#23 Who Survives When Disaster Strikes With Amanda Ripley

Disasters can strike at any time, leaving us feeling vulnerable and unprepared. Join Amanda Ripley, acclaimed author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes, as she discusses the forthcoming new edition of her book with host Jenn Cassetta. Amanda reflects on her motivations for updating the book after noticing renewed interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a seasoned journalist and author, she also reflects on the enduring impact of disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which shaped her understanding of human behavior in crisis. Amanda delves into the evolution of disaster preparedness and societal responses, urging for enhanced trust and resilience in communities worldwide.

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Who Survives When Disaster Strikes With Amanda Ripley

Introduction

In this episode, I have such a special guest, a hero of mine, Amanda Ripley. She is a New York Times bestselling author, a Washington Post contributing columnist, and the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. She’s written three award-winning books about three very different subjects. One is High Conflict, two is The Smartest Kids in the World, and three, my personal favorite, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes.

This is one of two books that I highly recommend everybody read while I teach every self-defense and personal safety seminar. It’s that important. Everyone, we’re going to be talking about some important things now. We’re going to be diving into difficult subjects, and maybe you’ll learn something that can help keep you or someone you love safe in the future. If you’re ready, buckle up and start taking notes. Welcome to the show, Amanda.

Thanks so much for having me, Jenn, and I’m so glad to be here and so honored that you recommend my book. I have to know though, what’s the other book?

The other book is The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.

Yes. That makes sense. It’s like salt and pepper.

Exactly. Every self-defense expert always recommends that book, but I like to have the second one as a different perspective on safety. It’s fascinating because it’s not just about the scary guy in the alley Safety is being safe in all these kinds of disasters that are happening every day on the news. I think your body of work is so impressive, so diverse, and so deep, and I want to acknowledge you for doing that, for sharing that, and for taking the time out to be here with me and my readers. I want to talk about The Unthinkable and dive deep for those two reasons. One is because I recommend it to everyone, but two because I hear you have a new version coming out. Is that true?

Yes, that is true. It’s on August 20, 2024. Your timing is very good. It’s a funny story because I hadn’t thought about doing another version, and then my publisher reached out to me and said that during the pandemic they had noticed a lot of new interest in the book because it came out a while ago. It came out many years ago, which is hard to believe. They said, “Do you think it’s time for a new version?” I thought about it for five seconds and I was like, “I’m embarrassed that I didn’t come to you with this idea because so much has happened in those years.”

I was a little afraid to sit down and reread the whole thing and think through what it would require to update it. What I learned was that the original bones of it, which describe the three phases we all go through in disasters still hold up, and all the stories, which are the most gripping and memorable part of the book, hold up. However, I needed to add a chapter on the pandemic.

I needed to add much more information about technology, social media, climate change, distrust, and lots of other things and update all of the stats. Also, keeps us connected to what is most risky, and that has changed. The risks have changed and also, the resources have changed quite a bit since the book first came out. Some things have gotten much better and some things have gotten worse. That’s a long-winded way of saying, “Yes, a new edition is coming out.” Thanks for asking.

Amanda’s Background

I can’t wait to read the hard copy. Thanks for sending a little snippet, but I want to dig into that. However, first, I want to get to know you, and Amanda, and share with everyone a bit of your background. What is a trajectory that gets someone like you to share this kind of data and research with the world which in my definition, everyone knows this is a black belt in badassery? When someone goes through their own challenges, their own work, gets knocked down, keeps getting up, and then it winds up helping others rise too. That’s what your books do. Please share.

I like that definition. I was a journalist forever and I would find there would be these moments where I would just hit a wall in whatever I was covering, where it either got too depressing or too frustrating to keep covering it the normal way. It took me a while to figure out this is what I was doing each time but it’s obvious in retrospect that each time I’ve written a book, it’s because I’m desperate for some hope.

The way I’ve been covering it in traditional media is not giving me that. With The Unthinkable, which was my first book, I had by chance become the go-to reporter at Time Magazine to cover disasters. I covered crime in the past. I had covered courts and other things, but for some reason, it started with 9/11 because I covered that obviously but then also other disasters. Even smaller ones that we may have forgotten, which is incredible like the anthrax attacks, the sniper in DC, and other things that gripped the collective imagination.

