Making Sense with Sam Harris - #36 — What Makes Us Safer?

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

Sam Harris speaks with Juliette Kayyem, a leading expert on homeland security, about the war on terror, profiling, Islamism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with Juliette Kayem. Juliette is, as you'll hear, one of the leading experts on Homeland Security, and she's written a book, which I'm loving, entitled Security Mom, an unclassified guide to protecting our homeland and your home. Juliette served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, where she handled diverse crises such as the H1N1 scare and the BP oil spill. She was also the Homeland Security advisor for the state of Massachusetts. You've seen her very

likely on CNN as an analyst, and she was actually a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her columns in the Boston Globe. She's a graduate from Harvard and Harvard Law School. She's currently on faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School, where I met her because she moderated the event I did with Majid Nawaz to launch her book, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, for Harvard University Press. Juliet was great at that event. She was really a fantastic moderator. When you look at the background she has, resisting the impulse to take up equal time on the stage, giving her views, had to be excruciating, given how qualified she was to have expounded upon those topics. So if you look at that event on YouTube, you will see impeccable generosity and tact on the part of

a moderator, as well as an impressive case of jet lag on the part of yours truly. In any case, it was a real pleasure to get a chance to return the favor and have Juliet on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation and I hope you do too. And now I give you Juliette Kayyem. I'm here with Juliette Kayyem. Juliette, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. Well, listen, you and I first met, you moderated the event I did with Majid for the launch of our book at Harvard's Kennedy School. And I remember joking at the opening there, both when we were setting it up and actually at the event, I think,

that he and I should have been asking you questions. Now, of course, that really wasn't much of a joke given your background. So just tell our listeners briefly, or at any length you want, just how you got into this and why you are in a position to know anything about security and terrorism and homeland defense. Well, that was a great forum. And thank you for the compliment. I'm not sure it's deserved, but I have spent almost close to 20 years now in counterterrorism, national security, and homeland security efforts. I was in counterterrorism before 9-11. There were a few of us in the field. I was a lawyer at the Department of Justice. I don't want to call it

the quaint days because certainly there were victims of terrorism, but nothing like what happened on 9-11. And after 9-11, those of us who were in the field, a very discreet group, I was a lawyer, a practicing lawyer, you know, sort of became elevated in various ways as careers do when things happen. Ultimately, you know, served on the National Commission on Terrorism and then served as the state. I'm in Massachusetts, the state's Homeland Security Advisor. That was a position that was created after the 9-11 attacks that sort of is the point person to oversee the National Guard, emergency management, all the public safety apparatus, and then served in President Obama's transition and then as an assistant secretary dealing dealing with, you know, the efforts, the things that were going to impact

the United States from a threat perspective. I've been a writer, an academic, and I'm a CNN analyst and have had sort of a varied career in this space that a lot of people don't know about. So, and to be honest, it's not going away, as you know. Yeah, yeah. So you served under two presidents, right? I did. I was under President Clinton, and that was the days of Oklahoma City. And what got me more involved with international terrorism was the Africa embassy bombings. People remember that in 1998, few Americans died, but our embassies were targeted in Tanzania and Kenya. Many Africans died. It was really the first time that bin Laden,

sort of who was known certainly as an entity in national security circles, really did target U.S. interests, in particular an embassy. But he wasn't a household name. I mean, and so the cases arising out of the Africa embassy attacks were, you know, they were sort of followed by the mainstream media, but most people wouldn't have known what al-Qaeda was or bin Laden was. And I remember in one of the trials, a couple of the guys in al-Qaeda were captured. There was some testimony from a former al-Qaeda member about bin Laden saying not only how intimately involved he was with the Africa embassy bombings, in fact, at one stage had told the planners to move a truck from one side of the embassy to another side. So he was very operational, but also that this was the beginning,

that these sort of coordinated attacks. And then of course, September 11th happened, and I was serving on the National Commission on Terrorism. And the media calls I got that day were so basic. I mean, they were sort of, who's this bin Laden guy we're hearing about? Where is Afghanistan? You know, just how people

