The One Thing That Predicts Whether You Survive a Disaster

Daniel Aldrich: you let your child marry someone of a different political party? We are getting the same gap that is to say yes and no to that answer that we got on race in the nineteen sixties. And when my mentors has argued, we are now at the same level of divide as we were just around the time of the Civil War in the eighteen sixties in America. As far apart as we have been in almost two hundred years.
Ben: It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Would you be mine? Would you be my neighbor? Mr. Rogers said it. He arguably said it best. What does it take to be a neighbor and in times of disaster? We just came off of the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9-11. We got through the COVID pandemic. Folks are still reeling from that, whether it be businesses, whether it be kids who were disrupted in their learning environments, families who lost loved ones, and even the smaller. Disasters in our neighborhoods that do change our quality of life and the way we live. How do we respond to the next disaster? How do we respond to the next AI conundrum? A big disruption. Could it be a hack? Could it be a grid issue? Again, may not be a dystopian idea to think about these days. Does it come down to just introducing yourself person to person? Those human relationships rather than relying on resources that are accessible through ChatGPT or other AI agents. Well, how do we build that type of social purpose? did the nationalization of politics come into play Of how we no longer connect with one another as closely as we did after moments of national unity and collective purpose. Somebody's been studying this extensively and born out of his own tragedy when he lost his house, entire belongings along with his family's belongings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina after moving to Louisiana. It was Daniel Aldrich's family who was thrown through a loop among the countless people who lost pretty much everything during Hurricane Katrina. And now he's devoted his research to the common cause. How do we rebuild it? Daniel is a professor of resilience. With a resilience studies program at Northeastern University in Boston. How does religion come into play? How does politics come into play? How do politicians and the folks who want nothing to do with politics start to rebuild what he calls social capital? He's not only an academic, he is an author. Several books, publications, he's got one out right now. Beyond common ground, how everyday places solve big social challenges the church, the bar, the four H club, maybe even if it's just a group chat from your apartment building. How are we gonna be better collective members of our own neighborhood? community members looking out for our own personal interests, but not becoming so selfish in order for all of us? To survive, thrive. And he argues that it is these social connections That help us get there. How do we do it? Let's talk to Daniel. Well, at a time when we are siloed off, whether it be politics, social media, race, class, socioeconomic status, I thought, is there a way out of this? Especially when cable news is saying that we are at a very divided part time rather in our country, especially when we talk about the silos of politics. But there are some real world examples of how we can coexist with one another in our communities. And I thought Daniel Aldrich would be a great person to catch up with given your extensive research, sir. so thank you for joining Byline. I'm excited about this conversation.
Daniel Aldrich: Thanks for having me.
Ben: 100%. Let me start with how your research kicked off. I know that some personal tragedy born out of Hurricane Katrina actually prompted you to start asking some more questions about community and and kind of a collective sense of purpose. Take me back to that moment and when those questions about the research you do today started popping up.
Daniel Aldrich: Sure. This is the last weekend in August two thousand and five. We had moved down about seven weeks beforehand from Boston in the middle, funny enough, of a hurricane. And that hurricane we moved through was very light, some rain and some winds. So we had set up our new home, my first job as an academic ever in New Orleans. Tulane University had hired me to come in that fall. And my kids, I had two young kids at the time, their classes were all gonna begin Monday the twenty ninth. All of us had this vision Have a good day, first day of school for me, first day of school for the kids. And that day didn't come. It didn't come because over the weekend we saw our neighbors packing up their trucks and their grandparents and their dogs and their stuff and driving away. And we were young and naive, had no idea what it meant to go through a real hurricane. We envisioned this wind and rain thing we had seen already. So Saturday night, really late at night, a neighbor who saw their lights were still on knocked on the door and said, Why are you still here? And we said, Well, we're gonna just ride this out, we'll be fine, right? And she said, no, you would not be fine. So very early that morning by three AM Sunday, we packed our two kids in the car. We took one bag, literally a single bag of stuff for the whole family, thinking we'd be back. And we took fourteen hours to drive. It's normally a four hour drive to Houston, Texas, from New Orleans. All the roads are counterflowed on I-10 west. You can't go east or north, you've got go west. We got there, got the last hotel room, very small days in on the edge of an industrial park in Houston. And settled in, we thought for a day that would do it. We'd be done by Monday, we'd be back in school again. Well, that next day we woke up to yells from the lobby of the hotel. We ran downstairs and we saw people staring at the screen. It showed water in the streets, even though the hurricane had passed. And of course, what had happened is the levees, the system of mitigation of concrete and metal walls around the city had collapsed. All that water from Lake Pontitrain, all the water from the Mississippi River had poured in. Our house, all the other houses where we lived was called Lake View, unironically. And it became lake filled because the lake literally filled up our entire house, bottom to top, and everything was toast. So all of our hard drives, papers, documents, our clothing we had bought, the whole house we had filled with stuff or other car. We d we just got our first car. All that stuff is toast. And, you know, you go through this moment and my wife and I looked at each other and said, like, we what are we doing? Like we have no idea what's happening right now. You know, we we f figured two things would save our lives. We figured that either private insurance would activate and get us some money for the stuff we had lost, or FEMA or some kind of white knight on a horse would come through with a check, like an
Ben: It's a long process, we know that.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah. And unfortunately for us, two things happened. We weren't in town long enough for our insurance to activate. So actually insurance didn't cover anything. And FEMA thought we had insurance. So to try to prove you don't have something is really hard. It's basically a bot. So for the first six months of faxing, and back then it was faxing, you know, fifteen page applications for help to FINA but everyone was rejected. So we're at our wits' end, we've been there a few days, and all of a sudden we get these texts, not from people that we know really well, but from friends of friends, religious organizations around the country, people in Detroit and Philadelphia, people in Colorado. Someone had actually taken a picture of their lottery ticket they had won and sent it to me. Just they heard that we were in trouble. And this network of connections reached out to us. And eventually rather than staying in Houston, we ended up driving all the way back to Boston. So we drove down and then drove back out again. Because the Boston community got us a place to stay for free. They got us a new apartment, they filled it with stuff, they got our kids into school, they paid for the tuition. So
Ben: Well.
Daniel Aldrich: our recovery didn't come from the private sector from insurance or from the public sector from FEMA. It came from the network of connections. And I began to wonder, we saw this ourselves, right? This is the Mesearch you heard about. We observed in our own lives
Ben: Right.
