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Catastrophe – Audio

Hi, I’m AJ and welcome to this month’s VIP lesson.

So there I was in Bangkok, Thailand on vacation. And I was in my old neighborhood, the old neighborhood where I used to live. I had lived in Bangkok for two years, but several years before.

And I was back on vacation enjoying the old neighborhood, looking around. It gave me a very warm feeling to be back in that neighborhood again, because I have very good memories about living in Thailand, excellent memories. I had a wonderful experience there.

But, things had changed, things were a little different this time, because my old neighborhood was filled with thousands of people, all wearing red shirts; the famous red shirt protest. So they were protesting against the government and they were everywhere, all over.

So the neighborhood, the area of the neighborhood in Bangkok it’s around the Democracy Monument. If you know Bangkok then you might know this area.

So I was just walking around like everything’s kinda normal except for all these red shirts. And to me, I don’t know, it just felt like a festival.

Because as I was walking through the protesters, most of them just sitting around during the day, just sitting around having a little barbeque and eating. They would say hi to me sometimes, everybody just relaxed and friendly. So I didn’t think anything about it.

And then the evening started to come. The police with their big shields, the big riot police, they moved into the border, the areas all around these protesters. And I was kinda curious like, oh wow what’s going on? So I got up close to the front lines where the red shirts and the police were close to each other.

Again, just curious, just looking, nothing much was happening. But then, as the sun started going down everything changed suddenly. Suddenly, the red shirts started picking up pieces of concrete. They would get hammers and break the sidewalks. And they started throwing this cement, these big rocks basically at the police.

I was right there, right at the front. And of course, the police weren’t too happy about that so they started shooting tear gas, so I got a little bit of tear gas in my eyes. It was all so sudden, I wasn’t expecting it and I was still just curious so I just started— I was just watching right there.

And at one point, I was in the middle between this line of red shirts throwing rocks and things at the police and then the police started marching in, coming in.

And I got caught right in the middle, they hit and they started fighting. The police are trying to hit them with sticks and the red shirt guys are trying to throw rocks and things, and at one point a policeman actually came up, looked at me, he had his big stick raised and then he realized I was just some foreigner.

I was like, huh? And he kinda yelled at me in Thai. I don’t know what he said but he probably said, “get out of here.” And then he went and the fight continued. But I was foolish and I didn’t leave. To me it wasn’t real, like it just felt unreal with all this stuff happening in my old neighborhood and I stayed there.

I got back way from the very front lines, but for the rest of that night there were these huge fights between the police and the red shirts, back and forth, back and forth, and I was watching and curious. And then finally I got sleepy and I walked back to my hotel and went to bed.

The next day, I woke up and I read the newspaper and found out that a Japanese journalist was killed very, very close, the same area I was in, he was shot by a rifle, by a sniper.

Nobody knows who shot him. The red shirts say the police shot him. The police say it was the red shirts, whatever, but basically this guy got shot and killed, killed right near where I was. Very close, I mean the same basic area where I was.

And only then, the next day reading about it did I realize how dangerous that situation really was, and how incredibly stupid and lucky I was. That was very stupid to be right there on the front lines of all of that, and lucky that nothing happened, nothing bad happened to me.

That could have been a catastrophe, because more people later died in those protests.

There was a lot of violence. There were bombs that went off. The red shirts set off bombs. The police beat and shot some people. It was really bad.

Why am I telling you about this? What is the point? The point is this, that these kind of catastrophes or disasters— a catastrophe is a disaster, it means the same thing. It’s a sudden big disaster, something that happens suddenly and it’s really bad and has a very dangerous and bad effect.

So it’s sudden and it’s big. So, if you hurt your little finger that’s not a catastrophe, that’s not a disaster, right? But if your house burns to the ground then that’s kind of a catastrophe for you. And if there’s a massive earthquake that destroys your whole city, obviously that’s a huge catastrophe or a huge disaster.

Here’s the thing about disasters— They’re uncommon, luckily, thank God they’re uncommon. That’s the good part about disasters. You know some people, many people, probably most people can live their whole life and not suffer from a massive disaster or catastrophe.

But, that’s also part of the danger of catastrophes. Because they’re uncommon, we don’t prepare for them. So when they happen, we’re not ready. And that’s one of the reasons they can be so deadly, so devastating, so horrible.

People who study disasters and catastrophes, for example, earthquakes or big fires or also just like violent crimes, right? Somebody comes into a store and starts shooting people, terrorism, all these kind of big things.

