What does fear actually do to us, and how can understanding it help us survive?
Listen
The Signal
The people around you may be just as uncertain as you are.
WE LOVE BEING SCARED
Why we seek out horror movies, haunted houses, and frightening stories—and what being scared on purpose can teach us about real danger.
WHAT FEAR IS FOR
How fear evolved to protect us, why we freeze, and what happens when the brain learns to fear something it can no longer forget.
THE FIRST MOVE
Why stress makes decisions harder, how waiting for certainty can become dangerous, and why practicing your first response matters.
THE ROOM MOVES WITH YOU
Why mass panic is rarer than Hollywood suggests, how crowds influence our decisions, and why one person’s actions can change everything.
BECOMING THE SOMEONE
How preparation, psychological flexibility, courage, and hope help ordinary people respond when circumstances become extraordinary.
The takeaway
Being prepared doesn’t mean being fearless. It means giving yourself enough knowledge, practice, and flexibility to act when it matters.
ROSIE KNIGHT (opens in a new tab)
Journalist, Author & Podcast Host
Rosie Knight is an award-winning journalist, author, podcast host, and moderator whose work focuses on pop culture, film, comics, horror, and fandom. She co-hosts X-Ray Vision for iHeartPodcasts and has written thousands of articles for outlets including Esquire, The Hollywood Reporter, IGN, Nerdist, Polygon, Den of Geek, /Film, and Refinery29. She is also a comics and graphic-novel writer whose work includes The Haunted High-Tops and Godzilla: Monster Island Summer Camp. Rosie regularly writes and talks about horror and why audiences seek out frightening stories, making her a particularly good guide to the pleasures of being scared on purpose.
DR. MICHAEL FANSELOW (opens in a new tab)
Distinguished Professor of Psychology, UCLA
Dr. Michael Fanselow is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA whose career has focused on the nature and function of fear. His research examines how fear is learned, how fear memories are stored in the brain, and how those memories are translated into defensive behavior. His laboratory studies brain systems including the amygdala, hippocampus, neocortex, and periaqueductal gray to understand how organisms detect threats and generate fear-motivated responses. He has received major scientific honors from the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Sciences, including the APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.
DR. MEGHAN FITZGERALD, PhD, LMHC (opens in a new tab)
Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Trauma & PTSD Specialist
Meghan Fitzgerald is a licensed mental health counselor in Washington State whose clinical work focuses on trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and the long-term effects of difficult early experiences. Before becoming a therapist, she earned a PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she studied social and cannibalistic behavior in tropical spiders, and later taught human anatomy and physiology and other biological sciences. That combination of behavioral biology and mental-health training informs her interest in how protective behaviors develop, why they can make sense in the context in which they first appear, and how those responses may persist after the original threat has passed.
DR. CHRISTOPHER HICKS (opens in a new tab)
Emergency Physician & Trauma Team Leader, St. Michael’s Hospital; Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Dr. Christopher Hicks is an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and an Assistant Professor and Clinician-Educator in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on how individuals and teams perform during complex, high-stakes emergencies, including communication, situational awareness, stress, distraction, decision-making, and task coordination. He uses simulation and lessons from other high-reliability fields such as aviation, the military, and athletics to study how training can improve performance under pressure. His work has also included psychological skills training, mental rehearsal, stress inoculation, human factors, and trauma-system design.
advancedperformance.ca deptmedicine.utoronto.ca/faculty/christopher-hicks
DR. BJØRN SÆTREVIK (opens in a new tab)
Professor of General Psychology, University of Bergen
Bjørn Sætrevik is a professor of general psychology in the Department of Psychosocial Science at the University of Bergen in Norway and a member of its Operational Psychology Research Group. A clinical psychologist by training with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, his research focuses on applied decision-making in safety-critical environments, including situation awareness, attention, perceived risk, teamwork, communication, human performance, and error prevention. His work has examined decision-making in settings including emergency response, policing, maritime operations, public health, and other situations in which people have to interpret incomplete information and act under pressure.
DR. KAYLEY D. ESTES (opens in a new tab)
Psychological Scientist & Disaster Psychology Researcher
Dr. Kayley D. Estes is a psychological scientist whose research examines how people respond to risk, uncertainty, disasters, and threatening information. She earned her PhD in Psychological Science from the University of California, Irvine, where her work has included studies of disaster-related media exposure, perceived trust, climate anxiety, anticipatory disaster stress, and how people interpret risk information during crises. Her research has appeared in journals including Psychological Trauma and BMJ Mental Health, and she has also spoken publicly about evacuation psychology, scare tactics, and emergency messaging.
DR. CYNTHIA PURY (opens in a new tab)
Professor of Psychology, Clemson University
Dr. Cynthia Pury is a professor of psychology at Clemson University and a clinical psychologist by training. Her early research focused on anxiety, cognition, fear, and threat appraisal before she turned her attention to the psychology of courage. For more than two decades, she has studied how and why people take courageous action, how individuals and societies decide what counts as courage, and the roles of risk, values, fear, and choice in courageous behavior. Her work has explored courage in health care, organizations, the performing arts, and interpersonal and civic life, and she is co-editor of the APA book The Psychology of Courage: Modern Research on an Ancient Virtue.
What to know before you need it.
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Advanced Performance — Dr. Christopher Hicks (opens in a new tab)
Co-founded by Dr. Christopher Hicks, Advanced Performance uses simulation to examine how individuals, teams, environments, and systems influence decision-making and human performance under pressure.
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X-Ray Vision — Rosie Knight and Jason Concepcion (opens in a new tab)
Join Rosie Knight and Jason Concepcion for smart, entertaining conversations about movies, television, comics, horror, fandom, and the stories that shape popular culture.
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Tactical Breathing and Police Performance (2025) (opens in a new tab)
Research co-authored by Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik examining whether tactical breathing improves police performance during a simulated critical incident.
