Lawfare Archive: Juliette Kayyem on Dealing with Disasters

The Lawfare Podcast

In this archived episode of The Lawfare Podcast, David Priess speaks with Juliette Kayyem, Harvard Kennedy School lecturer and CNN national sec

Key takeaways

• Disaster management has traditionally focused on preventing crises (left of boom), but the book argues for equal emphasis on minimizing consequences during and after a crisis (right of boom).
• Success in disaster response should not be defined as complete prevention, but as reducing harm—measured by fewer 'stupid deaths' that result from poor systems rather than direct causes.

Main topics

• Reframing disaster preparedness from prevention to consequence minimization
• The 'left of boom' vs. 'right of boom' framework in crisis management

Notable quotes

"It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do."

"Success is not whether we stopped the boom, but whether those preparations led to less harm than might otherwise have occurred."

Conclusion

Kayyem's framework calls for a fundamental shift in how societies approach disasters—not by aiming for

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:10) I'm Sarah Wilbridge, intern at Lawfare with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for September 5th, 2026. On August 26th, flash floods hit Nepal near its border with China, wiping out entire villages and causing over 1,000 deaths. Earlier this summer, wildfires swept through France and Spain. Experts warn that such natural disasters are likely to become more common in the coming years, caused in part by man-made climate change. For today's archive, I chose an episode from March 29, 2023, in which David Priest spoke with Juliette Kayyem about her book, The Devil Never Sleeps, Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. They discussed traditional approaches to disasters, how to prepare and respond, and what we can learn from previous disasters ranging from airplane collisions to wildfires. Speaker 1 (1:03) I'm David Preece, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, March 29th, 2022. We live in a time of seemingly constant catastrophes, and we still fumble when they occur, and we always seem a step behind. It's no longer about preventing disasters from occurring, but learning how to use the tools at our disposal to minimize the consequences when they inevitably do. Juliette Kayyem has just written a book about it all called The Devil Never Sleeps, Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. Juliette is a lecturer at the Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a CNN national security analyst, and I sat down with her in the virtual jungle studio to talk about it all. We talked about the traditional focus of the disaster framework, consequence minimalization, the paradox of preparedness. Speaker 1 (1:54) and a variety of disasters and what we can learn from them, ranging from the Y2K incident to Super Bowl XLVII to the shipping incident in the Suez Canal back in 2021. There's a lot here about disasters and how to recover from them and how to deal with them in a way that stops the bleeding and keeps them from getting worse, even as they're occurring. It's the Lawfare Podcast, March 29th. Juliette Kayyem on dealing with disasters. Speaker 1 (2:25) You have a remarkable new book out called The Devil Never Sleeps, Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters. And it really turns our thinking around about thinking about catastrophes and accomplishing a couple of things with it. And I want to talk through that with you. But to do so, I think we need to start out with an understanding of what the traditional focus of crisis managers and planners. has been? What is the usual way of looking at disasters? Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm a listener, first-time caller, second-time caller, actually, but just thrilled to be here and to talk about a book I've been thinking about for 20 years, but have written in the last year. Speaker 1 (3:13) So the framework that you talk about, and it's rather simplistic. I mean, we're sort of, I often say in the book or write in the book, you know, this is not rocket science, is that in disaster management, we divide the world into two phases, what we call left and right of boom. Now, the boom is agnostic, right? It could be the cyber attack, the pandemic, climate event, terrorist attack, whatever it is, we're sort of agnostic on that. It's just anything bad. And left of boom is really the investments that we put in both preventing and protecting ourselves to avoid the disaster or catastrophe. Right of boom is what we do to recover from it. And what that means, I think, for readers and the American public is that then when we think about disasters, we tend to... Speaker 1 (4:01) think of success is generally viewed as stopping the bad thing from happening and failure is when it can't. And the goal of the book is to rethink and reframe how we think about disasters and also success. So you're not saying that we shouldn't try to predict disasters, that we shouldn't try to plan for catastrophes with a mind. towards avoiding them. We should still do that, but we shouldn't be putting all of our eggs in that basket because guess what? There's going to be a crisis. There's going to be a catastrophe and we can't avoid them all. Is that right? That's exactly right. So one tentative title at one stage was Assume the Boom, but it was too hard to explain. I'll explain the present title later. But yeah, exactly. So we need now. Speaker 1 (4:55) to prepare for disruptions, that moment of the boom as a common phenomenon rather than the surprise factor or the, oh, we failed factor. And view success as whether those preparations for the boom, for the inevitable is I think the... is the right framework led to less harm, whether those preparations actually led to less harm and destruction than might otherwise have occurred. So, and I tend to talk in bulk, and it's not that I'm not sympathetic. These are just numbers. But, you know, as you and I talk, we are likely in the next couple of weeks to hit a million Americans dead from the pandemic. That is a horrific number. But no one who knew that the boom was coming believed that. Speaker 1 (5:39) that the number would be zero, let alone probably even a hundred. But, you know, the difference between a million dead and if we had done this a lot better, a hundred thousand dead is significant, right? These are real numbers. And the book takes us through centuries of disasters and crisis