What Could Go Wrong? Everything (And It’s Ok)

Notes from America with Kai Wright

WNYC Studios

News Commentary, Politics, History, News

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What zombie movies can teach us about our era of perpetual crisis, and other lessons from a disaster management specialist.

Former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security under President Obama, and current professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Juliette Kayyem joins host Kai Wright to help us make sense of our current age of constant disasters. Learn what tools we have at our disposal based on her new book, The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What is the number one threat facing us that keeps you up at night?
0:06.0	I don't know. I mean, there are tons.
0:08.0	Honestly, abortion access has been on my mind a lot lately.
0:10.0	The monkey pox virus, the filibuster in the Senate.
0:14.0	I'm right now. Don't have any fears because I don't listen to media anymore.
0:19.0	Human beings, because everything that is happening around the world
0:23.0	is happening because of the actions of a human being.
0:26.0	I can't really say that I'm certain by anything.
0:29.0	The only thing that I fear is God Himself.
0:33.0	How are you personally preparing for that threat?
0:37.0	I don't think I've personally done much for it.
0:39.0	I'm actually moving to France soon.
0:41.0	I protest, I hit the streets.
0:43.0	Reading and understanding the state of the world and current events.
0:46.0	Yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of hoping somebody fixes it.
0:49.0	Alright, guess what's just that?
0:52.0	Welcome to the show. I'm Kai Wright.
0:59.0	So you've probably heard of something called the black swan theory.
1:03.0	Ring a bell.
1:04.0	It's one of those ideas that seeped out of academia and into popular culture a while back.
1:10.0	And it basically says that there are some events that are totally unpredictable
1:15.0	based on any existing understanding of what's normal or possible.
	...

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