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Emergency Response Teams and Shared Understanding (2015) (opens in a new tab)
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik's research examining how physiological responses, task complexity, and teamwork affect shared understanding during emergency response
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Bibb Latané and John Darley — Group Inhibition of Bystander Intervention in Emergencies (1968) (opens in a new tab)
The original smoke-filled room study discussed in the episode. Researchers discovered that people were much less likely to report smoke when others in the room appeared unconcerned, revealing how social cues can influence responses to potential danger.
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John Leach — Give-up-itis Revisited: Neuropathology of Extremis (2018) (opens in a new tab)
Survival psychologist John Leach examines how extreme stress can lead to profound apathy, psychological withdrawal, and the loss of motivation to survive. His research explores possible neurological explanations for this response and the relationship between extreme stress and a diminished sense of agency.
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C. R. Snyder and Colleagues — The Will and the Ways: Development and Validation of an Individual-Differences Measure of Hope (1991) (opens in a new tab)
Foundational research on hope as a combination of the motivation to pursue goals and the ability to identify pathways toward achieving them. The theory informs Dr. Cynthia Pury's discussion of hope, flexibility, and courage.
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Dr. Cynthia Pury — The Psychology of Courage (opens in a new tab)
A conversation with Dr. Cynthia Pury exploring what courage actually means, why worthwhile risks matter, and how courage differs from simply being unafraid.
NO ONE IS COMING
Season 1, Episode 10: Psychology of Fear — How Hope Can Save You
Full Episode Transcript
Lance: Somewhere between saying goodbye to summer and pretending we’re ready for the holidays, the neighborhood changes its mind about what counts as socially acceptable. Pumpkin spice appears in products that have no business tasting like a candle. Skeletons take up residence in front yards. The days get shorter.
Lance: The crisp evening air smells faintly conspiratorial. And for one month, we agree that something which would normally prompt a call to the police becomes festive if it comes with a fog machine.
Lance: We pay to be chased through haunted houses. We sit in dark theaters waiting for someone to open the door they should absolutely not open. And when the lights come up, we leave with our hearts racing, pleased with ourselves for surviving an experience we could have ended at any moment. A real fear doesn’t always announce itself so neatly.
Lance: Sometimes, while something genuinely frightening is happening, you’re too busy getting through it to know how scared you are. A movie gives you something unique, the chance to feel the fear, know you’re safe, and watch what happens next. This is No One Is Coming. I’m Lance.
ACT ONE: WE LOVE BEING SCARED
Lance: Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about fires, scams, pandemics, and an ocean that may, from time to time, have plans of its own.
Lance: We’ve explored what fear can do to you when any of those things actually happen, but October seems like the right time to end the season about risk by asking why anyone would pay good money to be terrified, and why we experience fear in the first place. Rosie Knight is a journalist and author and host of X-Ray Vision.
Lance: She writes about movies and popular culture, particularly the stories that send the rest of us digging our fingernails into the theater armrest.
Rosie Knight: So I think it is a human nature of trying to, like, work out our boundaries. Mm. What scares us? What’s safe? What’s unsafe? What excites us? And movies and TV and fiction give us a space to explore it that’s safe.
Rosie Knight: You can shut the book. You can turn it off. That incredible new movie that I love, Camp Miasma, which was- Mm … a Jake Schoenberg movie, there’s this line that recurs throughout it, which is like, “If it gets too much, you can just turn it off.” And it’s this kind of notion of the power of emotional control when you watch a horror movie, and I think that’s why, a lot of times, people who maybe you wouldn’t expect- Mm
Rosie Knight: little kids, older women, teenage girls, find themselves in horror, because there’s something there that is both exhilarating but safe.
Lance: Entire industries now exist to sell that feeling back to us. Every fall, haunted mazes, ghost tours, and escape rooms turn being frightened into a night out, complete with timed entry and a gift shop on the way out.
Lance: We want the monster to frighten us. But having paid for the experience, we also expect a certain degree of professionalism. When you’re in your house and you hear a weird creaking, that’s, like, not not great, right? But if you’re in a haunted house, why is it so pleasurable?
Rosie Knight: I think it is the element of expectation.
Rosie Knight: So you get that fear. Like, I didn’t go in a Halloween horror maze for years. My first time was maybe two years ago, three years ago, with a couple of friends. Wow. And I had such a good time. But I had built it up in my head that it would be so terrifying. Mm-hmm. That everyone would be touching me, that it would be very out of my comfort zone, and I’d built it up to something worse in my head, right?
Rosie Knight: And that’s kind of the balance. A lot of people won’t watch horror films ’cause they feel that way about them. Well, if I start to watch them, maybe it will become very scary, maybe it will be overwhelming. But once you step through the proverbial door of the horror movie or the house, the- Mm-hmm … the haunted house, I think you understand.
Rosie Knight: You get to learn the rhythms of it.
Lance: Inside, you begin to learn the rules. A haunted house teaches you that a dark hallway containing nothing is almost certainly up to something. A horror movie gives you a different education. Never investigate the noise alone, and never accept overnight accommodation from someone whose home contains a room that you’ve been specifically instructed not to enter.
Film clip: Hello? Hello. Who is this? You tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine. I don’t think so. What’s that noise? Popcorn. You’re making popcorn? Well, I’m getting ready to watch a video. Really? What? Oh, just some scary movie. You like scary movies? Uh-huh. You never told me your name. Why do you wanna know my name? ‘Cause I wanna know who I’m looking at.
Lance: When you hear that clip, part of you has already started working. Where is the caller? Are the doors locked? Why is she still talking to him? You’re reading the scene, testing choices, and looking for the moment when the person on screen still has time to leave. Some of the smartest horror of the last decade has been built around that exact question, less interested in what the monster wants than in why the person keeps staying.
Rosie Knight: Take a movie like Barbarian, which is like a really crazy movie by Zach McGregor. Yeah. Super fun, seems super out there, very B-movie style. But the opening of that 45-minute opening of the movie is all based on a book he read about red flags that women miss in interactions or ignore because they’re trying to be polite that should tell them to leave, right?
Rosie Knight: Right. And even though the original threat in Barbarian is not who you think, if she’d have listened to any of those red flags, she would have left, right?
