Episode replay: Chris Joffe, Founder and CEO of Joffe Emergency Services

This is a re-release of an earlier episode, back by popular demand. Chris Joffe is the founder and CEO of Joffe Emergency Services. Chris started the company 15 years ago with a simple promise: to empower teams with the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to keep people safe in an emergency. Joffe has become one of the nation's leading safety organizations for schools and events, and has over 2,000 clients. Chris is also an author with a book forthcoming, a certified pilot, scuba diver, and endurance runner.

Learn more about Chris: chrisjoffe.com/
Learn more about Joffe Emergency Services: joffeemergencyservices.com/
Pre-order Chris’s book: All Clear: Lessons from a Decade Managing School Crises
Connect with Chris on Twitter
Connect with Dr. Sciarretta on Twitter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Superintendent's Hangout where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, Dr. Sheretta. Come on in and hang out. In this conversation, I was privileged to sit down with Chris Joffe. Chris is founder and CEO of Jaffe Emergency Services. That's J-O-F-F-E, Emergency Services.com. Chris founded the company 15 years ago with a pretty simple promise to empower teams with the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need to keep people safe in an emergency. Jaffe has grown as an organization to be one of the nation's leading safety organizations for schools and events and actively supports more than 2,000 clients nationwide. Chris is an author. He's got a book coming out soon. You can check it out in the show notes pre-order on Amazon. He's also a certified pilot, scuba diver, and endurance runner, a marathoner. We talk about the comparisons and the lessons to be learned from distance running in terms of training, preparation, mental toughness, and safety preparedness. We also dive deep into the topic of connection assessment versus a threat assessment and what it really means to be safe and thriving as a community. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did having it with Chris Joffey. Welcome, Chris. Thanks for joining me for a conversation on the Superintendent's Hangout.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Of course, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:43

I think it's I didn't notice this when we were scheduling, but it is the anniversary of 9-11. And so I have a couple questions related to emergency preparedness. And I think that's apropos to the theme of the day. But if you could start out by just sharing with our audience uh your origin story.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

So, and first, you know, absolutely it's 9-11 today. And I think, you know, one of the things I am excited to talk about, and maybe even one of the things that is woven into my story is the opportunity for progress and learning and recognition that we will never get it exactly right. We can get it great, we can get it excellent, we can do phenomenal training, we can advance and develop and iterate, as is the case in emergency preparedness, um, but we'll never be perfect. And that's both empowering and also frustrating, and one of the things we'll talk about today. Um but my story started uh I was actually the fifth child born to a sex worker in St. Louis. Um, and I was removed from the home along with my siblings, and so I very early in life developed this perspective that uh that life was fragile and that children were were inherently vulnerable and that there need to be better systems in place to help care for them. Um, fast forward uh 20 years or so, I uh went to EMT school, got started my career in EMS, and so I was responding to 911 calls, and I had this frustrating sort of recurring event, which would be I would show up to a call and there would be people standing around and they would be watching or in some cases like guiding us to the patient who needed to be treated, but almost, almost invariably, there would be people that were standing there not doing what they could be doing to help the person who was hurt. And so I became really frustrated with that. And I started a CPR and first aid training business with a simple goal that, like, if only people would know what to do, if only people had some idea of how to uh roll up their sleeves and provide basic patient care and provide basic first aid and CPR and those sorts of things, right? Not surgery, not nothing fancy, but but to just to do something that maybe we could make better progress and we would get better patient outcomes, because that was the result, is that we weren't able to help people as much as we could have if their bystanders had been helping more. And so that turned into a school safety organization where now about 500 employees across 32 states serving about 2,000 schools and a handful of dozen uh venues and stadiums and convention centers and what have you. And we're all focused across the entire country on this single question. How do we make communities safer before, during, and after emergencies occur?

SPEAKER_00 4:47

That's that's quite a that's quite a jump. I'm sure it wasn't uh an instantaneous jump, right? Um I think I I think I saw in your in one of your uh uh it might have been on a podcast, but you spoke about the fact that as a as a as a young entrepreneur, uh as someone who went from uh being an employee of uh I must have been an ambulance company or something, right? To to now the founder and the the the chief uh officer of a fairly large company of 500 employees is we're at we're in 180. And so when you said 500 and they're spread around the country, I started to get heart palpitations. Um can you can you kind of describe how that was for a young man to go through that that transition to running a big company?