I covered terrorism and Homeland Security for a while. I covered Hurricane Katrina and other hurricanes. One thing leads to another, and soon, you’re covering disasters. At some point, you start to feel like, “There’s got to be another way to talk about this.” It’s because typically there’s a formula for covering these things in the media, and it’s usually stories of loss, grief, blame, and accountability. Those are important stories, but those are not all the stories. They leave us marinating in fear and distress, which I don’t think is healthy for any of us and it’s also not that useful at the end of the day.

What I noticed in covering all these disasters for Time Magazine was that the survivors of the disasters were telling me that in addition to the grief, the blame, and the sadness useful specific things that were surprising about what it had felt like physically, mentally, and even socially to escape a burning airplane, a sinking ship, or a tsunami. Whatever it was, the patterns were very similar, but it was very different than what I was hearing in the official Congressional Committee hearings on Homeland Security. There was almost no overlap between what they wished they had known, what they wanted you to know, and what we were doing to prepare for disasters.

You had this idea. Walk me through that. How did that come about?

I think when it became most vivid to me, I was looking for hope, looking for something useful to write that felt like the same stories over and over just different details. On the anniversary of 9/11, I went to a survivor support group meeting because, at the time, you probably do remember this for personal reasons. We didn’t hear much from the people who escaped the attack zones. We heard mostly from the people whose loved ones had died, which made sense.

That was the focus in the first couple of years and then slowly the people who had escaped started to organize and speak up as eventually did the firefighters and first responders. It happened in waves for all kinds of reasons that you can imagine including a lot of the survivors felt like they survived so they shouldn’t take up any airtime. Is that how you felt?

One thousand percent. I don’t know if I could call it survivor’s guilt. I’m not sure. It was the guilt of taking up space and airtime about my story because there were so many people who suffered so much more. For years, I didn’t talk about it. I buried it. It wasn’t until I started speaking and developing my origin story. I remember being at a seminar for speaking and where it hit me that once I took a look back, the story was so important to my whole trajectory of who I am, what I do, and who I’ve become that I started owning it. “This is part of my story and I’d like to share it,” versus all those years, and I’m talking probably many years of burying it like it’s not important because everyone else’s story is more important.

It’s almost like you need time or you to feel not entitled, but allowed to talk about it. I even remember I was living in Manhattan at the time and you’d travel somewhere and people would say, “Were you there on 9/11?” Immediately you’d feel like, “Yeah, but I didn’t lose anyone.” You had to immediately say that. Do you remember that?

One hundred percent.

You felt like there was this hierarchy of needs which makes sense. You heard the same thing during the pandemic. People say, “I count my blessings. I’m alive. My family’s healthy,” if that was the case but it was indecent to complain or take up space in that moment. It takes time for these things to emerge. In this case, I visited this survivor support group, which was high up, ironically, in a skyscraper in Times Square. It probably is not the best choice but that’s where they were meeting.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I think, if I’m being honest, I am not super excited to go because I’d absorbed a lot of pain from the stories of people who had lost loved ones in the Trade Center. I felt like that was important to honor those stories and to write a good story yourself, you have to feel some small fraction of that pain but after a while, it’s hard to keep hearing these. Each story was mind-blowingly painful and tragic in a different way. I’m dreading it, but I’ve decided that if we wanted to figure out something, we could do on the anniversary that was meaningful.

I went to the support group and to my amazement, it was very different than what I expected. It was very practical. These survivors had an urgency. They had already started reaching out to churches and organizations. They were going on a little speaking tour to talk about what they had learned and what they wished they had known. That appealed to me because it gave us back a sense of agency and reminded me that survivors have valuable lessons to share that aren’t just about suffering and blame. That is what kicked off the idea.

Survivors have valuable lessons to share that aren’t just about suffering and blame.

The Unthinkable

I love that because it’s true. We watch the news and it’s so much doom and gloom all the time. These are the stories that bring us hope just like you said. In the first version that I have of The Unthinkable, you tell stories from times when you and I probably weren’t even alive to Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Thailand, plane crashes, major fires in history, and 9/11. Tell us what’s different in this new version and what we can expect.