Daniel Aldrich: how these connections made a difference. So I proposed a grant to an organization called the Abe Fellowship. And I said, look, maybe my experience is one in a million, who knows? What if we go to a country like India, with a lot of poverty, a lot of people who are not well educated, a lot of underinvestment, and we also look at historical records in Japan from a hundred years ago and find what factors help those survivors and those people that left after a huge tsunami and other things?
Ben: Well let me let me let me ask you this because I know three eleven, that's b that horrible nuclear tsunami incident that happened, some communities survived, others did not. survival in more ways than one. At what point did you stop prioritizing family, private needs? Obviously academia, I assume I don't want to put words in your mouth. You had put that on the back burner thereafter from Hurricane Katrina. But then you thought, hmm, I can take my own individual experience into something or start researching something that's more collective here. When did that light bulb go off?
Daniel Aldrich: Well, I'm a big nerd and since an early day my life has in has been an introvert with books. And you know, when you're nervous or stressed as an introvert, the easiest place to go is to a library. So I was stuck in Houston. I also could access stuff online through my university library, even though Tulane wasn't open, their online resources were. So I began to download everything I could find on what disaster recovery literature told us. And it talked about the government. It talked about FEMA. In other countries, it talked about national aid. And talked about private insurance. It talked about all kinds of catastrophic bonds and fancy things. And almost no one was talking about this idea that maybe it's our connections that really drive that recovery arc. So I found one paper from the nineteen nineties by a really cool pair called Nakagawa and Shah. They had written a qualitative paper looking at two earthquakes back in the nineteen nineties and said, There's strong evidence here, but they had no quantitative proof. They couldn't say if you to them, show me the numbers kind of thing. They couldn't really do it. So I made a vow to myself. that if I could show a skeptic out there that in fact it wasn't about again aid from the government or aid from the insurance, but really my network, could I show them having more connections, deeper connections, more trust, more engagement would lead to better outcomes? And that really became the book that I worked on that became Building Resilience. And that was the earlier book I published that looked at Hurricane Katrina, looked at India, it looked at Japan, tried to find patterns across time and space where these connections make a bigger difference than for example, how older I am or how much money I have in my bank account or how well educated I am, it's really more like, well, have I put time into building connections? Do I know my neighbors? Right? Have I put time into networking on my at local events trying to meet people that I don't know as well? We call those bridging ties. Do I know people in power and authority? We call those linking ties. So this is really about not just do I have any friends? That's just too broad, but what kind of connections are in my network and can I access them at these moments of stress and crisis like when we lost pretty much all the stuff that we owned.
Ben: Let's open up can of worms here. You argue that trust between neighbors rebuilt community far faster than physical rebuild, if you will, infrastructure. Why? And you also mentioned in that paper from the nineties that it's hard to or at least it was difficult to quantify these findings at the time. Was there a single most surprising data point that convinced you of your theory here?
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, there are a few things. I'll start with a quantitative question. A few things really stood out. One was that we noticed really easy to capture, but weird things like blood donation levels. So oftentimes,
Ben: Fit.
Daniel Aldrich: I don't know if you've been at a college campus or at a business or at a plaza, you know, the Red Cross or something, or just pull up with a big truck, right? They'll give you a cookie and a little ginger ale if you go and give blood. Well, if you think about what that means, what does giving blood mean? It means I'm not helping my own family. Right? I could be home dw doing whatever, walking the dog, painting the back fence, washing the dishes, helping my kid, whatever. But instead of outgiving my blood literally to some stranger. And I began to notice if you correlate actually giving blood and other what we call volunteeristic activities. So again, I can help my family. That's not volunteering though, right? If my spouse says, Hey, go to the store and pick up some peanut butter, I'm not really helping the world. I'm helping the peanut butter producer, but not helping my my my world. But if someone says, Hey Daniel, I need a pint of your blood because some car accident victim in Skokie, Illinois, is gonna need that in a few weeks, that's a very different level of engagement, right? I can't
Ben: And it's not like you're getting two thousand dollars in return.
Daniel Aldrich: Exactly. There's nothing coming back. And that's so what's for me, these are really cool to watch. If you begin putting the data together, so you asked about capturing things quantitatively,
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: so obviously not every society does stuff the same way. In Japan, for example, they have a thing called chonikai, which are almost like homeowners' associations, but a lot of people join them. Renters, newcomers, oldcomers, people that own their homes. And those chonikai have all kinds of events. They have Disaster Preparedness Day, they have Know Your Neighbor Day, they have Claim of the River Day. In America we have other stuff. We have the Koanis Clubs Four H clubs and we have the Masons and we have, people come by selling I love this part. Girl Scout cookies all the time to my house, right? Girl Scouts come by. Not really a Japan thing, I've never seen them in Japan. Maybe there are, but each society has a different way of building these ties, building these volunteeristic processes. But that kind of data s consistently connects with this idea, for example, of bridging ties. Are you volunteering? Is your child, you know, selling Boy Scout or Girl Scout cookies? Are you going to the Masons? Are you spending time voting on on poll day, we have people poll workers right now who go outside and spend their day out, giving out stickers and getting people guided in. Again, you're helping out a community, it's not your family. So that kind of data, the more I studied it and I saw the correlation between those activities, volunteerist activities, no payback, no no one s paying me to be there completely on my own, and recovery questions, questions of trust, even preparedness. This is a really cool thing. We actually have really cool data that shows Before a disaster arrives, before Hurricane K Katrina arrived for us, the local yeah
Ben: Something you can predict, predictable disaster.
Daniel Aldrich: yeah, local authorities are telling us over and over again, get out of your homes, leave your area, please leave, right? Because if you don't leave and there's a flood or a fire or whatever, either they're picking you up or your body up. One of those two things is gonna have to happen because the electricity is out and you know that means there's no gonna be no water running. No water running means there's no toilets to flesh. Pretty unpleasant, right? So most people can't stay.