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Yeah, I mean, you know, in in truth, I I wonder sometimes if I knew now, or if I knew then would I know now, would I do it? Because because part of the story for me was uh ignorance is bliss. I you know, I started this CPR training company, I stumbled into schools, and it, you know, schools were really fun classes to teach. They were communities that really cared, they paid attention, they asked great questions. Um, but honestly, the thing that stuck out to me is that when I would come back the next year to train a faculty and staff group, they would raise their hand at the beginning of the class and say, I used this, I saved my child, I saved my student, I saved a parent, I saved a grandparent who was on campus. And at the time we were also training government agencies and EMS people and those sorts of folks. And it's not to say that they didn't value the training, but it was that that I really felt like we were making a difference in schools. And I felt like those stories, those opportunities to have another birthday, another uh, you know, to reach a graduation ceremony, to to go to something next was um it was exciting. It was it was powerful, and it was something I couldn't, I couldn't ever really step away from. And so uh, you know, over the course of a few years, we went from those kind of traditional CPR and first aid training courses to uh schools started to say things like, hey, can you help us with our drills? Can you help do our lockdown drills and our earthquake drills? And uh in small business, the answer is always yes. I fortunately have been trained through the academy to have sort of perspective on how to run those programs and and uh and and then frankly, there's a lot of really valuable information that's out there, kind of designing the the systems to help schools, but what the the information that FEMA publishes or Department of Homeland Security publishes lacks is the nuance of a specific charter school or a specific independent school. And so, in some ways, in the early days, we were like the translators of that information, just taking what was available anywhere and saying, you know, here's how we apply this, here's how we bake it into our curriculum, here's how we design a scope and sequence to make progress on emergency preparedness. And so, you know, that that all took quite some time. It was probably a few years of a pretty small business, something like you know, five, 15, 20 employees. And then uh suddenly we we started to get these calls from schools, not in Los Angeles where we started, but in San Francisco and in the Bay Area and in Chicago and in BC. And I learned there that really schools are just relationship organizations and that people will move from one school to another and they'll take the great things with them. Um and it turned out that we were lucky enough to be one of those things that got taken with them from you know LA to San Francisco and so on. And so uh yeah, lots of lots of struggles, lots of challenge, lots of uh lots of ignorance is bliss. Um, but but overall, as I think back over the last maybe 15 years or so, um, also lots of stories where somebody did something excellent, somebody was able to bring somebody back, save somebody, do something. Um, and that's sort of the theme for me is um well, we can talk a little bit about some of the kind of paradigms of emergency preparedness, but I think often people run into this like denial feeling, or you know, it's not happening here, it could never happen here. And I never say this to be scary because that's that's just not RMO. I mean, we we spend all of our time on confidence building, but denial is is one of the most dangerous portions of the emergency because it's it's a it's a refusal to start action or to take action and to actually make the people yourself and those around you safer. And so for that reason, I often find myself saying, you know, you don't have to solve the the person on campus that doesn't belong there. You don't have to do the CPR and administer the AED, you just have to do something, because something begets something else, and that will beget something else. And so just beginning to create some progress makes a huge difference when we look back at that incident in hindsight. And so that's that's really the theme of my work today.

SPEAKER_00 10:10

I I like that you that you mentioned the concept of a of a paradigm, because uh I'd imagine that in particular, probably starting with Columbine, um, which some of my some of our listeners might not even remember, but that was, I think I was in my third or fourth year of teaching, and and that was really the first of these kind of uh school shooting, uh, school shootings, mass shootings on it that gotten a lot of national attention. But starting there to the present, uh, I'd imagine that school security companies and experts in quotations pop up all the time, right? I know I'm approached by very well-meaning folks who say, Hey, my friend's a Navy SEAL, and he can come and do a walkthrough of your campuses, and he can tell you, you know, you probably have to cover this window up and you have to do that. Or my friend has a company and he's starting, he wants to do that, he wants to fill this space. Um uh we get every time there's a high prof profile incident, I get calls for metal detectors, dogs, bomb-sniffing dogs, drug-sniffing dogs, and armed officers. Um, can you talk about your paradigm and in particular how you define safety and security in a school context?