There is a whole new chapter on the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’m not going to make people relive the whole thing because most of us just went through it. Trying to look at what was human behavior because that’s the piece of it I’m most interested in. What did we do individually and collectively that may be surprising and important, and see if there are connections to other disasters, which it turns out there are a ton.

Even though the pandemic was a slow-moving disaster, it was a disaster. The behavior while slower was also very consistent with what you would see in other disasters. No one wants to talk about the pandemic because it’s so recent and for all the reasons we just talked about you need some time. I tried to be very thoughtful about it. What do we need to know here that we didn’t already live through?

What we know is that if we look at how many deaths typically happen around the world in a given year, and then we look at how many deaths there were from 2020 to 2023, we know that 28 million additional people died and that’s for all kinds of reasons. It’s not just the pandemic, but for a lot of reasons, it’s hard to get an exact number of COVID-19 deaths. Some are people who died of something else but tested positive for COVID and other people never got tested. If you think about other disasters, it’s hard to find comparables. It’s massive.

That’s on top of people who would normally die in that time frame.

In the US, we’re talking about 1.3 million people between 2020 and 2023. It was beyond what we would normally expect from cancer, car crashes, homicide, and all the rest. About half of Americans say they know someone who died in the pandemic. It has major ripple effects that we are only beginning to understand but the disaster arc is the arc that we all go through. Those three phases that I mentioned remained consistent. Often, we would cycle back and forth between them and there are differences because of how long a pandemic lasts, and there are things that make it much harder. That behavior is very similar, surprisingly.

Would you mind walking us through that arc?

Yes. The first phase that we all go through in every disaster, whether it’s a train crash or a hurricane or a pandemic, is a very profound period of denial and disbelief where your brain will get incredibly creative to come up with reasons to explain what is happening, normalize what’s happening. Also, even if you’d finally accept that something bizarre and scary is happening, you think it’s just happening to you personally.

It’s called the illusion of centrality where you don’t want to see the scale of it. Your brain is holding that information back to help you for a bunch of reasons, but one reason that we go through this phase of denial is that too much reflection on what is happening is not super helpful at the moment but also because, and this is the biggest reason. All day long, we are pattern recognition machines. The way we get through life is to remember what happened before and fit everything that’s happening into one of those slots in the bookshelf of our brain.

Unless you’ve been through a disaster like you have, then you don’t have previous visceral experience for it so you will normalize what’s happening and that is certainly what happened to me at the beginning of the pandemic that I kept thinking it was almost over and it was being blown out of proportion. I was either underreacting or overreacting, I guess I would say depending on the day. The next phase after denial is deliberation, which is an interesting very social phase where we all look to other people around us.

Whether they’re strangers, neighbors, family members, newscasters, or politicians, we get extremely curious about how everyone else is reacting and there’s a lot of survival benefit informing groups and staying with your group in disasters but strangers are the people who will save you. Strangers, neighbors, regular people, and not first responders because it takes too long for them to get to you typically in a disaster.

That is a point I need to make right there because when I’m teaching self-defense, that’s something I always think of. It’s like people have this false sense of safety for many reasons and I’ll just point some out. Some think just because they’re married that they’ll be safe. Sometimes people will say, “I just call my husband on the way home from work when I’m commuting and that will keep me safe,” or, “I carry this pepper spray that I’ve never even used and have no idea how to use in an emergency. That’ll keep me safe,” this alarm, this jewelry, or whatever it is.

In reality, if you are being attacked wherever you have seconds that is sometimes to deploy one of those mechanisms. Also, even in those seconds, even if you do get someone on the phone or alert someone to the distress you’re under, it could take up to fifteen minutes for someone to get to you. When you’re talking about major disasters. In that one-on-one conflict kind of thing, it can take at least fifteen minutes and then what are you going to do? So much can happen in that time. Thank you for pointing that out.

You’re saying there’s a false comfort that we can take in thinking, “As long as I have my phone, I’m good because I can call 9-1-1 but in fact, it’s ourselves or the people around us. Also, sometimes those are strangers. A lot of times it’s strangers but the good news is generally strangers behave unbelievably well in disasters. People get much nicer. This is the thing that’s counterintuitive is that in a disaster we have this impulse towards deliberation and forming groups, which is the same with chimpanzees and other mammals, that basically, we treat each other well.