just did not have any sense of what was going on in the world or the threat that had caused such terror on September 11th. Yeah, I actually want you to describe how you spent your morning of 9-11, because I should say I've read a little more than a third of your book at this point. I try not to be the journalist who pretends to have read all of your book or shows that he's read none of it. I'm loving the book, and I really recommend that our listeners get it and read it. It's called Security Mom, and you have married the insecurities of starting a new family with the insecurities of our global war on terror in a really wonderful way. And so I want you to describe the morning of 9-11 and just how that proceeded for you. Well, thank you very much for the compliment. And the book, just taking a step back before we get to 9-11, is attempt to talk about these really difficult issues, whether it's

terrorism or homeland security or the threats we face as a nation in a way that maybe people can grasp. And so I tell it as in the form of a memoir and what it's like to be in this field raising three kids. And it begins on the morning of 9-11. I would just, you know, I had I was in counterterrorism. I have a five-week-old child on the morning of September 11th. I was having difficulties, as most mothers do, of having any semblance of organization in my own life and had decided I was going to get back on my feet and head to New York that morning, go visit my sister, and had Cecilia with me. David, my husband, is driving us to the train station, to South Station here in Boston,

and we hear about the first airplane. And I have to tell you, nothing was further from my mind that this was the thing that I had been warning about, right? We had all, those of us in the field have been saying, this guy bin Laden, this group al-Qaeda wants a mega attack against the United States. I board the train and about, you know, not very much longer, I get another phone call from David that a second tower has been hit. And, you know, obviously at that stage,

I know that, you know, one airplane hitting the World Trade Center may be an accident, two is not. And I am starting to get a lot of media phone calls of very few people in the field and trying to deal with those at the same time dealing with the newborn, at the same time heading into ground zero on a train with, you know, with my new baby. And people, you know, we're so used to the security apparatus now, right? Sort of the TSA and airport security and travel security. But at that time, there was no protocols for anything like this. And so Amtrak, as one would suspect they would do, they just keep going into New York and I keep staying on the train. And then all of a sudden, very far into the train ride. So we're heading into New Haven. It just dawns on me, like, you know, I have one responsibility to myself and my child, but also to others. I am an expert

that whatever Amtrak was going to decide to do, we had to get off this train, that it was irresponsible, if not dangerous, to enter New York City. And so essentially evacuate, you know, stand on a train bench and tell people, you know, what I what I believe to be happening, because, you know, we don't at that stage, people information was not like it is today. You know, no iPhone, stuff like that. And and and sort of evacuate the train, just say this is, you know, I know this world and we don't know that this is over yet. is, you know, I know this world and we don't know that this is over yet. And so, you know, standing on a platform in New Haven, trying to reach friends that I know live there and my husband who's back in Cambridge and thinking, you know, even for me, I can't separate the expert from the mother, right? That, you know, both my self-preservation and preservation for my newborn,

but also the needs of those on the train was that they just needed to be told what to do. And it was the beginning of understanding that the expert and the mother were not so different, and that a lot of times the skills in both are somewhat similar. I would then enter government in which that became very, very clear. So just to back up, so there was a period when you were on the train, when you knew that the second tower had been hit, and you're headed into the city with your newborn on your lap. And at this point, you can't call your husband, because you can't get cell phone reception. But calls are coming in from journalists, right? So you're actually doing

interviews at this point with your... Interviews. And I admit, I did one interview while nursing. I mean, it was such madness, you know. And these calls are from top journalists who probably have some Rolodex in which it says terrorism. And I'm serving on the... Or we had just given our report, the commission on terrorism, essentially saying America was unprepared for what bin Laden was trying to do, you know, are finding me through

my assistant back at work. And I'm doing these interviews and they are questions like, who is bin Laden? What is Al Qaeda? Why is he in Afghanistan? And also is this war? I mean, Afghanistan. And also, is this war? I mean, already the questions about what is this? What is this attack and how is the United States going to give meaning to it or understand it? And then this sort of realization that not only was I, you know, not only am I trying to educate reporters and others that I'm talking to through journalists, but that there's, you know, a couple hundred people on the train heading into New York City. And that's my responsibility to them. And of course, Cecilia.