to show what went wrong and what... And also, importantly, what went right that helped to mitigate those harms in the age we live in now, where it's not just because of climate change, although that's clearly relevant, but our globalization, our connectivity, cyber, pandemics, everything, and the pace and speed of what we're encountering, focusing on right-of-boom investments, that moment of... Speaker 1 (6:25) will save lives and will reorient our focus, I think, in important ways so that we can judge success differently. You know, I think it's so fascinating that you bring up the pandemic case first and actually refer to it at several places in your analysis, because that's, if you reflect back to the coverage in February and March of 2020. which I know you remember well because you were involved in a lot of the analysis at the time, it was breaking news, hour-long coverage when there were the first cases identified in the U.S. And when there were deaths in the U.S., that was a large figure on the screen, I think of all three major cable networks. And as that number went up day by day and it was, oh my God, seven Americans have died. Speaker 1 (7:17) there was definitely this attitude of prevention. How do we prevent it from becoming a pandemic? And now we're talking, what is it now? We're still averaging something in the last few weeks, close to a thousand deaths a day. And no one's talking about that. And yeah, that's because there are other crises in the world, like invasions of European countries. Got it. But even before the invasion, it's almost like... because of all the attention was paid on the how do we prevent it? And as it's happening, what could we have done to prevent it? That we've worn out our ability to focus on how do we actually deal with it and prevent it from getting worse while it's happening? Exactly. Right. It's like, oh, okay, well, we failed. Right? No, like there's a difference between failing of a million dead and failing of 100,000 dead or whatever our number is. And it's that binary notion of. Speaker 1 (8:14) of sort of disasters, right? I mean, it's either good or bad, right? And, you know, I live in the grays, you live in the grays, that what you're trying to do is sort of reduce the consequences. So I have some wonky terms in the book, but I talk about sort of just consequence minimization. It does matter, right? It does matter if you can minimize what... the Haitians call, and I describe in the book, what are called stupid deaths, right? Those deaths that didn't have to occur if only you had done X, Y, and Z. And I go through X, Y, and Z in the book. And I'm a generally happy person and optimistic. And part of it, I think, is because looking at all these disasters, right, we always are sort of surprised and, oh my God, why us? And didn't think it could happen here. And what you realize is that while Speaker 1 (9:04) Each of them is unique, right? They all follow their own patterns that really the consequences tend to be the same. And therefore, the solutions are generally the same. And I wanted to figure out that connective tissue of all of these disasters. I start with Greek mythology and the Trojan horse to Surfside. I make it all the way to Surfside. And what are those points of commonality? that will make disaster sort of oddly familiar, given that we always, exactly, like that we always seem surprised. And then when it happens, we're like, oh, yeah, that was too bad. Never again. That's a, never again is a, you know, really is a hard promise to keep. You mentioned the concept of stupid deaths. And I want to be clear, you're not saying that these are stupid people making stupid choices, but they're consequences of a system of reaction. Speaker 1 (10:01) to a crisis. So it is not the tornado outbreak. It's not the direct deaths from the tornado. It's the deaths from starvation because food can't get into the disaster zone. Is that right? That's exactly right. And we can learn from those deaths. So one of the interesting, you know, I always say one of the interesting, I find it interesting because I wrote the book, but so. one of our obligations in disaster management is not simply to say, well, people died, but to also figure out, you know, how they died. And as importantly, sort of why did this person die and not that person? So in the pandemic, for example, like, you know, vaccination. Speaker 1 (10:39) is a sort of telling metric, right? And so, or this person was, you know, too close to the, in an earthquake, this person was, was too close to the building. That's why they died. And that's sort of, that's really our obligation. And so one of the interesting statistics coming out of U.S., of the U.S. is. hurricane fatalities. So we've gotten so good at hurricane prediction and hurricane preparedness and management, especially in areas in the Gulf area. But we still lose too many people each year. But we're not losing them from hurricanes. We're losing them because... Speaker 1 (11:12) The resources are often not being delivered. The preparedness isn't there. The recovery is too slow. So that, at least in the case of hurricanes, what's happening is people are dying of carbon monoxide poisoning because they set up their own generators. So most U.S. deaths related to hurricanes and blizzards now are related to carbon monoxide. Well, that's a good thing to know because now, you know, when I plan for the, when someone, you know, public official plans for the next hurricane season or... Speaker 1 (11:41) or blizzard, you're focused on that education and communication, which is what you started to see in particular in areas that get hit by hurricanes. They're much more focused on those generators because people know what to do, stay home or evacuate. And to focus on that kind of factor, avoiding the so-called stupid deaths, you need to accept that prevention will fail, that the crisis will happen. But you also recommend a couple of things that I want to talk through in a little more detail. You talk about establishing mechanisms to listen and communicate as the disaster actually unfolds. You talk about creating structures to enforce, for lack of a better phrase, unity of effort to respond to crises. So I want to start walking through some of that, but beginning where that left of boom kind of hits the boom. Talk about the paradox of... Speaker 1 (12:38) preparedness and how that can get in the way of this kind of planning. It is a challenge. I mean, you know, this coming from the intelligence world as well. It's a challenge of our