That’s great to hear.

It’s not like rush hour on the freeway. It’s much more of a very different state that we go into. If anything, people are much more courteous than they should be, probably in a lot of disasters.

We also see nowadays a lot of people would rather take out their phone and film something which can be helpful down the line rather than step in and act. That sometimes upsets me when I see that but there is the bystander effect where some people freeze as the bystander. They don’t know what to say and what to do. I also like to remind folks in my classes that if you are under attack, please tell people what you need them to do in clear, plain, demanding, and commanding language.

“You call 9-1-1.” It’s like, “You in the yellow jacket, call 9-1-1. Give people a job. Thank you.

We have denial and deliberation. What’s the third? Is it a D?

The third phase is also a D and it is the decisive moment, which is the moment where, depending on what has happened in the first two phases, you take action or in a lot of cases you take no action. One of the most common reactions to any intense, stressful situation is what is sometimes called negative panic in the airline industry, which is where people do not move. They shut down and freeze.

There are different reactions, and sometimes, that’s evolutionarily the right thing to do, and understandable. Other times, it is not a good idea but typically, the first two phases, whatever happens during that denial and deliberation phase dictate the decisive moment as well as the training and experiences you’ve had before.

Significant Stories

We talk about fight or flight so often, especially since the pandemic, I feel like people are starting to learn a lot more about the brain, neuroscience, the fight or flight response, and yet that third F, the freeze response is something that we don’t speak enough about, I think. In fact, I keep plugging my self-defense course here. I’m not intentionally doing that but I know it’s relevant.

The first lesson I teach in that is what is fear. What happens when fear completely takes over your mind, body, brain, and all of it? I like to talk about that freeze response because it happened to me on September 11th. I was completely paralyzed. I felt like I couldn’t move. I could still be there in my mind. Even though there are so many parts of that day that are blurry and I can’t remember, I remember being frozen in time.

Do you mind, Jenn just saying a little bit more about right before, during, and what you remember from that?

Sure. I remember being on the subway before I got out. They’re these little pops of memories.

It’s those flashes.

That first flash was when the subway slowed down before it came into the station fully. That was like the first ping of something’s off but that could just be normal everyday subway stuff. I got out and looked up, there was black smoke, and everyone was pointing. Everyone’s yelling and trying to use their cell phones. That’s the second, “Something’s wrong.” Third, I get to the corner of Rector on the West Side Highway, a police officer leaning up against the divider, staring up at the towers and crying.

I’ve never seen an officer cry. My dad was an ex-NYPD. I barely ever saw that man cry. It was one of those moments where you know something is disastrously wrong and now looking back, I can only imagine what he was seeing when he was staring up there. Also, it was only maybe a minute most where from the time that I walked into the lobby. I talked to the doorman. He wouldn’t let me upstairs, but I said, “Can I use the phone in the lobby?” I called my mom. She was at work and literally, it might have been only less than a minute before that first tower fell.

Mind you, I don’t remember the noise. I can only imagine it could. It would’ve been earth-shattering noise. I had no recollection. I just remember the phone flying and people rushing into the lobby. That’s when I froze. I am sure I was crying because I remember an officer in there with us who told me to quiet up. I’m not mad at him, but that’s when the nice woman, a stranger Nancy, came over to me and made sure I felt safe.

What did she say to you?

She asked me my name and that took me out of that frozen state because it forced me to take a breath. I believe when we’re in that frozen state, we’re not breathing. There’s no oxygen getting into the brain. There’s an adrenaline dump. Your brain is shutting off the frontal lobe. No logical thinking is happening. No creative thinking is happening. It’s just completely frozen. Asking me my name took me out of the trance state. She just said, “You and I were going to get out of here together,” and that was it. That officer kicked us out. I guess he probably thought it was going to collapse on us so he made us evacuate.

You’re in the building just a few blocks away from the Trade Center. One of the people who I learned a ton from [00:23:59] who’s in the book.

I loved this story, by the way. I read it twice.

You must have been like, “Oh my gosh,” because she has this epic odyssey getting out of the Trade Center where she worked where there’s a lot of denial and a lot of deliberation, all normal but she slowly winds her way down the stairs and slowly gets outside. She is struck by the fact or the scale of the disaster.

