Citizens are not prepared for attacks because there is a bias against the public by nearly every expert and government official. In emergency preparedness, there is this belief that public will panic, that the public is not to be trusted, that there will be looting.

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.

I can't tell you how many times I've been with very smart, knowledgeable Homeland Security experts who are essentially tasked with saving your life who do not trust you with information. They just don't. They kind of dismiss the media and the public in one fell swoop.

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

By sort of combining the research of a lot of smart people, I came up with an equation for dread [dread=uncontrollability+unfamiliarity+imaginability+suffering+scale of destruction+unfairness]. The dread equation is a simplification, but it's a way to explain why we fear something so much when it is so unlikely. Part of it is the lack of control. That's why we're more scared of plane crashes than car crashes even though we know rationally which is more dangerous.

Most serious plane crashes are survivable. There's a sense that, 'Oh, if we go down, that's it, it's out of my hands.' And that's just statistically not true. I have more optimism and more faith that my own actions can make a difference.

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