Lance: By the time the character understands the danger, the audience has been living with it for several minutes. That’s the quiet benefit of a scary movie.
Lance: It lets you practice noticing from a safe distance. Long before horror movies, fairy tales gave children imaginary encounters with real danger. The forest in the story was invented, but getting lost wasn’t. The wolf could speak, and so could strangers who meant you harm. A welcoming house might conceal something terrible, and the adult giving instructions was not necessarily the adult who could be trusted.
Lance: In her book, Off with Their Heads, Harvard folklore scholar Maria Tatar examines how fairy tales help make children make sense of a world filled with dangers they can’t control. Uncertainty, strangers, broken rules, and difficult choices become witches, curses, and suspicious houses in the woods. That’s the double life of a frightening story.
Lance: It’s both warning and sanctuary. The danger feels real enough to quicken the heart, release adrenaline, and produce a tingle of anticipation. But the margins of the story are a protective barrier. It’s a version of exposure therapy as old as storytelling, built on the understanding that to conquer fear, we must first be allowed to feel it.
Rosie Knight: I think about this a lot because I have a lot of nieces and nephews, and I was really into spooky stuff as a kid. And I actually think it’s a very early thing that we start to seek out. Because when I look at my nieces and nephews who are, like, three and four, they love scary stuff. They love Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Rosie Knight: Right. They’re watching things about killer clowns from outer space. Like, and that’s always been the way. When I was that age, I used to read the back of horror movie VHS, right? That would be my way of getting that thrill. I, so I think it is a human nature of trying to, like, work out our boundaries.
Lance: When I was a little kid in fifth grade, I read The Amityville Horror without-
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: Yeah, exactly
Rosie Knight: telling anybody.
Lance: I had to keep the book under a couch cushion in the f- Mm-hmm … ’cause I couldn’t have it in my bedroom ‘
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: cause it was too scary.
Lance: The living room couch cushion became a supernatural quarantine zone. I could invite the horror in, provided it understood that it lived downstairs and would not accompany me to bed.
Lance: Rosie could turn over the VHS box. We were curious enough to approach the danger, and frightened enough to negotiate terms. Without quite knowing it, we were finding out how much fear we could take in amounts we got to choose. Meghan Fitzgerald understands fear as something the body learns. Before becoming a licensed mental health counselor, she earned a PhD in integrative biology and studied animal behavior.
Lance: Now she works with people living with trauma and anxiety.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: We, as humans, have a very, like, a biochemical and, like, natural biological feeling that discomfort is bad, and so we have to get away from it.
Lance: Right.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: When really, it’s actually quite good for us. It’s how we learn. It’s how we grow. It’s how we, you know, but it, it’s, you know, it’s…
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: I see parents doing it all the time, trying to save their kids from discomfort. Mm. But kids learn from discomfort. Mm-hmm. That’s how they learn. It’s okay to be worried, and we do it anyways. Right. It’s okay to be anxious and try something. And if it doesn’t work, well, we survived it anyways, right? So why not, you know?
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: Keep going, keep living.
Lance: That’s easier to practice when the frightening thing is a book beneath a couch cushion or a figure at the end of a darkened hallway being paid not to follow you into the parking lot. Real fear rarely gives us the comfort of knowing what kind of story we’re in. It can arrive before we understand what’s happening, before we’ve chosen our response, and sometimes before conscious thought has entered the room at all.
Lance: By then, the body is already doing something serious. It’s noticed, anticipated, and registered a threat, and now it’s preparing us to respond. To understand what fear teaches us, we first have to understand what it was built to do.
ACT TWO: WHAT FEAR IS FOR
Lance: We tend to talk about fear as though it’s the problem, the thing to master, suppress, outgrow, or overcome.
Lance: But fear is not a character flaw. Your body built it to keep you alive. Dr. Michael Fanselow is a behavioral neuroscientist, distinguished professor of psychology and psychiatry at UCLA, where he has spent nearly four decades studying how we learn to fear and how the brain holds onto those memories.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: I think what you need to really start with is why is fear there.
Lance: Right.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: And, you know, what’s the evolutionary reason that we experience fear? And my view is that what we think of as fear, or at least lots of the fears that we have, really came about through the evolution of defensive behavior to protect ourselves- Mm-hmm … from danger. And I think within that context, you can really get an understanding of what fear is.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: So I really think of the evolutionary force behind fear is actually defensive behavior, defensive behavior against predation. So, you know, all animals experience predation in one form or another. Sure. And it’s one of the most powerful evolutionary forces. ‘Cause if you think about it, if I miss an opportunity to eat, I’ll be able to reproduce.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Even if I miss an opportunity to mate, I’ll be able to reproduce. But if I miss an opportunity to defend myself when I get eaten by a predator, I will never, ever reproduce.
Lance: This is a fairly unforgiving performance review. One missed meal, you try again tomorrow. One missed predator, and tomorrow has been canceled.
Lance: A useful defensive response needs to be fast. Your heart beats harder. Breathing changes. Muscles get ready to move. Attention swings toward the thing that might hurt you. Some of that begins before you’ve had time to form a complete thought about what you’re seeing. In the right moment, that speed is an extraordinary advantage.
Lance: It also makes “Stay calm” an odd instruction to give someone whose body is already doing its job. You hear, like, in an emergency, there’s a wildfire and you have to evacuate, or there’s a tsunami, or somebody’s broken into your house, “Stay calm.” You hear that a lot. Is that useful advice?
Dr. Michael Fanselow: One of the things is if you can stay calm, then probably you’re not as afraid as you might be, right?
Dr. Michael Fanselow: I think staying calm in the face of a really strong fear is, is a really incredibly difficult thing. I think the truth behind staying calm is if you’re not in immediate jeopardy and you can calm yourself down, then you will allow these more flexible parts of the brain, prefrontal cortex and all, to take over and give you more flexibility in what you do and strategize the situation better.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Mm-hmm. So when you’re under immediate threat, it’s probably best to let the amygdala run its course to take care of you. Right. But if the situation is such that, wait, wait, the immediacy of the threat isn’t that great, then staying calm and sort of pushing yourself where you can now allow these flexible things to come in.