Ben: You're putting the first responders at risk too, in that case.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, so we know that those local authorities want them out of the home. So why doesn't everyone listen? Well in some cases people can't evacuate. Maybe they're elderly, maybe they're in a wheelchair. That makes sense. But a lot of people who can evacuate don't. Oftentimes it's because the information they're getting isn't coming from authorities. It's coming from like, you know, Auntie Susan, who tells you, It's gonna be just fine, just stay at home. All's gonna be good. Or it's your brother, who's like, I've been through this before, it's no big deal. We actually measured this across millions of users, both of Facebook and other platforms. If most of the information that you get comes from networks of people that sound and look like you,
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: it's less likely you move when those evacuation notices come. But
Ben: Hm.
Daniel Aldrich: if the information you're getting is broad and diverse, you're watching the NOAA broadcasts, you're listening to local authorities, you've got a friend in another state who says, Daniel, it's not safe, you've got to get out. And you also have Aunt Susie telling it's gonna be fine. When you have multiple forces of information, it activates mobility. You think, well, Maybe there is something to this fire warning. Maybe there is something like thinking about the California, right? The paradise fires. Maybe there is something to this idea, we need to move. We can't just stay in our house and use a hose. We really have to get out of here. So even before the disaster arrives, we've got quantitative data that shows we can predict who will and who won't get out of their homes in time.
Ben: Well, this comes to a central point and that's trust. And it takes a lot to build trust, whether it be in government, whether it be more naturalized personal trust with Aunt Susan as you had mentioned, or Susie, however you want to call her. And I wanna get to that in in a moment, but I and I I also wanna get to how the intersection of social media and AI, how might this muddy the water from a misinformation standpoint, but also
Daniel Aldrich: Strongly.
Ben: yeah, so I I I imagine That you are researching a brand new faction of of different theories right now in this world of artificial intelligence. But let's let me go to Japan real quick after three one one three eleven. Same tsunami, wildly different mortality, town to town. and I know that that certainly comes down to socioeconomic class, infrastructure, et cetera. But what separated the towns that ultimately were able to thrive thereafter?
Daniel Aldrich: Their levels of two things. One was bonding and bridging ties during the event. Those ties activated. If you knew your neighbors, if you'd worked with them before, if you knew someone was home, you would go out, knock on their door before the tsunami arrived, but after the earthquake, and say, Mrs. Tanaka, there's a tsunami coming, you've got to get out of here. And then offer to take her out of there on your back, on a bicycle, even on vans. We saw all kinds of what we call collective action behavior. People went and found neighbors that they knew were vulnerable. And got them out of harm's way. That reduced casualty rates. Then once people are safe and away and they're starting to rebuild, actually there it's no longer horizontal ties, the bonding and bridging ties. Then it's linking ties. To what degree does your community, does your town, does your region have a booster in Tokyo, right in the capital, helping out? I always think about in America, really powerful senators. Har Harry Reid from Nevada used to be one of them, right? And nothing got done in Nevada unless he and his staff either approved or stopped it from happening. Same too in Japan, there are powerful people that you can have as a booster who can guide resources to you. Think about after a disaster, how many homes have to be rebuilt? Well, there's only so many contractors in the world, only so many construction firms that can do that. Why do they choose one community over the other? And by the way, this isn't just Japan. One of my students did this in Puerto Rico after some of the storms there. Same thing with putting the power back on. They can't, the electricity company can't get to everyone's home at the same time. It's not possible. You've got to go here, build the power lines, connect things back again, turn it back on. He found also that these linking ties, having powerful politicians backing you up, meant your community, after a storm, after a tsunami, after a fire, those are the communities that come back faster. Not necessarily because of grit or because of money or because of whatever thing we imagine that somehow drives recovery. It's because you have social connections to people with power and authority who can drive that process. No local community in the world, nowhere, Japan, Puerto Rico, America, has enough money to rebuild by themselves. So for example, I live in Boston. If we get hit by a major hurricane, which has actually never happened in our lifetime, a major hurricane hit will absolutely flood our tunnels, it'll flood our downtown, seaport a number of buildings that are built there will be underwater, but at least four feet, maybe more. It will take probably hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild. Boston's not the kind of money. That's gonna have to come from the federal government. How will the federal government decide? Well, the president gets to decide two things. Is this a disaster declaration that he or they or she approves? And there's the money come. And we're seeing under different administrations different levels of approval of disaster recovery questions and different levels of aid. California, for example, versus Florida, very different levels of aid right now, because different levels of political connection.
Ben: Well, that's gonna require I understand your point. That does require some type of proof on the record, say a president is withholding money from a state that's led by, say, a Democratic governor that he particularly doesn't like. In Maryland, that was some of the suspicion they had devastating floods in western Maryland, which relatively rural community, not a lot of vast wealth that's out there. But they were denied FEMA declaration, despite having overwhelming evidence that they needed some federal dollars here. And there's this suspicion that well, that was because the president didn't necessarily like Maryland's Governor Westmore, a Democrat. But again, I I understand your your point there. But let me go back to this all idea of social capital, which it sounds like a fancy academic term, but does it does social capital require people to be alike? Or can it be built across political cultural divides if those examples that you mentioned where politics might drive somebody to deny certain type of aid do exist?
Daniel Aldrich: This is a great question. So the good news is there are different types of connections. The most common though is people that are like us. The fancy word is homogeneous or bonding social capital. That means if I'm a fast talking white guy from Boston, probably most of my friends are fast talking white guys from Boston. That's pretty common. So again, this is true in Japan, it's true in Australia, it's true in Europe, Africa. Most of the people that we know and interact with look and sound like us. For example, if I'm a first generation migrant, many of my friends and my cohort will also be first generation migrants. But the good news though, beyond bonding ties, are bridging ties. Bridging ties are people that are not like us. We may only have one single thing in common. So let's say we both have kids at a local kindergarten. We both have dogs who walk at a dog park. Both of us are fans of the Bruins. Maybe, maybe sometimes they win. Sometimes we can be fans of a certain club nearby. Maybe we go spend time at the same institution. Maybe you're member of the fish road crew and you follow them around where they go touring. Right? Those are ways we build connections, not because we're similar. But because we have a single interest in common. Those bridging ties are harder to maintain, right? The fish concerts only come once every few years and they're only out for a few months. I'm only only see you a few hours, right? I'm not gonna see you every day like a neighbor or someone in my family. But those bridging ties bring huge benefit because you're in a different set of networks than I am. That means the information that you have, the way you solve problems, the way you see the world is different than mine. And what I really benefit from is my worldview is pretty set, right? I've got a certain way of seeing things. there's a fire, here's how we handle it. there's a flood coming, here's what I do. Your worldview, Ben, might be quite different. And having a conversation with you means you're helping me understand the world from a new perspective. That gives me new tools. There's all kinds of data that we have and other labs have that show individuals with a broader network, a more diverse network, they can solve problems better. If you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail. But if you've given me a saw in our conversation and someone else gave me a zaza and someone else gave me an all, that set of tools now gives me Preparation for different new problems. If I've only talked to people like me and we all have a hammer, I'm not gonna get very far. This is the same thing by the way, finding jobs. Oftentimes we think I need to get a job, I'll ask my best friend. Well, your best friend probably is a lot like you. If you can't find a job, probably they're not finding a job either. But bridging ties would mean don't ask your best friend, ask that guy at the Shriners, ask that guy at the mosque, ask that guy that you met last week at the baseball game. Those are people who know people that you don't know. And that's
Ben: Hm.
