Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

The health of your family or your office or your city directly affects the health of it after. The better you are at handling high-stress situations with little information, those skills lead to resilience and the ability to recover afterward.

Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

The public totally discounts low-probability high-consequence events. The individual says, it's not going to be this plane, this bus, this time.

People help way more than we expect, way more than makes sense. But when you talk to people called heroes, they often say they did it for themselves. In one case, a hero said that the cost of not doing it is so great, the sense of shame, when he knew that he was strong enough, that the fear of not doing anything was more frightening than the fear of dying.

You could reduce people's fears if you gave them some useful information before things went wrong. It's really important to create a sense of confidence in the public in their own abilities before a disaster because they're the only ones who are going to be there. No one's going to help you for at least 24 to 72 hours. So it would be good to know more about it.

Women are far more likely to follow orders to evacuate, especially women with children. At the same time, women were much more likely to die during the South Asian tsunami. In some villages it was 3 to 1. And that was party because of the average strength it takes to hold onto something. Also it was cultural; women were less likely to know how to swim, as were children. So much of this is based on how we develop our own survival skills before something goes wrong: Even if nothing goes wrong, it might be good to know how to swim.