Lance: We tend to imagine an emergency as a single moment, but emergencies rarely arrive all at once. They come in steps, and the body meets each one differently. So a person who is calm when the evacuation warning came may be someone else entirely by the time there’s smoke at the end of the street.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: You can imagine, I have to go out and go get some food, but it may be dangerous.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Mm. I may be, you know, a rat and, um, I need to forage, get some food, and there may be a predator out there. Right. What a rat foraging will do in those situations, it’ll eat a bigger meal. And we call that sort of pre-encounter behavior because you haven’t- Mm … encountered the threat, but there might be one in the situation.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Yeah. But now let’s say you go out there and now you detect a threat. You detect a cat out there. Very different. We call that post-encounter ’cause you’ve encountered the threat. And then that’s when you’re afraid. So the first- Mm … phase we can think of as anxiety. This phase we can think of as fear, and now you drive these much stronger evolutionary, uh, carved behaviors.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: And what both humans and rats do in those situations is freeze. Mm. You stop moving. You just clench up and you don’t move.
Lance: If you’ve ever gone blank in a stressful moment, you’ve met this response firsthand. That pause has a purpose. It’s the body stopping to take in something it doesn’t yet understand. A person in a smoky hallway needs the next step already worked out.
Lance: For a rat in an open field, holding still may be the whole plan, at least while the cat keeps its distance.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Now, the next phase in that is that now let’s say the cat is on top of you. Freezing isn’t gonna do you any good. Mm-hmm. So what do you do? You go ballistic, right? Right. You explode, and that w- we liken to panic.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: That’s what the panic reaction is like. The threat is right on top of me. You go from this freezing to this huge burst of activity- Mm … to try to get away, to try to escape there.
Lance: By the time the threat is on top of you, the planning parts of your brain have mostly stepped aside. What’s left becomes Nike’s most committed spokesperson, flooding your system with stress chemicals and shouting, “Just do it” at every muscle you have.
Lance: The trouble is that just do it is not much of a plan when your brain is struggling to decide what it should be. That collision between urgency and impaired thought has been studied for decades by survival psychologist and former military survival instructor John Leach. In research conducted during intensive survival exercises, Leach found that acute stress impaired attention, planning, and action.
Lance: He distinguished between declarative knowledge, the instructions you can explain, and procedural memory, the actions learned through repetition. Under pressure, you may struggle to recall what the safety card said while still being able to perform something you’ve practiced. That’s why physically locating the exit, handling the equipment, or rehearsing the first move can matter.
Lance: Practice doesn’t prevent fear from taking over. It gives fear somewhere useful to go. A system built for speed is still going to make mistakes. The question is which kind it would rather make.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: If there’s a real threat-
Lance: Mm-hmm …
Dr. Michael Fanselow: tiger’s out there, and my brain tells me there’s a tiger out there, that’s good, right?
Dr. Michael Fanselow: ‘Cause I’ll, I’ll do the right thing.
Lance: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: If your brain tells you there’s no tiger out there, and there is, you get eaten. Don’t reproduce. If your brain tells you there’s a tiger out there, and there isn’t, then you’ve been scared. You’ve wasted some time or whatever. Mm. But you’ll still live to reproduce.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Right. So there’s asymmetry in those two errors, where if you make a false alarm, that’s not so bad, but if you miss recognizing the danger, that’s really bad. So evolutionarily, we’re biased toward making those false alarms.
Lance: Fear is not only a reaction It’s also a learning system, and a fast one. If something hurts you, your brain would very much like to remember that before it happens again.
Lance: Touch a hot stove once, and you won’t need a 12-week seminar on stove awareness.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: Fear is shaped by experience. And so if something bad happens to us, we very rapidly form a fear memory. It’s gonna take over. We’ll have a phobia. You know, if it’s really traumatic, we’ll have post-traumatic stress disorder, and that will really take over everything we do.
Dr. Michael Fanselow: What happens when you form a fear memory is that those neurons now communicate in a different way. That’s potentiated. You’re actually changing the synaptic connection, the strength of the connection between these neurons. So you’re changing the wiring. Typically, you can’t change back the wiring. What you have to have is some other influence come in and say, “Wait, this is not a time to express that new memory.”
Lance: If an experience can change the wiring, the first step is noticing that it has. For people living with trauma, that can be harder than it sounds because the new pattern feels like common sense.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: They have that rut, just like solid. Mm-hmm. And their brain says, “This is how we survive. We keep doing that, we keep doing that, we keep doing that.”
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: And that’s wonderful when you’re in, like, an active military response. Not wonderful when you’re talking to your kid, right? Like, not the same, and we don’t wanna be the same. So instead, what we have to think about is how to open up flexibility in our thinking. We call it psychological flexibility. And we go to this radical acceptance of, like, let’s look at what’s true.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: I have experienced a trauma, and I know that it’s made my thinking patterns very solidly black and white, and I wanna create space for a little more, right? We talk about how we can take our emotions, not as facts, but as, I like to call them yield signs. They’re a place to pause, right? Mm-hmm. If I feel fear, I’m gonna pause.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: I’m gonna look at that yield sign, and then I may react in the way that my trauma says to, or I might not.
Lance: Fear can get your attention. It can buy you a second. It can push you to move, freeze, prepare, or look again. But fear alone can’t tell you the whole story. That’s why planning shouldn’t begin only when the emergency does.
Lance: Fear needs something to fall back on, a skill you practiced, a decision you made while you could still think clearly, a first move you didn’t invent from scratch.
ACT THREE: THE FIRST MOVE
Lance: What helps is not the perfect plan or a fantasy in which you become an entirely different person the moment the smoke alarm goes off.
