, how does it impact my equities? And this is a question you have to ask yourself though. A lot of you are probably civically engaged on a lot of issues, so everything matters. It's hard to impact everything, right? So, so what is the question you ask yourself. I asked myself before I launched some stupid tweet or whatever, like, you know, is that really something I need to be engaged with? Like, you know, and then the now what, which was the last question that Linda I think asked me, you know, the now what is, what can I do for a meaningful contribution that is in between tuning out and freaking out, right? I mean, so much is happening. And once again, I don't mean this as Democrat, Republican, I mean, it as public policy. I mean that unites us, right? Is hopefully, if you are on, you know, part of this community, you believe that that matters. And so that's the what, so what, now what. It's both your zen moment of the day, but also how I think about engagement now.

- [Ariadne] And I think that encapsulates what a treasure you are, because it's always both reassuring and frightening when you talk at the same time. And all of us, I think on this call, and all of us in this world should be grateful that we have you.

- Oh, thank you.

- [Ariadne] And helping us all think better about things we don't wanna think about. So thank you for that.

- [Juliette] Thank you. I'm gonna be let out of my basement. Back up to the beautiful rooms upstairs.

- [Ariadne] Thank you most of all. And thank you, everybody, for joining this call, this Wiener Conference Call. Thanks so much.

- [Juliette] Bye, you guys. Thank you. Have a good weekend.