Daniel Aldrich: where bridging ties come in. The neighbor who knocked on our door who told us you need to get out of of New Orleans before Katrina comes, she had ties to NOAA. I didn't. And she knew how bad the storm was gonna be. Her message
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: to me gave me new information about what to do. If she hadn't come in, we'd be in trouble. And this is true for all of us. Finding jobs through bridging ties. In this case, surviving a disaster, new information, new ways of acting, new mobility through bridging ties. There are also these linking ties we've been talking about, people in power and authority, and yes. that they can definitely change how things go. As I mentioned, we we have very strong evidence that those vertical ties drive the pace of recovery after disasters across around the world. Not just here, not just in Japan, but everywhere. But the good news is bridging ties can also bring resources and information that are at horizontal levels. So it's true there might be misinformation, we can talk about that, disinformation coming in. But those bridging ties are a powerful antidote to a lot of the nonsense that gets spread. But when you think about it, if one of your friends sends you a a meme that you don't know is fake and they make you think it's real, you may go around telling everybody, Did you see this video? Which is actually an AI fake video. But if you
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Aldrich: have friends in different organizations, you have assistance that you're getting from other people, they can say, No, no, Daniel, that's that's not real. You need to delete that post. That is not absolutely a real thing.
Ben: Well, deep fakes aside, and I do want to talk about AI forming, you know, b people forming deep relationships with those chatbots instead of the human connection, which seems to be the most at least a connection that seems to have the most weight human to human versus human to robot. Let me go to back to this collective purpose. Coming on the heels, or actually, we're past the twenty fifth anniversary of the nine eleven attacks. America fell to rare collective purpose at the time. What happened to it? And I c I can I can we don't need to get maybe into the specific details or theories of what happened to it based on perspectives of war and conflict itself, but that that purpose, how did it fizzle so relatively quickly, do you think? And do you think it can be rebuilt without catastrophe? That's a big question.
Daniel Aldrich: This is a great research question and actually it's been answered a few times. We know that after a major shock, whether it's a hurricane or a fire or a terrorist attack like nine eleven, people come together. They come
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: together spiritually in the sense that they have the same vision of what to ha what to do. They come together physically, they help each other out more. That blood drive we talked about before. After nine eleven, blood drives spiked. The number of people giving blood, people volunteering through hours, joining the armed services, running police forces, all that stuff spiked. But we also know around the world, after about eleven months That esprit decor, that sense of connection, it begins to win. And usually by one year, it is back to baseline. Whatever your country was like beforehand, or your society, or your your city, was like before that shock, you've got about one year of goodwill that disasters generate. I remember some politician once said, you know, never let a bad disaster go to waste. But which it means you have this one year period when people are really on board to want to do something. Now, what can I do against a foreign terrorist attack besides join the army? I'm not really quite sure. But we
Ben: Well why why is it? Why is it a year? Is it that calendar event that sticks in our mind that contributes to this?
Daniel Aldrich: That we think it's just more like the how the human mind works. we can only hold so many things in our head over time. And even after a major catastrophe like that, and of course the news covered it, right? And we have stories of the victims' families and we'd investigating what's going on and Congress is covering it, after about a year the human mind really drops down most high priority things to l medium and low priority. in some cultures, for example, you mourn someone for about a year after they pass, and after a year the number of rituals involved basically disappears. Human minds did it for about a year for most things. So, that's how we have birthdays every year, right? So one year is enough to keep it up and then it's gone. I think that's just the way human nature works. And this is true again
Ben: Do you think it's because we have short term as attention spans?
Daniel Aldrich: We just have so much going on in our mind, right?
Ben: Okay.
Daniel Aldrich: we have information coming in from multiple sources. Some of us have TikTok and we have Instagram and we have YouTube and videos and we're watching channels and we're at work and we have kids at school and we have dogs, mortgage payments. We have a lot of things in our mind at the same time. and oftentimes you people will find even day to day that something that really was big news last week, this week is no longer interesting and it's it's it's dropped out. So that terror attack for nine eleven it definitely changed lives. It obviously re literally worked the landscape in New York City in Manhattan. it awfully changed, how you and I board airplanes. You and I bore take off our shoes now. Because, back in nine eleven and afterwards we were worried, DHS got worried, about people using their shoes to bring on explosives. All those things that happened, the formation of the DHS, the way we board airplanes, those are long term institutional changes. But if you ask someone nowadays, do they think about nine eleven every day? Maybe survivor of a spouse who was killed, or maybe someone who was killed in the wars that followed. But again, most disasters. We can really keep them in mind for about a year before other stuff takes that space and becomes higher priority.
Ben: If collective purpose has a shelf life and I'm giving it this some this title here, and it shouldn't in some cases if if that's the theory how do you make that a reality?
Daniel Aldrich: It's hard and we've studied this in different disasters. same thing in Japan's three eleven disasters. After
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Aldrich: about a year, if you measure newspaper coverage, if you ask people what's on your mind these days, if you look at levels of s depression or happiness, those things tend to go about that one year cycle. same too, by the way, in foreign countries where there are terror attacks as well. Oftentimes we'll have an anniversary that one day will come back up again and and it'll get submerged. we've we've had all kinds of stuff around the world to to measure this on. It's really hard to maintain that sense of of espree, of decor of connection of what do you to call a group think for a long time because we're always being pulled by our own lies, right? No, I really want to get outside and take a walk. I don't really want to go to that one year anniversary event or, some something else something else happened recently. Maybe there's a a stabbing in my community and that's top priority right now for me. Or, I'm struggling in school or I'm paying the mortgage. So because we our minds can only hold so many things, emotionally speaking, it's really hard for mo the average person to hold a national level calamity in their mind for more than that year. And the the news would be though, right, you have about a year to use that goodwill. So if you had a plan, let's build a new organization, as they did, which is, the d Homeland Security DHS itself was the new organization
Ben: Yep, d DHS, yep.