At this moment, she loses her vision. She stopped seeing and it reminds me of what you said about not remembering the sound of the building collapsing. It’s very common for people in these situations. Their brain will turn on and off certain senses, which reminds you that all the time your brain is filtering and syncing up and we forget that. That means your brain can also turn things off that you wouldn’t expect to save you, which is wild.

All the time, your brain is filtering and syncing up what you see and hear. That means your brain can also turn things off that you wouldn’t expect to save you.

There are two things I’d like to share. One is the noise part. The noise part is the thing that I think is still embedded in me because anytime I hear a loud noise, a loud car, a motorcycle passing by, or any type of loud noise like that, I feel it in my body. I shudder. I freeze up. Over the years, obviously, that’s less and less. The first few years, it was really intense but even to this day, I can still feel that. Just a little moment where that sound must have been so intense that it’s still with me.

You have hypervigilance to that sound, it sounds like.

The second thing is that I walked. I made it to the dojo. Me and Nancy went to the dojo. I know a lot of people reading have probably known but I eventually took Nancy to the dojo where I finally felt safe. I then went to my friend’s apartment who lived a couple blocks away from there in SoHo. From there that evening, somehow I got to my sister’s house 55 blocks away. She was on 55th and 7th. I have no recollection. Apparently, I walked 2.5 to 3 miles and cannot remember one second of it.

It’s incredible. I don’t think we’ve even begun to understand what’s happening in our brains. It’s designed to protect you and to keep you focused, to keep you moving if that’s necessary but sometimes it’s designed to shut you down. We know that all animals that have ever been tested have a freeze response. Where if they are sufficiently frightened and they feel trapped which is what happened to you from what I’m hearing, they will freeze. The theory is that it’s like playing dead. In other words, a predator will not go for an animal that seems to be dead or sick. There’s value in freezing.

I’m so happy you said that because that was one of the questions I wanted to ask you.

I think it’s important to say because there could be people reading. There’s a lot of evidence of people freezing in mass shootings, certainly in rape cases, and assault cases. A lot of people feel bad and ashamed that they didn’t do more. They didn’t fight harder or jump up and in fact, this is an evolutionary response that again all animals from chickens to monkeys to humans, when you make them feel pinned or trapped and they are very frightened, they will tend to freeze. It’s not under your control.

Thank you so much for saying that, because that is another reminder I share, especially when I’m talking to college-aged women because there is a lot of shame and guilt. Also, we have all these other idiots who are watching from their safe homes or computers and saying like, “Why did she fight back? Why didn’t she just leave? Why didn’t this?” These are the things we need to start talking about. Thank you.

They have no idea and it’s important to realize this is what you can expect. The more experience you have in a given place or the more training you have with a given threat, the less likely you are to freeze. That is something. Also, this is where that deliberation piece comes in handy. In Elia’s[Ma1] case, she finally emerges out into the light. She gets out of the building She sees bodies on the ground.

The more experience you have in a given place or the more training you have with a given threat, the less likely you are to freeze.

She’s starting to grapple with the scale of this disaster and that’s when she froze. She just stopped moving and lost her vision but at that exact moment, Jenn, a stranger appeared at her side, linked arms with her and she said almost verbatim what Nancy said to you, which is, “We’re getting out of here.”

I read it again last night because I just wanted to reread the story before this interview. When I read that line, I just lost it. That is incredible. I hope that we can all be like that. More Nancy in the world. I know she didn’t get her stranger’s name right?

No. She just knew she had a red sleeve of her shirt because all of Elia’s[Ma2] vision returned just to see that one piece of color. It wasn’t Nancy. It was someone else. We know that this too is a survival response that is very normal and very likely to happen where people do help each other. She remembers that she couldn’t see and thank God this woman appeared, took her arm, and they started walking and walking.

She said the woman was talking, as she put it. She never shut up, but it helped Elia[Ma3] continue to move forward and it probably helped the other woman to keep moving forward. That’s a very vivid example of the social element that is so important. You’re not on your own often. Not always, but you’re often not on your own and that can help you get out of the freeze response.