Lance: The people who walk into emergencies for a living have a much more practical idea of what works. Dr. Chris Hicks is an emergency physician and trauma team leader at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto. He studies human performance under pressure, stress, distraction, and what happens when very capable people are suddenly asked to function in very different conditions.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: I think we’re in the midst of a bit of a cultural shift now where we understand that, for example, the performance of a team as a unit is a skill set and it needs to be trained. And to your point, you know, repetition or what we would call overtraining is a way to do that. Sometimes you just run drills until you practice it till you can’t get it wrong, so to speak.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: You know, that is, that’s one strategy to overcome the impacts of stress on performance.
Lance: Practice until you can’t get it wrong is a very high bar for those of us who occasionally enter a room and forget why we went there. But the principle beneath it is generous. Being useful under pressure isn’t an inherited trait reserved for people with ice water in their veins.
Lance: Repetition makes the first action easier to find when deliberate thought becomes difficult. You don’t need to rehearse every possible emergency. You just need a practiced way to begin. So you talked about the training and the reassessment in real time. Can ordinary people practice a version of this without sort of turning their life into disaster drills?
Dr. Christopher Hicks: So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing these sort of, uh, worst case scenario drills, or at least, you know, as a cognitive exercise in your life or in your work or at home or whatever it happens to be if things don’t go as you expect them to go. I think everyday application of those skills we touched on before, pre-briefing, situation reports, and updates in a dynamic fashion, I think are very applicable to how people may run their lives.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: There’s so little, I find, discussion about whether people are truly on the same page with how they perceive a situation and how they intend to move forward. And I think with just a little bit of a discussion, a little bit of exercise, again, we would call it a pre-brief. But having a little bit of a discussion ahead of time about, you know, what do we expect to see?
Dr. Christopher Hicks: What are we gonna do? Who’s gonna do what? How are we gonna know if it’s working?
Lance: A pre-brief sounds official because doctors and pilots and emergency teams have excellent branding for common sense, but the civilian version is simple. It’s the conversation before the concert, the storm, or fire season. In a confusing situation, wanting more information is not wrong.
Lance: It may be the most reasonable impulse you have. The trouble is that emergencies keep moving while you’re trying to become certain. Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik is a professor of psychology at the University of Bergen in Norway. He studies risk, situational awareness, and decision-making in safety critical environments, places where people have to make decisions under pressure with incomplete information.
Lance: What happens to decision-making when people don’t have enough information to understand the full situation?
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: The typical response when you’re faced with a sudden emergency is you want more information, and that’s part of the freeze process, too. Mm-hmm. That’s our body’s way of stopping and attending and trying to gather as much information as possible to understand what’s going on.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And the more extended version of that is that even when you know you’re supposed to start to deal with a situation, there is a tendency to delay action and always want to gather more information, and this is sometimes called an information trap. As time goes by, the fire will grow bigger, be more difficult to put out when you decide to do that.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: The ship on a collision course gets closer and gets more difficult to steer away from. Emergency exits and equipment may become unavailable. Injured people may grow more severely injured. To adequately handle a situation, you need to figure out when you have enough information to stop gathering and start acting.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: So that’s one of the important lessons, to be aware of this trap and know that it’s very easy to fall into and try to, uh, to have some, some tools to, to avoid it. So one of the tools often recommended is to try to set a deadline for a decision.
Lance: Waiting can feel responsible, but emergencies are dynamic.
Lance: Every minute spent gathering information is also a minute the situation spends changing, and the careful choice and the safe one can quietly drift apart.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: In an emergency, most of the time, an early decision is better than a late decision, and a, and a late decision is better than no decision. So it’s, it’s easy to get things wrong in the heat of the moment and make suboptimal decisions.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: But the problem is more usually that we’ve failed to make decisions at all, delaying for too long. And really good decision-makers or good emergency handlers, they also follow up on the course of actions to make sure that the, the actions have been satisfactorily performed and that the action is having the, the expected effect.
Lance: Once you act, the situation provides more information. The door opens or it doesn’t. The person picks up or doesn’t. The smoke thins or thickens. Each action hands you new information and a chance to adjust, which is why a first move is worth making even when it isn’t the perfect one. So what does that look like for someone who will never stand on a ship’s bridge or run an emergency operations center?
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: It would be like to be aware in advance that you’re not going to make good decisions, uh, during the emergency. So thinking through in advance, having a script, like if you live in a wildfire area, running through it in your head, what do you need to pick up? Who do you need to call? Which windows do you need to close?
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: What are the actions you want to perform? And so you will be able to perform those even in a high fear, high stress, uh, situation. And, and figure out what are the scenarios most relevant for you and, and what are the plans and the scripts you, you should prepare for.
Lance: And once you make the first move, other people can respond.
Lance: They can hear the question, follow the cue, correct you, join you, or become the person who knows the next thing, which means we have to talk about one of the oldest and most damaging stories we tell about disaster, that when things go wrong, everyone else becomes the danger. Again and again, the research tells a different story.
ACT FOUR: THE ROOM MOVES WITH YOU
Lance: The disaster movie version of human behavior is not subtle. Something goes wrong and the crowd becomes the second disaster. People scream, they stampede, they shove one another out of the way. The collapse of our civilization is apparently one fire alarm away. Dr. Kayley Estes is a psychological scientist who studies risk, uncertainty, disaster communication, and how people respond to threatening information.
Lance: When I asked her whether that’s really how people behave in disasters, she didn’t hesitate.
Dr. Kayley Estes: I would say when it comes to panic, it’s much less often what’s happening than we think. This everybody for themselves panic is pretty rare, especially in disasters. I don’t know of any research that says, like, exactly how much ti- like, percentage this is, but the pattern that we see in disaster research time and time again is cooperation.
Dr. Kayley Estes: Like, there was a 2005 London bombings, and the research that people have done on survivors, survivors describe no mass panic and very little selfishness even though they were mostly among strangers and thought that they were gonna die. And we see this with cell phone footage of first person POV of mass violence events over and over.
Dr. Kayley Estes: People tend to try to help each other. So our picture of panic, I think, comes from, like, movies and headlines more than what research actually suggests.
Lance: That’s not a sentimental claim about human nature. It’s a practical one. If you believe the people around you probably are going to become the danger, you may miss what they can actually become: information, assistance, courage.