Daniel Aldrich: that came out of the rubble, literally. That's the one permanent change that came out of that. That's only possible. That's really the first major reorganization in the US government in decades. Right? FEMA was built in the 70s. It sat as an organization by itself and then got glommed with thirty-seven other organizations. The Coast Guard got stuck in there. And border control got stuck in there. All these organizations get stuck in this new conglomeration because Congress and the and the House they said we have got to do something, right? We have a year, we've got to do something. So there are moments of let's call it a window opens of political windows, but as a for society, also let's build something, right? Let's build a a core of volunteers who can do things. Let's build something like let's teach for the city or whatever, build something peace corps that can do things. And we have, peace corps came out of past wars when local people wanted to do something in response. To what they didn't like going on abroad. So there have been moments like that where that one year window was used for building something that's more permanent. But in terms of an ind individual's ability to hold on to it, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I've had so many things happen since breakfast. And probably you and your listeners are the same. Most most of us have very busy lives. Holding a tragedy in our mind is also exhausting, right? I know I went to Hurricane
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: Katrina, I know about it. when it comes around these years, honestly, I don't have to think about it much. I have A lot of our stuff going on, it's a really negative point in our lives as it we lost everything that we owned.
Ben: You don't want to devote any more emotional capacity to it. You've already been run through the ringer. Yeah.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, it's hard. so many other things have happened since then that make us s excited or sad either way, that to hold that one moment for a long time can be very challenging. So I'm sure there are psychologists out there who can help us out with this, but I think at the end of the day, most research shows you have about a year to act on those feelings of connectedness and then you're back to baseline again.
Ben: Well, I'm sure social media well, I in some cases I presume that it might have elongated some of that shelf life, especially with we have immediate access to a myriad number of of of resources, videos, accounts, et cetera, newsletters, you know what I mean? But social media, you know, from from the the the the social media gods, if you will, said that it was all here to connect us, back in what, almost two decades ago, two thousand six, seven, eight, when a Facebook was spearheaded a college dorm room. Do you think that social media has built the social capital that you study or eroded it? Give me some examples here.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, I think the the bad news is in most cases social media is increasing polarization, meaning if I'm a red voter, I'm living in a red bubble, whether it's on threads or Facebook or Instagram, TikTok or X, whatever side I'm living on right now or Discord, most of those sites reward me finding a group, an in-group, my tribe, and then then basically attacking the other groups. If I'm red, I only see a blue voter getting made fun of. Like, look at this nonsense, look what they did.
Ben: Those algorithms at work, yeah.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, and it it's flipped also. So if I'm a blue voter, then I I dunk on the red voters. And they benefit from that, right? Anger, speaking of emotions, anger is usually pretty short-lived, but look at this outrage we can generate with an image that's we know is gonna spike the other side, whatever side we're on. We know there are images that spike both sides, right? So that's how oftentimes we get the big hits. The viral things are things that are often a spike in o endorphins or an adrenaline or anger. And the sad thing, of course, is social media platforms benefit from this. They don't wanna spending time being purple. Purple is probably more calm. Most I think the average person probably just wants to have live their life and doesn't really want to spend their day attacking the other side. But it it they benefit from having these spiking endorphins from these really angry emotions that we feel. So rather than just having, you know, Daniel got up, he had oatmeal, then he went on a walk outside, it was pretty calm. You know, no, it's like look at this wh whatever, either liberal or crazy conservative guy.
Ben: It used to be like that, I remember. It was a boring chronological feed on Facebook.
Daniel Aldrich: Right, but now it's not now it's what gets the highest hits. What gets the highest hits? Highly emotive calls. Look at this group, they're undermining society. Quick, send money to these guys, they're saving us from those who are undermining society. Or look at my friend. this happened to them when they tried to go to the other side's event. They got mocked or make fun of we can't stand for this. This is outrageous. The by the way, the funny thing is, we mentioned AI before, many
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Aldrich: AI platforms, social media pushes us to the outskirts, right? So again, if I'm in the middle and I'm Trending red, I'm gonna go more red. If I'm blue, I'm getting more blue.
Ben: I know where you're going here. I just had a conversation about this.
Daniel Aldrich: But AI, funny enough, is built to be almost like the moderating mom in the room. It says, I hear you both arguing, but actually there's points on both sides I could see. So if you try to ask an inflammatory question,
Ben: To an extent, I will say to an extent, because a lot of these models, they're gonna tell you what you want to hear.
Daniel Aldrich: Yes, that's true. But some of them will try to give you a fact-based one wrapped in a nice package. So if I say, Hey, isn't it true that, on nine eleven this conspiracy theory was real? It'll be like, Hey Daniel, that theory has been espoused by many people, but actually it's been but debunked
Ben: Mm-hmm.
Daniel Aldrich: and here's some evidence. Why? Here's the way to go for it. So rather than what X or some other platform, Facebook, whatever, would say, You want a conspiracy theory? I've got them for you, right? Here's tense conspiracy theories. Most AI platforms are built to try and push us back to the middle. Now I'm not saying that AI or platforms like Facebook or X are way to go. The reality is, and we have to back up a second, if there's a disaster in my community, I live in Boston, we had a fire behind us, not even a hundred yards away. If that fire had spread and the Transformers had gone out, or a fire at another house had been burned, I wouldn't be on social media tweeting about it, right? I would be getting my neighbors out of their homes and hopefully them getting me out of mine. That doesn't help to have those online connections, whether they're in Timbuktu Right, or in Paris, it helps to have people on the ground. And that's the problem that we have. Oftentimes, and I see this in my own kids, they're playing video games with friends they've made online, they've never met in real person. For all we know, they are an Android or a dog, that joke goes in the internet, but we don't actually know. When I was a kid, the vast majority of social interactions were mediated face to face. Now many of our s interactions, like we're doing right now, we're not in the same room anymore. Right? We're even even workmates may not necessarily be in the same building anymore. And that means it's much harder than To g to gin up that face-to-face connection and the recognition of neighborhood neighborhoodly need. So our programs as in my lab, almost all of them say, look, we cannot get people off Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever. We're not gonna be able to do that. But for a few minutes, can you put your phone down and let's try to build in this room and then back in your home neighborhood connections? Because again, the WhatsApp group can raise money for you after your house burns down. That's nice of them. But in the meantime, to get me out of my home to help save my dog or my grandma or whatever, I need a physical body in the house with me. I need someone there before the fire department, before the police, before some uniform person together. We call them zero responders. In most events, earthquake building collapses, fires and floods, zero responders are neighbors. And this is a lesson we're really having a hard time with. Most of us spend our day online and we expect that these connections will help us. And again, they can. Charity, whatever it's called, GoFundMe, those things are great. But that's after the event. You have to survive the charity, or if someone has got to survive the event to have a good gofundme event. To build the neighbor dynamic connections, those require face-to-face meetings.