Likewise, if there are other people around you freezing and they shouldn’t be freezing like on a burning airplane or something where you have seconds to get out before the smoke gets toxic on the ground, then loud aggressive direction is very effective. When I did some trainings with firefighters and others, they were pretty blunt. Also, flight attendants now are trained to be very assertive. “Get off the plane. Do not get your carry-on.” That does snap people out of it. It’s the same with animals. A loud noise will snap animals out of that stupor.

It’s not being rude. It’s being safe. Asking someone to politely get off the plane is not going to be helpful in a disaster. I appreciate that you watched my TEDx Talk and listened to my story there. You sent me this email that I want to point out because we’re doing it right now basically. You’ve already echoed what you wrote in the email, but you said that you recognize three lessons that you’ve heard echoed from survivors of all kinds. One is freezing under extreme stress and two strangers become your rescuers. I love that. I wish we could find her too, by the way. Three, disasters can be terrifying, tragic, and opportunities to get stronger. What are some examples of folks that you’ve interviewed over the years?

It’s almost always all those things at once and, different people suffer to different degrees, but often there are people who suffer terribly and still somehow find a story to tell about that disaster that changes everything. The story matters. The story that we tell ourselves every day about our lives, about our loved ones because feelings come from thoughts. We now know this in a way that we didn’t know in the past. The thoughts we nurture and feed do shape who we are, how we feel, and who we become.

Some people suffer terribly and still somehow find a story to tell about that disaster that changes everything. The story matters because feelings come from thoughts.

A quick example from 9/11, Manuel Chea was one of the survivors that I interviewed that day in that survivor support group. He worked pretty high up in one of the World Trade Center towers. As soon as the first tower was hit by an airplane, he got up, went to the stairwell, and started descending which was extremely unusual. On average, people waited at least five minutes. Many people waited hours. There was a lot of deliberating happening and lots of reasons for that but he was unusual.

I asked him, “Why do you think you got up and left so fast?” He said, “It could’ve been because I was in a house fire as a kid. Our whole house burned down in the middle of the night in Queens.” He knew that things like this could happen. Just like you, when you hear that sound, you have this visceral response. He knew that it was possible for everything to go upside down very quickly. Often people with military training also react more quickly and push through that denial phase faster because they’ve had that training or experience.

The other thing is that he knew where the stairwell was, which was pretty unusual in the Trade Center, which is shocking. Most are skyscrapers. It’s terrible but he knew where they were part of his situational awareness came from his experience of a house fire. After 9/11, what did he do? He quit his job. He went back to grad school and studied emergency management and now he’s an emergency manager.

Weirdly, I happened across a little local New Jersey paper that was about groups of survivors who are going around talking to kids who are survivors of all kinds of things like cancer or whatever. Manuel is one of the survivors going around and giving talks at high schools. He turned what happened there into a whole inflection point in his life and career. There are lots of examples like that and it’s through that suffering and through that like sudden shock and uncertainty about the future, there is often an opening.

I know we focus a lot of this interview on 9/11 and it’s probably because I can relate and also I found the story of Elia fascinating. In either version, the first or second version of The Unthinkable, are there any other stories that you want to point out that you covered that have such a strong message that we need now? I do want to read this quick quote that you have because this will bring it back.

Building Better Survivors

You say there’s a 28% risk of another pandemic as deadly as COVID-19 striking before 2033. That’s nine years from now according to disaster forecasters but as we build ever more impressive vaccines, buildings, and airplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors. In your opinion, with all those other stories that you covered, what do we need to know to become better survivors?

There’s an interesting paradox that’s happened since the first book came out and that is that the cost and frequency of disasters has skyrocketed. There are way more disasters even by the same metrics and they’re much more expensive. They’ve gone up over 50 years fivefold. It’s a huge increase and here’s the hopeful part. The number of deaths has dropped by two-thirds in 50 years. We’re not including the pandemic here.

This study was on all kinds of disasters, but not biological but the point is, overall disasters have become less disastrous. The most deadly disasters are typically floods. It’s a huge one. Lightning, hurricanes, monsoons, earthquakes, especially in other parts of the world that don’t have good building codes and that kind of thing. Looking at all of those, we know that disasters have gotten much less deadly, which is huge and good news. Again, hopeful and a lot of that is because we’ve gotten better at warning people that a disaster is coming. People now have more time to evacuate before a hurricane.

You brought up the Hawaii fire.