Lance: It makes sense that the movie version sticks. A crowd quietly helping one another doesn’t make much of a trailer, and the news tends to arrive after the fact when all that’s left to show is the outcome.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: That’s like the popular view that when an accident or an emergency happen, most people panic, and, uh, sometimes it can even look like that from the outside.
Lance: Right.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: But the actions are almost always reasonable from the, the person’s own perspective, and they, they make reasonable decisions based on the information they have. For example, maybe after a fire, you might find several people suffocated at a dead-end corridor, and it may not make sense why they didn’t try to go somewhere else.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And so you might conclude that they’ve acted irrationally and been in a panic mode. But from people caught in the fire, they probably moved towards what seemed like a reasonable exit or moving away from what they thought had caused the fire, and, um, they may not have been aware of other exits. They may have had their path blocked and been unable to retreat due to the crowd behind them and so on.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And the people behind may have thought that since everybody’s going in this direction, it, it must be a good choice.
Lance: Right.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: So true panic in the sense of acting irrationally when there are good options available is thankfully very rare. So what’s more common is more like a freeze response that you see in a lot of cases, that, uh, people don’t act individually.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: They’re waiting for others to act, but they are willing to be led or to be asked to do something. And some people are true problem-solvers in a time of crisis, and they’re able to lead other, to solve problems, suggest solutions, and to help others
Lance: A room full of people waiting for a signal will take one from somewhere, even if the only signal available is that no one else is moving.
Lance: In the late 1960s, psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley tested this by quietly piping smoke into a room where people were sitting filling out questionnaires. They wanted to know what people do when something seems wrong and no one else seems bothered.
Dr. Kayley Estes: So in that experiment, that classic smoke room experiment, three-quarters of people who were by themselves reported the smoke.
Dr. Kayley Estes: But when others sat passively in the room and didn’t react to it, it was only about one in 10. So when we read others people’s calm, we see the evidence that there’s no danger, especially if, you know, 9 out of 10 people are calm, then, like, I must be misinterpreting something. And we do know that it can cut both ways.
Dr. Kayley Estes: There’s a study where they did a simulated evacuation with about 2,500 people, and they found that social networks could falsely reassure people into staying. If everyone else was calm, then I was calm too. But it also stopped unnecessary evacuations when nothing’s wrong. So I always think about, like, you’re in an apartment building or a dorm building and the fire alarm goes off.
Dr. Kayley Estes: Everyone pops their head in the hallway and be like, “Is this real?” Like, “Should we go? Are you going? Okay, I’ll go with you.” And so we always try to check with other people because we are ultimately pack animals.
Lance: The strange thing about reading a calm room is that it may be full of people who are each privately unsure, and each reading everyone else’s stillness as a sign that someone knows something.
Lance: No one wants to be the first to look worried, so no one does. The good news is that the same mechanism can work in the other direction.
Dr. Kayley Estes: We know that the classic bystander effect, and a lot of people have heard of this, that the presence of others reduces the likelihood that any one person will help. But we know that this is not universal.
Lance: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Kayley Estes: So when there’s, like, some meta-analyses that have shown that, like, the, the effect shrinks when the situation is clearly dangerous. So once those cues are clear, you see the flames or you see blood or something, then people act. And I think importantly, it’s not only, like, dramatic cases. So there’s a study where they did a CCTV footage of over, like, 200 real public conflicts, um, across, like, UK, Netherlands, and South Africa, I believe.
Dr. Kayley Estes: And someone helped in 9 out of 10 situations. Wow. And usually several people did. Once one person started to help, more people would, would come help, and then you get to the point where everyone’s like, “Okay, you got to back up. There’s too many people.” So I would say it’s really the ambiguous aspect that is when we don’t see people react.
Dr. Kayley Estes: But as soon as an emergency becomes clear quickly, and then people start to act.
Lance: This is the social theater of a not yet obvious emergency. You’re not only asking, “What am I seeing?” You’re also asking about whether moving would be sensible or ridiculous, and whether you will be the person who saved the day or the person everyone talks about later because they mistook the fireworks show for the apocalypse.
Dr. Kayley Estes: I think the key is being able to process the cues, filter the cues that matter, and maybe it’s as simple as asking the person next to you, like, “Hey, does that seem a little off to you?” Like, maybe you don’t need to stand up to the whole room and tell them like, “Oh, it’s time to evacuate,” ’cause we… That can cause other issues.
Dr. Kayley Estes: Or maybe it’s talking to someone who is working the event, someone who has more background information and knows what’s going on behind the scenes, and also has that established chain of command. So sometimes just, like, being like, “Hey, man, I don’t know if this is actually something weird, but, like, I think something weird’s happening.
Dr. Kayley Estes: Can you look into this?” And they may be like, “Yeah, that’s planned,” or “Thank you. We’ll look into it,” you know?
Lance: There’s an odd mismatch in how we weigh the two possible mistakes. Your body would rather sound a false alarm than miss a real threat. Socially, we tend to flip that math, and the embarrassment of being wrong out loud can start to feel more dangerous than the thing you noticed.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: In the aftermath of an emergency, nobody ever gets blamed for taking it too seriously, right? You’re, you… That’s always understandable. So if there are indications that can be interpreted as this could be really serious, there’s no risk in, in hitting the big alarm. So it’s a no blame culture for overreacting to an, uh, an emergency.
Lance: Noticing is one kind of first move. Doing something is another. Once the danger is undeniable, the question shifts from, “Is this real?” to, “What can I do?” And the answers rarely look like a rescue. They look like whatever ordinary people happen to have with them, offered by someone who is never trained for this moment.
Lance: For a study several years ago, Kayley had to gather footage of mass violence events from around the world, weeks of video most of us would rather never see. One clip has stayed with her.
Dr. Kayley Estes: There was a clip from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. I think maybe, like, a dashboard of camera that caught this, and then they submitted, you know, to the news.