Ben: One could argue that the nationalization of politics, at least in the United States, has contributed to a lot of this division. we don't talk about at least some people don't go to the polls anymore just because they want their roads fixed. They go to the polls because they have a stance on Middle East policy when their local co their local city council members nothing to do with it. but i in that same kind of tech realm, if you will, where I want to pivot from from what we have seen on social media to what we are now seeing with these AI chatbots and back to the research that you do. During disaster, misinformation spreads fast. We saw misinformation during the 2016 election, which American
Daniel Aldrich: Mm-hmm.
Ben: intelligence has pointed toward Russia acting in this realm right now but now we're seeing misinformation with these deep fakes, et cetera. AI can generate fake images in seconds. Certainly there are gonna be bad actors that are profiting off of this right now, especially in disaster. What
Daniel Aldrich: yes. Absolutely.
Ben: does that do to trust networks at the exact moment that they're needed the most?
Daniel Aldrich: I'll tell you a very sad story. my parents and my wife's parents are in North Carolina, which was hit by a hurricane that came through and destroyed Asheville. You might remember that from two or three years ago. Several FEMA teams went out to survey the land and were met by hostile residents holding longarms who told them, You need to leave now before we shoot you. They were physically threatened by gun-holding residents because politicians had been telling them over social media that FEMA was there not to help. or a guide the resistance process, FEMA was there to take their land from them. So because they heard this and they believed these politicians, this misinform this disinformation, rather than allowing FEMA onto their land to help them figure out, could there be assistance for these anchor institutions? Could we rebuild this road, FEMA never got to touch that area at all. They had to s to safely pull people out of the area and not resend them back in again. This is the first time in history during a disaster we could we've I've been able to find in my lab where there's evidence now that disinformation Has literally blocked the process of recovery. Typically we have the
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: disaster. Agents go in, they check to see what's going on, road conditions, local power lines, critical infrastructure institutions like hospitals and so forth and schools, and then they report back and then the that can flow. This is the first time that we know of when local residents believing them to be bad actors have stopped them from coming. So this pressure
Ben: Do you fear this is only gonna get worse?
Daniel Aldrich: only gonna get worse because as as as most of us are on these platforms like X and Facebook and so forth, and we're being polarized. And we're hearing more and more about how this government agency or this person or this eight institution is not having your best interests in mind. It's the opposite. They're actually here to harm you, to hurt you, to hurt your children. And again, those are very powerful messages, right? If you're already if if you know there's a storm and you're out of water or power, hearing and this person's coming to make it worse, that's a highly motivating message. If you just heard they're gonna come and take some pictures of your land and walk away, okay, I don't know what's going on. But if you hear, no, no, no, they're here to survey your land, Daniel, because they're gonna take it. For the government, I've already been through some crap. I do not want more stuff coming. And that's really motivating. That's why they met with them again. So we're in an era now when we don't actually have a good roadmap of what to do. We need, as I mentioned before, the federal government's level of funding is the only one that can cover most major disasters. No regional or local government has that kind of funding available to them to rebuild hospitals and schools and roads and door and all the kind of stuff that gets destroyed during major disasters. So if they're being blocked from coming in and talk right now, by the way, is that the FEMA as it is now is going to be devolved to the states, meaning that many of the agencies powers and responsibilities will be taken from the national level and put in all 50 states, and who knows maybe Puerto Rico, it's unclear. Meaning there'll be even less interaction then between, let's say, local residents and those national people. It could be for some people, right? The only interaction they ever had with a national level government person was through a FEMA. if you think about how many times in the day Do you meet someone from the federal government, if you live in Iowa, right? It may only be like the standoff that we had a few years ago, right, between some of the organizations out there and the BLM, the Bureau of Land Management, right? Those very negative organizations driven by disinformation. So we are in a new era right now when it is very unclear to me how we're gonna keep up business as usual if those teams, if those agencies cannot get into a disaster struck area and provide assistance because people see them as being bad actors.
Ben: Well, do you think the localization of these resources would be a good thing if they are the folks who are the ones with the more minute details and connections on the ground to get people relieved?
Daniel Aldrich: It is true they have more connections, but they're missing two things that FEMA does have. FEMA has very, very deep expertise across not one, not a dozen, but literally thousands of disasters over time. And the average disaster manager on the ground in Deloitte or in in Buluth or wherever, some, Indiana, North Carolina, Chapel Hill, they've had maybe one disaster or two disasters over their entire lifetime. FEMA knows the pain points, they know the process by the back of their hand, they know how agency flows, they know how much time it gets stuff done. If this is as many disaster bandits or young people because the paid isn't very good, it's a hard process to go through not having any thirty thousand foot view of what's going on. So that's that's one problem. The second problem is resources. As I mentioned, no local government budget could easily right now by the y imagine you tell Boston, by the way, remember all the schools you're struggling to fund? Two of your schools just burned down. Rebuild them with the money you have in your coffers. Or you have that ha that major hospital that you have. provides indigent care to people who come in and use it like an ER all the time. that hospital just got flooded out, you need to build a new one and you need to build it yourself. That that's what we're basically telling local governments. If FEMA doesn't devolve the authority and the capacity and the money, the funds, the financial capacity as well, this is gonna be a very rough go for the next few years, should FEMA really step back from the disaster space.