This gets to the piece of it where we need to do better. Distrust I am convinced is going to kill more people in the next 50 years than disasters. Not just distrust of institutions, but distrust of each other and importantly, authority figures distrust of the public. It moves in all directions and we know that’s gotten worse in general for lots of reasons, but there’s a huge cost when it comes to disasters. It’s because the reason they’ve gotten less deadly is because we have all this great forecasting technology and other building codes that I mentioned. Things that make our infrastructure or can make our infrastructure much more resilient.

Vaccines are a great example where yes, amazing, huge breakthroughs, but people have to trust it to take the vaccine and the public needs to be trusted by people in power to level with them. This is what we saw in Hawaii. The sophisticated warning system they have was not used for the recent terrible wildfires on Maui.

Often, what you hear again and again, and it’s very hard to keep hearing it having covered so many of these. It’s that afterward when they do the analysis, the people in charge, whether it’s politicians, policymakers, public health officials, or whatever, they often will say something to the effect of, we didn’t want people to panic and that leads to a lot of bad information, death, and also more distrust.

It’s because you can tell that the people in charge are not leveling with you. There are a lot here, but I think the bottom line is there’s an incredible reason to feel hopeful about the resilience of our societies, what we can each do is work on rebuilding relationships in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, and in our country because those relationships are lifesaving. How do we start to build trust back into our schools, our school boards, our libraries, and our police? Those are hard questions, but they are not impossible. They are not harder than inventing a vaccine. Spending more time, energy, and money on that question I think will save a lot of lives.

What a beautiful way to wrap up this interview, Amanda. I’ve had chills. I’m blown away but what I want everyone to leave with is that hope, the resilience, and the story of building trust. This is why we need more Amanda Ripley’s in the world. We need more women in general in leadership positions in this country and beyond. I’m a firm believer of that because that solution that you just came up with, as you said, could change the trajectory of this country and the world going forward. Thank you for being so brilliant and open-hearted.

Thank you for letting me riff on all these things and for sharing your story because I think it means a lot more when you can have someone talk personally about what has happened.

Rapid Fire Questions

On a lighter note, we’re going to go to my four rapid-fire questions fast. Are you ready?

I’m ready.

The first one is when you were a kid, what was your favorite food?

For sure cookies. That was my first word. It is still my favorite food.

Two, if you could have a drink with anyone alive or dead, who would it be, and what’s in your cup?

I’d probably want to have a drink with Nelson Mandela and I feel like we should probably have tea or something noble because it’s Nelson Mandela, but I’m going to go with a nice glass of red wine.

A glass of wine with n Nelson Mandela. It doesn’t get better than that. Third, what’s your favorite personal development book? Again, it could be anything that helps people grow.

I’m so glad you asked. I always have a favorite every few years and my current favorite is called Feeling Great by David Burns. It used to be called Feeling Good, the previous version and it sold millions of copies. It’s been shown to help people with depression and anxiety. Remember we talked about thoughts lead to feelings. It’s all about your thoughts, how to be more aware of them, and how to notice them. His new version is called Feeling Great and it’s terrific.

Thank you. Last but not least, what’s your favorite hype song? The song that gets you going?

There are so many that I love. My son has gotten me into some Bad Bunny music lately and I think partly because he loves Spanish and he loves Spanish music and hip hop. I think something by Bad Bunny would happen.

Closing

It’s not what I would’ve expected. Thank you so much, Amanda. Can you share with everyone where they can get your books and connect with you?

The new book is also called The Unthinkable, and you can find it at any bookstore on Amazon or wherever. Also, you can find me on Instagram @RipleyWriter. You can also find my website, AmandaRipley.com.

Thank you so much for being on. I’ve learned so much and can’t wait to read the upcoming book. Everyone, thank you so much for listening. Let us know what you think. Get on Instagram @JennCassetta and @RipleyWriter and ask questions. Tell us what you think and stay safe out there hopeful and resilient. I love you. Bye.

About Amanda Ripley

Amanda Ripley is a New York Times bestselling author, a Washington Post contributing columnist, and the co-founder of Good Conflict, a media and training company that helps people reimagine conflict. She has written three award-winning, nonfiction books about three very different subjects: High Conflict, The Smartest Kids in the World, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes.