Anderson Cooper: Good evening. Tonight we’ll be talking to Kendal O’Brian, the Deputy Director of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration. Deputy Director O’Brian, thank you for coming.
O’Brian: Thank you for having me, Anderson. Please call me Kendal.
Cooper: Okay, Kendal. What is your role in all of this? What is FEMA’s role?
Kendal: It’s important, if there is another time loop, that people be prepared when it happens, so that they can help to reduce the danger and confusion. So we at FEMA are putting all of our energy and effort into helping people to be prepared.
Cooper: And what advice to you have for people?
Kendal: The most important advice is for those people who, when the loop happens, find themselves somewhere safe, or even relatively safe. The most important thing they can do is to stay calm, to relax and stay where they are so that they don’t contribute to the chaos that the people around them may be feeling. If you’re with your family, stay with your family. And if you’re separated from family and friends, please refrain from making phone calls unless it is an absolute emergency. We need the phone lines to coordinate emergency activities.
Cooper: And what about people who loop back into dangerous situations?
Kendal: Well, obviously, the exact nature of the advice depends on the specifics of the situation. But the key idea is to do whatever you can to prepare a plan of action. If, as we anticipate, the next loop cycles back to the same moment as the first two loops, then clarify in your mind, be crystal clear about the exact moment you will cycle back to. And perhaps most important is to continue to do whatever you were doing at the time. If you were driving straight down the center lane of the highway, continue to drive straight down the center lane. If you were changing lanes, continue to change lanes. Whatever you did in cycle zero, do that again on the next cycle. We’ve seen people panic, naturally, to find themselves back in high speed traffic, and make large, sudden changes in their behavior. And of course this is a natural reaction to surprise and danger. Unfortunately, it means that the people around you have to cope not only with what just happened to them, but also with the sudden, surprising, unpredictable actions of dozen or hundreds of drivers around them. This in turn creates more danger, and more panic, and more sudden, unpredictable actions, and we get into a vicious cycle that increase the danger to extreme proportions. The key to reducing the danger is to realize that whatever you were doing at that moment in cycle zero, what you were doing was safe enough to keep you alive. So the idea here is to do that same thing, to keep yourself alive and relatively calm, so that you don’t create chaos for the people around you and they don’t create more chaos for you. If everyone can prepare themselves, and do whatever they did during cycle zero, we can get through those first few seconds and minutes relatively safely, gather our wits, and continue driving as normal.
Cooper: Do you really think that’s possible? To ask people to calm down and not to panic in a situation like that?
Kendal: Yes, for several reasons. First, human beings are remarkably adaptable, even in emergency situations. In our business, we see people whose houses are being washed away in floods leave their grief aside and help to rescue neighbors in danger. We see the best of what human beings are capable of, the generosity of spirit, the courage that is always there inside us, waiting for an opportunity to show itself. And second, each time the loop happens will be less and less of a surprise. Everyone, of course, was surprised and stunned and shocked at the first loop, and reacted instinctively to an unfathomable event. People report that it took them several seconds to make sense of what they were seeing in front of them, even though the objects were familiar. For example, a common report is that people found themselves looking at a complex shape they couldn’t identify. Then they recognized that it was a face, but they didn’t know whose face it was. Then they realized it was the face of their spouse or child or parent. It’s as if the sensory input were coming in, but the brain hadn’t caught up yet, and still processing whatever was happening just before the loop. That’s a classic — if extreme — reaction to extreme surprise. The larger the magnitude of the surprise, the longer it takes for the brain to make sense of even familiar sensory inputs. It can take several seconds, but subjectively it feels much, much longer. And it’s not the change that causes that lag in the brain, it’s not the change, but the surprise. Think of when you watch a movie, and the scene cuts from an actor’s face to the doorway of a building on a crowded city street. That’s just as much of a change to our senses. But because we’ve become used to such things in movies, we don’t experience any particular confusion when it happens. The same thing can happen with the time loop. If we can reduce the surprise, we can reduce the chaos. And if we reduce the chaos, we reduce the danger. And one way to do that is to anticipate the time loop. That will greatly reduce your surprise. And if you can plan out what actions you will take immediatly after you cycle back, and if others around you take predictable actions instead of unpredictable ones, the danger is greatly reduced.
Cooper: We have some callers with specific situations who want to know whathey can do. Can you take some calls?
Kendal: Of course, of course.
Cooper: Vera from Minneapolis, your on with Deputy Director O’Brian.
Vera: Thank you, Anderson. Director, you said to do whatever we did in cycle zero. Well, in cycle zero, I was changing lanes and someone cut in front of me. Their bumper caught my bumper, and I spun off the road and … died. Of course, I immediatly found myself back in that traffic, in the middle of changing lanes. I don’t know what I did differently. Whatever it was, it was instinctive, and I did it before I even fully realized where I was and what was happening around me. But whatever I did, it was different, and it kept me alive. Are you saying that I should go back to changing lanes, and that other driver should go back to cutting me off?
Kendal: No, of course not. And this is why it’s impossible to give hard and fast advice. For those people who were killed or injured or put in danger in cycle zero, either through their own actions or the actions of others, what we recommend is that, as we advise others, you plan out your actions. But where we advised others to repeat their actions until everyone gets their bearings, we advise people who are in such danger to change their actions in the smallest way that will keep them safe. And, if it makes sense given the situation, delay the change in your actions for as long as is safely reasonable. This will give others around you time to, literally, come to their senses. If your changes are smaller, it will be less difficult for people to react to. And if you make your changes as late as possible, people will be better able to observe it, make sense of it as their minds catch up with their senses, and respond safely for themselves, for you, and for the people around you.
Cooper: But doesn’t any change have a chance to ripple, to cause people to have to respond suddenly, causing yet further changes for people to respond to?
Kendal: Yes. The best we can hope for at first is to reduce the confusion and chaos.
Cooper: What do you mean by at first?
O’Brian: We’re anticipating that these cycles may continue indefinitely. If that’s the case, then people will learn from cycle to cycle how to anticipate the actions of the people around them, and, probably more importantly, to react in ways that other people can predict. The key is predictability. The better you can anticipate, the better off you and the people around you will be. And the better you act in predictable ways, the fewer surprises the people around you will have to adjust to. We expect that most situations will stabilize in only a few cycles, and perhaps even on the next cycle. You have to realize that at the exact instant after the loop, the physical world is doing exactly what it did before. The only thing that differs from loop to loop, as far as we know, is how poeple act.
Cooper: So the bottom line is what?
O’Brian: If you’re safe, stay where you are. If you’re in a potentially dangerous situation, do whatever you did before that worked. If what you did before didn’t work, adjust your actions enough to create safety for yourself, but make the changes as small as will be safe for you, and make the changes as late as will be safe for you.
Cooper: Deputy Director Kendal O’Brian of the Federal Emergency Management Association, thank you very much. If there is going to be another cycle, and if the cycle happens at the same time as the previous to, we are about a minute away. Sixty seconds… fifty nine… fifty eight…
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