Ben: Should we face and it seem it it sounds dystopian, but it feels like there's going to be at some point a catastrophe from an AI generated level, whether it be a hack, whether it be a mass misinformation event. I I'm just being cynical here. but I do but people do fear this right now. There are actually studies about this, I'm sure you found this. Of the the
Daniel Aldrich: I know. I've got some kids in my family who tell there's no point saving for the future because there either will be universal basic income or I'll be dead. I I've heard this in my own family from highly e educated kids.
Ben: Okay, okay. So you know you know that th there's fears about a social AI catastrophe right now. So how do you see the gears of social capital working as a r in the in the aftermath of that?
Daniel Aldrich: This is the funny thing. Here's again where it's so important to build the neighborly connections. Because if there is, let's call it a major, you know, young adult fiction level of catastrophe, right? Power grid goes out across the country, there's no power for days, water stops working, therefore you can't flush. We're gonna need every community, every block to organize, right? People have medical conditions, they're gonna need help. People are on second or third or fifteenth floor of t of buildings. How do how do we get them down? How do we get them out of there, right? Beyond carrying them. People are gonna need to get stuff distributed locally. We're gonna need food and water. So we see the seeds of this in local communities. We see community food gardens. There's food forests here in Boston where every plant, every shrub, every bush is edible, right? That's a local resource. We see also community gardens building food. As we have winter coming in, squashes and gourds are in right now. So these are all things the community does. you know, thinking about your neighbors, who needs help? Who who again who's on a tall floor who can't walk out if the elevator stops working, as it might, if there really is a major problem. This actually, by the way, this is not a joke. In Paradise Fires, it happened a few years ago. There's a five-story old folks' home, the elevator stopped working. That meant if you were on the fifth floor and couldn't walk down the stairs, you were trapped there for the nine days when power was out. So nine days meant you couldn't get your medicine unless someone walked it up to you. You couldn't get food and water. So that's exactly where we need these social ties. We need people nearby in our community who know us and care about us. There's two different things, right? You have to know you have a neighbor and be going back to the volunteerism, be willing to put the time in to help them. If we build those ties ahead of time and our lab does a lot of work like this, how do we build ties in communities where all of us are busy, all of us have jobs, all of us have kids in school or whatever? How do you build ties so that if there is a major catastrophe, local residents are willing to leave their home and go help someone else?
Ben: Do you think that these ties favor the wealthy, those who already have money, that have resources, that have some of these community groups that are already set up? And what's that dispar disparity between class?
Daniel Aldrich: The the funny thing actually is, we have found it's the wealthy who typically don't have bridging ties or bonding ties. Take about a typical day, right? If you're super duper wealthy, you might be g driven to work or maybe you've got a fancy car, you park it in a fancy closed-in environment, you go to your office and come down again, your your lunch is brought to you typically, especially if you use a security risk nearby. You drive home to a gated community with a big fence into your garage. Someone who's a lower middle class student or a middle class person They park on the street, maybe they take a bus or stuff, they meet people all the time, they're out in their porch saying hello, they're going shopping. Actually, we found bonding and bridging ties are weakest among the highest wealthy people. Because again, in their world, they don't need to have those connections nearby. It's among the poor and the middle class who need them. Again, imagine you're a poor person, you have two jobs, and you get sick, you can't take your kid to school. You need a neighbor to take them there. You can't hire a nanny, you're not gonna put them in an Uber. You need a neighbor who knows you and trust and you trust them to walk my kid to go to school. Same thing with going for shopping for this happened during COVID in our neighborhood, right? The wealthy had everything delivered to the house by drones in some cases or by fancy people. My
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel Aldrich: wife and I would walk to the stores, buy it, and walk it back to our neighbors. Right? So oftentimes it's not wealth driving social capital at all. Actually, it's the opposite. High levels of wealth can mean you're very isolated, which means the information you're getting, unfortunately, is very narrow. Rather than someone else with multiple diverse connections, getting information from multiple sources, having a better chance to think through. Is it a good idea, for example, to block the sun using geoengineering? If you're incredibly wealthy, you've only heard about this from other wealthy people, they all say it's a good idea, or whatever else you're doing right now. Someone in the middle class, someone who's got a broader set of connections, they get more information and more de diverse perspectives.
Ben: Well, okay, let me ask this question. The wealthy has access to Chat GPT. the folks who are less fortunate has access to Chat GPT. Granted, yes, you can pay for a premium and some people are paying paycheck to paycheck and may not be able to pay for that premium. But some models, say the cheaper ones, Muse has an agent that anybody can access right now, that seems relatively powerful and useful in the day to day. If AI is so accessible right now to complete some tasks that were otherwise done through some of these community interactions at churches, lodges, the bar. Where do you think the social capital's gonna come from?
Daniel Aldrich: It's true again, if we use these agents, if we use our platforms online to avoid having those face-to-face connections to building those ties, we are weakening our society's ability not just to connect, right? But those connections are the foundations for resilience. So every few hours I'm spending online, rather than going to the 4 H Lodge or the Masons or a local barbecue or a picnic, means I am spending less time building the ties that I might need. Of course, the irony of the question as well is of course if there's an A apocalypse. AI is gone, right? All electricity is gone, network's out. We're gonna be going back to the Stone Ages at that point. But on a more realistic level, right, at a more realistic level, if there's
Ben: I get I I get your irony. Yeah, I get it.
Daniel Aldrich: a fire or a flood, my Muse agent can help me then, right? It can help me apply for aid afterwards. Maybe it'll be faster than faxing in it like I had to do. But I'll still need someone to get me out of my house. And if there's a grandma nearby to get her ha out of her house and to deliver food and groceries. And again, that muse agent probably can help me navigate the process of calling FEMA and going through the steps of getting assistance if there's still a FEMA. So those processes still need human beings in that loop. And by the way, just to also push back a little bit, it's true, I think a lot of the let's us chattering class, people like me who spend my day talking, we do use AI agents for a lot of stuff, right? Absolutely. But I think a lot of actually what we would call middle middle and lower class are more skeptical of those technologies. So it's much more likely that a tech bro in California right now, right, maybe having your podcast taken by an AI summarized and put out into a a different podcast they can listen to with four other podcasts. Than someone who's on the way to work listening to a radio, right? Or someone on the radio work whose English is a second language, and they're really listening to some broadcast we broadcast from Vietnam or from Mexico or from someplace else. So it's true, of course, theoretically we all have access, but there's a huge digital divide as well. We know this as well on, for example, Native American reservations. We know this out west. There are still some communities without broadband access, which sounds hard to say, or whose Wi-Fi is really bad.