Dr. Kayley Estes: But a guy pulls up with his truck to an area where there are a lot of victims. He rolls down the window, and he just goes, “What do you guys need?” And this guy just been at the concert, got caught up in it, you know, like, he, he’s not, like, a professional, like, emergency responder or anything. And he just says, “You know, a lot of people need to get to the hospital.”
Dr. Kayley Estes: And the guy at the truck goes, “Load them in the bed.” And strangers start picking them up and start loading all these, like, injured people into the bed, just completely trusting the stranger to take them to the hospital and get them the help that they need. And there was no, like, questioning or hesitation.
Dr. Kayley Estes: And I think that just really gives me hope in a horrible situation. And it stuck with me for, I think I did this study, like, six years ago, that in times of crisis, strangers tend to help. Like, that’s the norm. And of course, there’s always gonna be one person, you know, that probably doesn’t. But for the most part, I would argue that, yes, you might be the one to help out, and you might surprise yourself.
Dr. Kayley Estes: But also, like, we can trust strangers in those situations to help us
Lance: None of this means people will be perfect in a crisis. They won’t, and neither will you. Fear makes people human, not magical. The room moves with you, the situation changes, and your own readiness is not just for you. It’s part of what makes you useful to the people around you.
Lance: Not for every possible disaster, and not forever. Maybe just long enough to think clearly, share what you know, make the call, or drive the truck.
ACT FIVE: BECOMING THE SOMEONE
Lance: Preparedness is not a bunker fantasy. It’s a way of giving yourself enough margin to be useful when fear, confusion, or bad luck enters the room.
Lance: The point is to look honestly at your life, your body, your home, your geography, your people, and ask what’s most likely, what would be most serious, and what would give you more room to move?
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: In the industry, and also for civilians, the concept of risk has to do with the likelihood of something happening and the consequences if that should happen.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And those are always in a relationship. So any imaginable event can be plotted as more or less likely and more or less serious. And what you want to do is prepare for the incident that has at least some consequences and are at least somewhat likely. And if something is very likely, they will probably happen in your lifetime, you should have a plan for that.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And if something has really serious consequences, even if it is unlikely and you may ne-never experience this, you should also have a plan for that. It’s called like a risk matrix in the industry, and you often plot it in a table, and you color-code it with, uh, green, orange, and red for those things. You wanna have a plan for the orange and the red events, whereas the, the green ones that are quite unlikely or quite benign cases can be safely ignored.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And what you tend to do is, is make either a formal list or an informal list in your head of what are the scenarios you need to be prepared for. And, uh, typically that can build a mental model of those, and those should involve what are the features that you will use to recognize that this is that kind of a situation?
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: What are the resources you would need to solve them? What are the decisions you may have to make under those conditions? And when do you know when the situation has been normalized?
Lance: That’s the opposite of paranoia. Paranoia makes the world feel infinite and hostile. A risk matrix makes it smaller. It says start here with the risk you actually live near, the medication you actually take, the road you actually drive, the exit you would actually use.
Lance: And if something does happen, the first question is not whether you can become the perfect person in the perfect emergency. It’s whether you can do the next useful thing without becoming part of the problem.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: One of the biggest challenges that we see with laypeople, and, and not even just laypeople, I’m not a pre-hospital provider.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: Um, I don’t work, you know, outside the hospital typically, and yet, you know, I’ve responded to, to, you know, car accidents and injury victims outside the hospital where I’m clearly not in my element, and I do a lot of dumb things, um- … because I don’t, I’m not in my environment. I don’t have my tools or my people or anything.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: But the first, I think, two things to think about are to call for help and to make sure that you’re safe before you respond. We talk about, in medicine, something called the zero point survey, which is a concept that myself and a few others put together, which is the zero in zero point survey means you’re doing an assessment of the situation before you actually engage with your patient, which in medicine we call a primary survey.
Dr. Christopher Hicks: And the reason that’s important is because you’re doing an environmental scan to make sure that the environment is safe. You’re not stepping into something that’s gonna be dangerous to you and create a second victim that, that providers need to, to, to also deal with. And you’re also doing an assessment of your own psychological preparedness, whether or not you’re fit to engage.
Lance: An injured, overwhelmed, or wildly underqualified rescuer can quickly become one more emergency for everyone else to manage. Being fit to engage depends partly on what you have with you, but more on what you still know about yourself. And that’s exactly what modern life has been quietly taking off our hands.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: Sometimes you may run into a totally new unexpected crisis, or it could actually be one of the, the ones you prepared for, but you don’t immediately recognize it as that. Whatever training, whatever preparation you’ve done might be insufficient to solve those rare and unexpected emergencies. And to solve those kind of emergencies, it might be a different type of skill set that’s necessary.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: So that might involve a more deep understanding of how the system works and the forces involved and how all the pieces fit together. And it’s also related to what’s called the automation paradox, which means that as more and more of our daily tasks or our jobs or everyday life gets, gets automated, that does take away some of the cognitive load and it frees us up our resources.
Dr. Bjørn Sætrevik: And you might think it should make it easier for us to notice when things go awry and, and have leftover space to, to handle that. So think of driving a car on cruise control or automated braking or even AI-assisted driving. But what you need to ask yourself is, are you able to take back control of the car if suddenly the, the automated system fails?
Lance: A little friction is not failure. It’s a rehearsal. The goal is not to make life harder on purpose. The goal is to keep enough contact with the systems that you carry that you can reenter them when they stop carrying you. And that kind of preparation is usually imperfect. Meghan lives somewhere remote enough that losing a single road would put her hours away from everything, so she keeps emergency supplies, mostly.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: I live on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. It’s pretty remote. Yeah. We have one road that if that road goes down, it’s like a five-hour drive all the way around. And, and I love it here, but I also know that it would be stupid for me to not have, like, a, a couple weeks worth of food stocked up and some basic water and supplies and things.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: And if I do all of that, I will still forget something. I will still end up with that, like… You know, I have a box of those, like, emergency rations. I only got breakfast. I have so much scrambled eggs. Like- … and I would be sad about it, you know? Yeah. I’m gonna mess it up. But do I just, like, decide, “Well, I’m not gonna eat”?