Yeah, because of course, we didn't know at that point that the attacks were over. So we didn't know what was going to happen next. Yes. I mean, we have to like, not only were the attacks not over, I mean, just remember the chain of misinformation that was going on that day. I mean, you know, Bush was dead. Cheney's gone missing. The White House has been hit.

And I and we had no way on the train to process any of this. And I remember hearing someone saying the towers fell. And first of all, you didn't know. I didn't know if that was true. We had no images. And then I just remember thinking, how do skyscrapers fall? Because if you haven't seen it, I had assumed, right, that it's like a domino, that they're going to tilt over. And it wasn't until we arrived in New Haven and there were TVs up that I saw, oh, that's, that's how towers fall, right? I mean, and that's, you know, and that those images we still remember today, almost 15 years later. So I, and I recall that you, your mother woke you up from your

delusion, right? You finally got her on the phone. I did. I, anything, you know, good, a good mother. My parents, the geography can be a little bit confusing. We, I grew up in California, but my parents happened to be in New York that day as well. And so I was actually going to see them and my sister and my parents who are in New York, but are on the Upper West Side, so they know what's going on, are realizing that the city's about to shut down. They have access to TV that they might not be able to get out. And so they resourcefully rent a car in Connecticut. And so they sort of just say, okay, if we can get out of the city where I'm going to get where they're going to get a car in Connecticut and try to come to Boston. And I'm on a call with her and saying, well, you know, this is I'll come to New York. And she is the one who said, you're you're going you realize you're back at work.

You know, I mean, this is this is your work. Right. I was teaching at the Kennedy back at work. You know, I mean, this is your work, right? I was teaching at the Kennedy School at Harvard. I am on various government programs and advisory councils about this growing threat of terrorism. And it was like, oh, that was like the light bulb that, you know, I thought I was going to have a couple months off and hang out with my newborn and work out, you know, do whatever we do during real maternity leaves. And, and five weeks into it, um, you know, when my mother said, you know, you know what this is, you're going back to work. Um, uh, and it was just like, yeah, I'm, this is it. Um, and this is the moment that we never wanted to happen, but that those of us in the field had been warning about, uh, and, uh, and that realization at that,. Eventually, I did get to New Haven,

I did reach David, and he picked me up and we drove back home. So you've distilled many of the lessons, maybe all of the lessons you've learned thus far, into this concept of resiliency, right? And this phrase, shit happens, which you distinguish. I was surprised when I reached this point in the book where you distinguish it from keep calm and carry on, the famous British myth about what those posters did during World War II. So can you just define your concept of resiliency and how you distinguish it there from just not letting the terrorists win by not doing anything differently?

Yeah, so it is. It's remarkable when you, you know this, when you write a book, what you actually discover when you research things, right? And so let me start with resiliency by what it's not, because there's various phrases to describe, you know, as zeitgeist, right, in times of conflict or potential violence. So what emerged out of the Bush administration after 9-11 was this concept of never again. You know, and Cheney, the Vice President Cheney, you know, said it was the 1% rule, right? You know, if there's a 1% chance of terrorism, we're going to do anything we can.

But it was essentially a notion that was easy to understand, hard to implement, which was Fortress America, which was essentially that we would put all of our efforts both abroad and domestically to ensure that never again, that this would never happen again. And as I say in the book and have said consistently, even when I was in government, it's a mythic standard. It is a fool's errand. And that no country like ours, either before or after September 11th, was ever at zero percent risk and that our vulnerability was actually a sign of our strength. But we bought it, right? We bought the never again. And that our invulnerability was a sign of our American exceptionalism. But that proves an impossible standard.