Ben: It's true, yeah.
Daniel Aldrich: So maybe actually for them it's not that they're gonna go onto Muse or other AI agents. Maybe they are still building those face to face ties.
Ben: By your measure, do you think America is more or less resilient than twenty years ago for a fast moving disaster and for slow moving disasters, say climate change or even COVID?
Daniel Aldrich: This is a great question. Yeah. it f it feels like we're less resilient. And I think that's because the last twenty years has seen this huge rise in these two bu bubbles of the red and the blue sides. you know, when I was a kid growing up, this was not a big issue to us. We we wouldn't think about this. I'll give you an example in social science. In the nineteen sixties, when we were trying to integrate African Americans and white people, we used to ask a social science question was, would you let your child marry someone of a different race? That was the question we used to ask in the nineteen sixties. Fast forward to the twenty twenties, that question doesn't make any sense anymore. No one cares about that question. But the question that does make a lot of sense now is would you let your child marry someone of a different political party? We are getting the same gap that is to say yes and no to that answer that we got on race in the nineteen sixties. That is where we have come. And when my mentors Bob Putnam has argued, we are now at the same level of divide as we were just around the time of the Civil War in the eighteen sixties in America. As far apart as we have been in almost two hundred years. So I I think we are not as prepared, not because we don't have technology or anything like that. It's because we are not putting in the time to build the kind of s critical ties that we need that resilience will grow from.
Ben: One boogeyman to blame if you had to for this divide. Name it.
Daniel Aldrich: Technology, yeah, technology. It's got a lot of great uses. Absolutely, makes life easier and and more simple, but at the same time it is definitely pulling us away from face to face. And you see organizations now, many businesses in Boston have told their employees, You are coming back to work. Whatever whatever happened with COVID, we understand, we had to do it then. But we see productivity gains are higher. People can name their coworkers if they don't have to and meet them only on a Zoom call. And those conversations that are sing that are just random. And this by the way Jane Jacob's argument about cities. She argued a long time ago. That the reason you need cities is not because you have to deliver goods. That's she didn't care about that. She cared about meeting someone randomly you'd never met before, finding a common interest, and then going to the opera together. Or meet your dog's leashes get intertwined like in 101 dalmations and you make a new friend. Or you go to the park with your kid, or you go to the movies and you say hi to someone. Jane Jacobs said this a long time ago. We need to have those face-to-face interactions because curated stuff online, like Facebook or X or whatever else, is not really building true ties.
Ben: Let's end with some practical tips if you will. I know you've been sharing them and planning those seats throughout this entire conversation but right now, but if you are listening who wants their block, immediate block in their neighborhood to survive a next disaster, and disaster can be relative. It could be a very bad storm that washes away your your kids playground and the school needs some more funding, or it could be obviously a hurricane or something, etcetera, more existential. What's one thing that you would do this week right now to plan?
Daniel Aldrich: First is get to know your neighbors. If you've never gotten to know them, whether you're in an apartment building or a HOA or whatever, a residential block, take a cake, take a ice cream, take a bottle of wine, whatever, go knock on our door and say hello. Oftentimes we don't do that when neighbors move in and we feel embarrassed. I didn't learn their names, that they may have kids or a dog. It's never too late to make those connections. That's the first thing. Get to know neighbors. Second is start planning some stuff. Have a neighborhood block party, have an event, even it has to be start on a WhatsApp group or a Facebook group or next door, whatever it is. start building those ties so you can at least know some last names and phone numbers. How'd you contact someone if their house is being broken into and they're not home? How would you let your neighbor know that, by the way, did you sell some guy in a black malaclava mask to break through your front window? Because that's what's happening right now. How'd you contact them? Many of us don't even know their names or email addresses or anything else like that. So first is get to know your neighbors. Second is connect them in some way. And the third would be join. There's a great movie called Join or Die by another student of Bob Putnam. It basically says many of us stop joining bowling leagues and 4-H clubs and churches and mosques and synagogues. We stop that because we're busy. But actually the reality is we get a real strong sense of connection. You mentioned trust as well. We get that from being in a group. So if you're listening to this right now and you haven't done those things, met your neighbors, made a list of their names and and phone numbers and everything, and joined something, try all three this week.
Ben: Mr Rogers arguably said it best, Will you be my neighbor? What does
Daniel Aldrich: That's right.
Ben: that actually require of us?
Daniel Aldrich: I don't think it's a lot. I think, we have tried our very best in our neighborhood to at least get to know their names, to drop off a bottle of wine, to give them a cake, to say hello. And when we travel, we ask them to take in our garbage. When we travel, we ask them to take out our mail, whatever. Those are very simple ways of showing trust, giving them a key in case something weird is going on. They hear a fire alarm going off when you're gone. Wouldn't you want someone to check on that before the fire consumes all your stuff? So it doesn't take a lot of time, but the benefits we get from building these social ties can be immeasurable.
Ben: Daniel, I know you write a lot. Let people know what you're working on right now and how to get in touch with you and follow along.
Daniel Aldrich: Yeah, brand new book just came out this week called Beyond Common Ground, How places like parks, libraries, and churches build these kind of ties. I've got a new project next on religion and social ties, how members and non members both can benefit from recognizing what faith brings into our connections. people
Ben: Mm.
Daniel Aldrich: can find me on LinkedIn under Daniel Oldrich. I'm still on X as well. also on Blue Sky and Mastodon, some of the more federated servers. So I try to be out there on social media to have conversations.
Ben: Daniel Aldrich, I appreciate your time and your insight. And I'll be sure to include any links that you feel pertinent to share in the body of this conversation too, so people can access you at least more expeditiously. So thank you, sir.
Daniel Aldrich: Thank you.
Ben: I hope you enjoyed my conversation. Please give me a good rating. If you did, share it. You know where to find me, Substack, Ben Dennis Reports, Broadcast Ben on the social media platforms. And what questions do you have burning about going beyond the headlines, the forces behind them? How people tick, how the decision makers are making their own judgment calls and how you, can check those in power. I'm looking forward to having more of these conversations. So with that, we will see you next week, everybody. Take it easy.