There can be financial disasters like the great depression or the one back in 2008 in America, where suddenly this massive drop in the stock market or the economy suddenly drops and businesses are affected by this financial disaster, this financial catastrophe.

Or, as I said, it can be on a smaller scale but still quite big for you, like if your house burns down, there’s a fire in your house or something like that; or a car accident or things like this, right? These are also catastrophes.

One of the biggest problems psychologically for surviving a catastrophe is something called normalcy bias. People who study these things, like study disasters and violent crime and all these things, they say one of the reasons so many victims are hurt or die is because of this thing called normalcy bias. I had normalcy bias in Bangkok. What is normalcy bias?

Normalcy bias means that we don’t accept that this big terrible thing is happening. That we’re so used to things being normal all the time that when suddenly there’s this disaster, this catastrophe, this massive change, that we don’t realize how serious it is.

Because we’re kinda stuck in our normal way of thinking. We’re still stuck thinking normally and we don’t change fast enough. We continue to act normal, even though the situation is not normal anymore.

I was continuing to act normal there in Bangkok, just like a visitor, like a tourist looking around, oh this is interesting, right? I was not acting like this was a very dangerous, possibly super dangerous, maybe even deadly situation. I was just acting like, oh, everything’s normal.

And this is quite common, that our brains don’t immediately realize how serious things are. We see this in disasters. For example, the Katrina hurricane, the big famous hurricane in New Orleans in America. A lot of the people, they didn’t evacuate. They didn’t do anything to prepare for it.

Even on the news this big thing’s coming and they’re telling them be careful, huge thing’s coming very dangerous, and a lot of people stayed in the city and continued like everything’s normal.

Even after the hurricane hit, it destroys most of the city, everything’s flooded and people would just freeze, they would just stay in their homes they didn’t know what to do. It’s paralysis, they continued to act kind of normal. They wouldn’t take action to get out of there, not fast enough.

They wouldn’t act fast enough. They wouldn’t make decisions fast enough. Like frozen, like this kind of paralysis. Paralysis is when you can’t move. This is the big danger when really big bad things happen, that you’re kind of stuck, acting like everything’s normal.

And then you kinda freeze. You don’t know what to do, everything seems so big, you’re kinda shocked and so you do nothing, but that’s super, super dangerous. It’s the worst possible thing you can do when something big and bad happens.

It doesn’t matter if it’s financial, physical or a crime, it’s the same for violent crimes. A lot of violent crime victims, someone comes in, they have a knife, they got a gun or they just break into the house and they threaten and they want to maybe hurt or kill people.

And the people just kind of freeze, they don’t fight back. Sometimes there’ll be like one guy with a gun or one guy with a knife who’ll walk in to a place where there’s 30 people and he’ll just start shooting them. And all the people just freeze. They don’t do anything and all these people die. Nobody jumps on him, nobody attacks him.

And also, the people don’t run. Some people run, but a lot of people don’t even try to run away and get out of there. They’re just kind of stuck. This is why so many people can die sometimes. It’s sad. It’s tragic.

We see this economically too, right? That we have these economic disasters. For example, in certain careers, certain industries, we can see a disaster coming, the car industry in America for example.

We could see it happening that the Japanese companies were moving in. That these manufacturing jobs were leaving the country and a lot of people they just froze. They didn’t take action.

They didn’t try to learn new skills. They didn’t go looking for different kinds of jobs until it was too late, until they had lost their job and they had no money. And they just kind of again, this paralysis of uh. This big terrible thing’s happening and they just froze.

So, how do we survive and thrive during a catastrophe? It’s important to prepare for these things, because these things do happen. Natural disasters happen. Economic disasters happen. Violent crime happens.

If we’re lucky, hopefully, none of this happens to us directly but we can’t just pray for luck, because these things do happen. The good news is they don’t happen often, but the bad news is, if they do happen, they are horrible. They can completely destroy your life.

So no, you don’t need to be terrified and afraid all the time of these big things, but yes, you need to have some preparation, some kind of mental insurance, so that if some kind of catastrophe happens to you, you’re ready. You’re ready to take action. You’re prepared. You’ve thought about it a little bit. So that you don’t become one of those terrible victims who freezes.

All right so, in the commentary I’m going to talk about some very specific ways to prepare so that you have some mental and emotional insurance, mental and emotional preparation for these various kinds of catastrophes. So if the worst does happen, you’re ready. You’ll take action. You’ll move quickly and you will survive.

See you in the commentary. Bye for now.