For one, you know, wars abroad show that we are vulnerable and that we can't fix the world like in Iraq and Afghanistan with just troops. But also, as I report in the book, you know, as early as one month after September 11th in October of 2001, President Bush calls Tom Ridge into his office. Tom Ridge, people remember, was the governor of Pennsylvania, resigned his job after September 11th, becomes the Homeland Security advisor to President Bush. And he says to Tom Ridge, alone in an office with his chief, it's only his chief of staff there, he says, listen, I just got a call from the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada. And they say that we, you know,

that this Fortress America is not working for trade, which is true. And so Bush says to Ridge, we have to let go a little, right? You can't even imagine, you know, Bush, who's so known as Fortress America, never again. But just recognizing a month later, a country like ours with millions of people crossing borders and trade and commerce and ideas and people moving was going to get to Fortress America. So I sort of put the never again standard to one side. as well is the exact opposite of that, which is the sort of, you know, keep calm and carry on and, you know, the sort of what will be will be attitude. People remember the keep calm and carry on mantra sort of started emerging in about 2005 as the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina show a government very unable to keep us, that was very incompetent. Keep Calm and Carry On was understood, and I understood it when I started writing the book, as a propaganda campaign coming

out of the War Council and Churchill during World War II as a way to tell the British public about how to face and the attitude that they should have in the face of what truly was for them an existential threat, which was Nazi Germany. I believe that this was how they got through it. And then I started doing some research and learned that the keep calm and carry on, which, as you know, had many variants, the keep calm and call me Mary, the keep calm and call me Mary, the Keep Calm and Call Me Maybe, the Keep Calm and Eat Chocolate, never was released by Churchill and his war council. They had a million of the posters made and they sat on it. It wasn't discovered until 2005 when a bookstore owner opens up some old boxes in his bookstore and discovers them. And he puts them

up on the wall. People love them. And then they became sort of a world phenomenon. And going back and discovering, why would Churchill and why would the War Council have done that? And essentially, it was because the keep calm and carry on mantra philosophy was exactly not what a society needs in the face of mayhem, whatever it may be. It was too passive that, in fact, what Churchill needed at the time was obviously for the men to go to war and the women to enter the manufacturing and commercial market and for them to send their kids to the countryside, of all things. And so that idea that keep calm and carry on was passive, was really not about resiliency, really did animate a notion of resiliency that really

derives from the word itself. Resiliency means re means again, of course, but ciliant means jumping. It's very active. It means essentially investments in our society, in our capability to respond and recover and then build again better. That is what are the policies behind resiliency. It is very active. security, get people to understand that a nation that too focused on stopping all bad things from happening was not going to nurture its response, recovery, and resiliency efforts, that that would be in the long term a bad investment. I want to stay with this issue because I feel like there's a paradox at the heart here that we need to somehow grapple with. So as you say, we obviously can't protect ourselves against everything, and the mere attempt to do that would be stifling of more or less

everything we care about. We can't live in some kind of panopticon, you know, self-imposed prison where we subject ourselves to truly Orwellian intrusions just to keep us safe from our enemies. But the paradox for me is that I think there's a rational fear to have of irrational fear. to be, quote, irrationally concerned about specific risks, given that we can be more or less certain that everyone else will respond irrationally when these events actually happen. So you take something like, and this is an example, I don't know if you do this in the book, but my friend Bill Maher has made this point publicly, and I thought it was quite insightful. He pointed to Hurricane Katrina, and he asked us to remember how we responded to this. And as inept as our response was, this was a discrete problem that

we just kind of, once we got our act together, we cleaned it up. A thousand people died, or a thousand plus people died, and there was billions of dollars in damage, and we rebuilt New Orleans and it's over. If that had been a terrorist attack that created precisely that level of damage, it could have been another history-defining event where we would launch multi-trillion dollar wars and the global economy could have been plunged into a depression. Who knows what would happen with another terrorist event that scale. And so his point, of course, is that we should have our response be more in register with the actual costs of the events and not overreact. And the difference between a natural,

quote, natural event and a man-made one shouldn't be as big as it is. But I think that given that it will inevitably be that big, that we won't actually be able to, we can't reach the dial in our brains that will make a hurricane equivalent with an act of terrorism or an act of terrorism equivalent with a hurricane, given that there will be mass panic and economic damage that is, in the final analysis, irrational, it seems rational to build those costs back into our planning for these events. And so I just want you to reflect on that a little bit. It's a great point, and it does in some ways reflect where, you know, I call it in the book the homeland security apparatus,