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: No. I look at my planning. I say, “I did my best. I have what I have, and let’s go forward from there.” Doing something is better than nothing. Trusting in yourself and listening to your intuition, and really that trust in yourself is what gets you through those situations. I’m resilient. You keep telling yourself that.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: I can figure things out. I’m an intelligent person with resources. Can I plan for everything? No, ’cause it’s always gonna be the thing we don’t plan right? Always. So you plan flexibility.
Lance: You plan flexibility, not perfection, not omniscience, not the fantasy where you buy the right thing and become the right kind of person who is never afraid.
Lance: You do what you can. You notice what you have. You forgive what you missed, and then you keep moving. Dr. Cynthia Pury is a professor of psychology at Clemson University. Her research focuses on courage, fear, and how people choose to act when something meaningful is at stake.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: We did look at hope as a component of courage.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: Mm. Uh, a colleague, Robin Kowalski, and I a bunch, a bunch of years ago. And we asked people to describe a time they acted courageously, then we asked them this whole gamut of questions about what best characterized the act. It included characterizations that had a lot to do with courage from positive psychology about persisting despite obstacles, about not backing down in the face of risk, but the other thing that characterized it a lot was this idea of hope.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: Expecting a good outcome and working to bring it about, and thinking of different ways to get to that good outcome is also a really important part of hope. So hope is sort of like a more activated form of optimism. So instead of just being optimistic, this is gonna be okay-
Film clip: Right …
Dr. Cynthia Pury: if I am hopeful in the way that Rick Snyder meant hopeful when he wrote about this a few decades ago, it is I am expecting to be able to bring about this good outcome, and also if anything comes up, I can think of lots of different pathways, he called them, lots of different ways to get to that outcome.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: So if this doesn’t work, I can try that. If this doesn’t work, I can try that. And so that being kind of mentally prepared or flexible could probably be helpful.
Lance: The work of psychologist John Leach gives us hope in a practical form. In extreme survival situations, people who feel completely overwhelmed and powerless can begin to withdraw from the effort to survive, a response Leach calls give up-itis.
Lance: The way back is to recover some sense of control through small, immediate decisions, establish a routine, complete one necessary task, then identify the next. Hope becomes a plan built from choices that still belong to you, creating a practical and winnable path through a situation that otherwise feels impossible.
Lance: And choosing to follow that path without knowing exactly where it will lead is where courage begins.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: To me, it means taking a worthwhile risk. When I first started this, I thought that it was acting despite fear, which was sort of the standard psychology definition. In everyday life across all sorts of different domains, though, the better definition seems to be one that comes from work originally by Chris Rate and his colleagues looking at what kinds of actions do people nominate as courageous.
Dr. Cynthia Pury: And they tend to be actions that are freely chosen, so the person had a choice. It’s gotta be intentional. It’s got to be taken despite risk to the actor, and it’s gotta be taken for some kind of a good or worthwhile reason.
Lance: A worthwhile risk. Courage is choosing to take some risk because something on the other side of it matters.
Lance: Your safety, your child, your neighbor, the person who needs you to be a little steadier than you feel. And the strange thing is, steadiness moves. Fear spreads, but so does hope.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: There’s this really wonderful researcher, his name is Chan Hellman, who does work on the science of hope, and he essentially, you know, he’s done all of these different works in looking at people who are really at their worst, like people who are in prison, families who’ve had their children removed and want them back, but they feel really hopeless about it.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: And what he found is there are certain ways that the people who just have hope, they have nothing different other than hope, tend to survive more. They get out of prison, and they do well. They get their kids back, and they stay sober, and they keep moving Totally different topic, but sort of the same.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: There’s this really great research paper. It’s about a teacher at a big university who teaches some of those huge classes, you know, 200 students. Teaches two different classes, and at the beginning of an exam, in one of those classes goes to the class and says, “I really believe that you’ve done the best you can.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: You’ve studied as much as you can, and I believe in your ability to do well on this test.” And in the other class, she just says, “Here’s your test. Turn it in when you’re done,” right? The kids in that first class did better consistently when they were told someone believes in them, that there’s hope, that there’s optimism that we can make it through.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: It makes a difference, a huge difference.
Lance: But I think it’s really interesting what you talked about with the study and the students. Yeah. And it broke my heart a little bit when you were saying it because we aren’t giving each other enough compliments. Like we aren’t being optimistic enough as a society.
Lance: Yeah. Nope. Agree. You know, if we could just big each other up a little bit more on a day-to-day basis. Yeah. Like, what do you think about that?
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: Yeah, no, I, I do agree, and I, you know, right now, I think economically, worldwide troubles, climate change, et cetera, people come into my office just feeling like the world is a disaster, right?
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: And I don’t have any solutions to that. I can’t fix that, but what I can tell them is that people are meant for people. Evolutionarily, we are social. We are grown to be around other humans, and we have become isolated as a society. We spend way too much time on our own, looking at our phones, watching TV, like, doing all those things, when really what we need is community.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: We do need to know our neighbors, to say hi to them, to make sure they’re okay. We need to see our neighbor walking with a sweet pair of shoes and be like, “Those are awesome.” Like, “You are great,” you know? I think if more people could tap into that connection, the community, the, the piece where I care about you not for any reason other than ’cause you’re my neighbor.
Dr. Meghan Fitzgerald: You are just, just someone nearby, and I care about you, you know? Then I think that- Yeah … helps. It matters, you know?
Lance: It matters, not because kindness is a decoration you add after the serious work is done. Because kindness is part of the serious work. When someone tells you you can do this, your body gets one more piece of evidence that the situation is survivable.
Lance: When someone stays calm, the room gets a little calmer. And when someone moves, other people understand that movement is possible. Ordinary people survive extraordinary things every day, most of them while they were very afraid. Every one of them started out exactly where you might be: a little scared, not entirely sure, and willing to do one useful thing anyway.
Lance: No one is coming, but you can be someone. Out