which is both maligned and misunderstood. So, you know, and rightfully so maybe in both instances. But so just to explain the thinking for those in the field. 2005, Hurricane Katrina was a pivotal moment for homeland security. Not because, as you know, people didn't die from the hurricane. Right. They don't die from the hurricane. They died from government incompetence. And for those of us in that world, looking at it, analyzing it, studying it, you know, realize there's a lot of systemic reasons for New Orleans. And, you know, it was a city that

had no resiliency built into it in the first place, just given, you know, centuries of neglect, including the fact it was built in a tub basin, essentially, but that it really moved the apparatus towards thinking about an all hazards approach to response. Because before that, we were so focused as a nation on terrorism, right? Then stopping 19 guys from getting on four airplanes. That was our strategy, that we had failed to appropriately plan and prepare for any shit happening, right? That any big thing happening. And so there was a change by 2005 and certainly 2006.

The Bush administration changed after Hurricane Katrina. I talk about two different Bush administrations. There's up to 2005 and after. And if youer at the moment of the fire does not know whether it's, you know, two brothers at the end of the Boston Marathon, a generator or an errant, you know, generator on fire or an errant cigarette to blow something up. And it didn't matter at that moment because all what we need to do is invest in the response to minimize the harm that occurs. So in terms of on the response side, after the boom, as we call it in my world, after the boom, there has been a focus on sort of this all hazards approach. But, and as you say, and I agree with this, this point, you shouldn't one should not blame the American public for being terrorized by terrorism. I mean, in other words, if if after San Bernardino, you saw the polling go absolutely nuts. That's the terrorist goal, right? And and government and good government. And I believe that Obama has been very flat-footed on this, recognizes that terrorism, whatever the consequences are of the attack, that terrorism

is different. It hits a psyche that people will act irrationally, but that their irrationality, as you say, is somewhat rational. In other words, because it's a purposeful attack. It's very different than a hurricane, very different than the air and cigarette or a generator. So it's purposeful. And that does have a different impact. And so in my ideal world in which government behaves well, you know, after something like this, it would be able to, you know, to guide that irrationality towards rationality, would begin, would put it in perspective, would not essentially blame people's irrationality on, as Obama did, on Trump or cable news. So people, no one watches cable news. I mean, the idea that, you know, you know, a million people watch CNN, I'm on CNN, I know very few people watch CNN. And so that, you know, so that distinction is, is I think important for, for government to do. And I describe it as a

parent of this irrationality factor. And you certainly know from your work, you know, the black swan phenomenon, right? That, that there are black swans, right? And they're very rare. And their appearance has a disrupt, you know, the black swan theory is their appearance and has a disruptive impact on the course of history. So there's black swan moments, 9-11 being one of them. And you can tell me as a mother that the chances that my child will die from terrorism is 0.00001%. You can tell me that and I get it and I can get calculations, risk and all that stuff. But if my child is that 0.00001%, right, if my child is the one that sees the black swan, that is an existential crisis for me, right? And so I kind of get people's irrationality and also try to steer it towards understanding that in a world like we live in, you know, we have to accept a level of risk and vulnerability

regardless of our hopes and wishes that it weren't so. Yeah, well, I'm glad you raised the issue of purpose, because that does show how a terrorist attack and a hurricane are not analogous. Because when you have a hurricane, it doesn't suggest that at any moment you could have another hurricane of that scale, or that somebody is plotting to deliver you the next hurricane as quickly as possible. Whereas with a terrorist attack, it's ongoing, it's emblematic of the next thing your enemy is attempting to do. So in that sense, it's not strictly irrational to, quote, overreact to terrorism or react differently to terrorism than you would to a natural disaster.

But I guess even in a case where it is totally irrational, I see that I think probably a better example would be like a plane crash. So flying is very safe and famously safe and yet famously feared by many people, even most people. And when a plane does crash, I think most people have a reaction that that would be one of the more horrible ways to die. And yet, if you were just going to go by body count, I mean, we have more than 30,000 people die on our roads every year, year after year, and we just accept it. And I don't know how many people die by plane crash, but it's got to be less than 100 on a yearly basis. It's tiny. And if you compute the man hours, person hours exposed to that travel and your danger, if you're flying on a

reputable airline, those are some of the safest hours of your life, being up in the air. And once you get on the ground, you can start worrying. And yet, given the horror people experience in response to a plane crash, I think it makes rational sense to over-engineer the safety of planes, to make them safer than would be strictly rational if you just were trying to save lives based on body count. Because if we had it, just imagine what would happen if the president said, listen, we're spending a lot of money to make our planes safer than they need to be. We should be making cars safer. We should be making roads safer.

We should be making playground equipment safer. This is what's killing all of you and your kids. So I'm going to take some of this money we've spent on the FAA and, you know, the engineering of plane engines, and we're going to spread this around. and, you know, did the engineering of plane engines, and we're going to spread this around, it would just take a few big plane crashes to get everyone to react against that and do the irrational thing, which I think in this case would probably be rational. Because if everyone stopped flying, if someone said, listen, I'm just too afraid to fly now, which many millions of people might do, well then, you know then our economy would grind to a halt.

So you have this cascade of effects that, again, even though they are not strictly rational, if they're reliably going to be produced, you have to build that into the cost in advance in your thinking about these problems. I think that's exactly right. I mean, the airplane is a perfect example because and it's something I've struggled with being in the field, which I describe in the book is the ratchet up phenomenon of safety and security. Very easy to ratchet up. Right. Because there's, you know, fear and especially after a terrorist attack or lots of money, lots of goods, lots of gizmos. lots of goods, lots of gizmos, very hard to step back and say, okay, what's the level of risk that we are going to tolerate as a society, and we're doing this all the time anyway, that would justify taking some of that apparatus or those rules or regulations off of, in this case,

airline security. And part of this for, I think, Americans and is the control factor is what's the what's the aspect of a plane crash that just is so horrible? Every part of it is horrible. But is that you're sitting there hoping to God the pilot, you know, you've given control over where when you're driving. Right. It's OK. Well, I I have some control over where other side of the boom, right, which is very much focused on preparedness and response and minimizing risk when something does happen, is to give people a sense of control over things that they feel like they have no control over. Because I think that's, plane crash is horrible. I think that's also why people freak out about terrorism. It's not just purpose. It's also, oh, my God, I have no control over this stuff happening in Syria. And I don't even understand what ISIS is. It feels like an amorphous blob. But all I know is it can show up in this country is on the other side, is trying to empower the public, not just with knowledge, but with what tools would you want or

would you desire to have to give you more control, given that you're not going to get the vulnerability to zero. So now what would you say are your greatest security concerns at this point? zero. So now what would you say are your greatest security concerns at this point? So, I mean, I could, I mean, given the world I've been in, I could, I must have some good gene that my husband says I don't have the stew gene that I actually tend not to stew on things, which is probably a good thing to have in my field. And as a mother of three, but I, you know, obviously, there's infinite numbers of things that worry me on the on the substantive side. It's it's clearly climate change. I'm with Bernie Sanders on this in terms of the existential threat of the movement of of the earth, whether it's the oceans or megastorms or a refugee crisis.

storms or a refugee crisis. And that is going to change the way we live globally, the way we live domestically, the way we live in urban societies in ways that we can't even predict right now. And so later on in the book, I get into ways to think about how we might prepare to be more resilient from that harm. I'll tell you the more, I said, maybe philosophically, what worries me now is that we, we built no resiliency into our, into how we live our lives, that we don't accept that shit happens. And therefore, anytime there is a disruption to the system, we have the kind of proposals that are being made by Trump specifically, but even Ted Cruz, that will make us more vulnerable over time. I know this is also, you know, I'm not a religious scholar, so I just look at this from a safety and security perspective. But I do know that if you asked me from the safety and security perspective, what has made America relatively safe?

We have gun problems. We have violence. I get that. But relatively safe from the generational challenges, problems in the Middle East, the civil wars in Africa, and now what we're seeing, the terror in Europe. Why is the United States immune from that in some ways in recent history? So it's clearly our oceans. You can't drive from Boston to Damascus. I get that, right? So one is our oceans. The other is our ability over centuries, not perfect. We definitely have counterexamples. We definitely haven't been great at all times, but to assimilate and acclimate and elevate the other, whether it's the Irish here in Boston or Mexicans in California or Puerto Ricans in New York or Muslims in America. We have a problem in this country.

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