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Yeah. What a uh a great sort of foundational question, really, to like to unpack and and pull some layers back. Um I guess I would start with I I often hear people, and and I I get those calls after the incidents occur as well, and and the call to me often says, what's the one thing we should do? Um and I find myself frustrated because you know, I after working in this and and like I said, you know, supporting at this point, probably north of 2,000 schools, uh, well over 800 myself, uh, in some way, uh, I can tell you that there's not one thing. Um, or at least I haven't found it yet. And and I'm open to that, right? I I I dream of the day where we can say this is the one thing, end all be all, it's we're safe now. Um but at least as far as I can tell, we're not there yet. And so, you know, probably the most useful starting place is everybody during the early days of COVID-19 became really familiar with this Swiss cheese image. Um, and it was an image that said, and if you're if you're hearing this and and your your stomach is turning over as I talk about the early days of COVID, I apologize. Um, but you know, the image had something like masks and vaccines, and and you could see those different layers of Swiss cheese, social distancing, and they all were designed to indicate that as long as you had multiple layers, you were doing more than any one layer could do on its own. And everybody sort of agrees to that premise, right? Two is better than one, three is better than two, and so on. But what they also did was they allowed us to acknowledge that no layer was impervious to the threat, in that case, COVID. And so masks weren't perfect and vaccines weren't perfect, and uh social distancing not perfect, right? But but the idea that we had added these different layers of Swiss cheese, well, suddenly we had this more impervious or more um significant boundary or barrier that was helping to keep us safe. Well, I like to use the same model in broader school safety, right? After these incidents occur, we get the question about metal detectors or about whether all doors on a campus should be locked at all times, whether uh we should add more armed guards, whether we should add more gates. Often the phrase in the security industry is gates, guns, and guards. And it's not to say that those things are wrong. That's that's not what I'm here to say. But what I am here to say is that it is about layering our response and ensuring that we are doing the basics, that we are locking our perimeter doors, that we are greeting people as they arrive on campus, that we're identifying the difference between a visitor who belongs there and a visitor who doesn't, or a person who's on campus that, of course, doesn't belong. Um, that we're doing those basic things. And then if we go to kind of the middle block of the Swiss cheese block, hopefully this analogy is working and not making people hungry, um, the middle block is sort of, you know, what are we doing for our faculty and staff? How are we equipping them to respond to the handful of incidents that we may need them to have a really quick or immediate response to? And then we can work our way to the sort of systemic work that we might continue to do on campus and sort of around our facility or campuses for those of our schools that have multiple campuses. And those are typically the places where we'll address fences and camera systems and all of the other infrastructure. And as I sort of walk through that, I think people hear that and I hope hear, oh, well, it wouldn't make sense to just do all the stuff on the right-hand side of the block. It wouldn't make sense to just do all the stuff in the center, it wouldn't make sense to just do all the stuff on the left side of that. What we really need to do is we need to make sure that we're building that entire Swiss cheese block. That's the way that we're creating some defenses. And then I think the next kind of challenge is we often find that in any of the incidents that we've debriefed, whether we were a part of them or responding agency or recovery agency, we've played different roles depending on the school and the incident, we have found that leadership and communication are the two things that emergencies tend to boil down to. High quality leadership equals high-quality communication, and vice versa. And if we're not getting those two things right from the beginning of the emergency on, the rest of it doesn't make as much sense. Now, again, right, that's not a perfect framework. I wish it were. But it is to say that if we can get leadership and communication down and we can practice those and establish routines where those are practiced, ideally with our head or our superintendent at the helm, and then at times without that person at the helm, right, going down the succession list, we have a much better chance at being able to enact those same tools during a real emergency. And so I guess if I were to really try to boil all of our work down, I would say there's like there's layers that you've got to get right, right? All the layers of Swiss cheese. And you want to be adding every year, every month, every opportunity you're given to that number of layers of Swiss cheese between you and a potential concern. But then the other piece that you've got to make sure that you prioritize is that leadership and communication, and that we're really effectively not just leading through the emergency, but leading through the preparedness too, and setting expectations and helping our community understand how we'll navigate the emergency.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

I you've mentioned uh in one of the podcasts I listened to, you mentioned a threat assessment protocol that you go through with your clients. And um, it struck me as really uh instructive because as humans, we don't do a particularly good job of prioritizing what the threats are uh in our lives, right? We hop into 2,000-pound missiles every day to get to work or to school. Um and we kind of overlook the risk inherent in that. Uh, schools probably statistically face a lot more risk that kids are bullied chronically, or that parents who aren't authorized to pick up their child because of whatever domestic situation try to force their way in to take away their kids. That happens far more often than a violent shooting incident on a campus. But yet, if you talk about safety and security, people are automatically going to bulletproof glass and metal detectors. So, can you describe uh for our listeners how you guide your clients through through going from kind of the spitball of throwing as many possible risks on the wall and then prioritizing and looking at how many of these are likely to happen and what would the impact be, and how do we plan for them?

SPEAKER_01 18:19

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there's a few layers to that as well. And I think you know, it starts, you you said it well, right? We we take risks all the time. And and I often say um, you know, that that we're we're never going to be absent risk, right? That life is about choosing which risks we're willing to take. Um, and so if you are willing to hold that as a truth, which is difficult to stomach, I realize. Um but if you are willing to hold that as a truth, that everything, arguably, in life is a calculated risk, well then what we have to do is we have to come up with a mechanism to prioritize how we will manage those risks that we are willing to take and what we will do to mitigate the risk to ourselves and to our students. And there are really good reasons for that, like self-preservation, but there are also like legal reasons, right? There's lots and lots of reasons, communication-based reasons, how do we articulate these risks to our community in a way that doesn't terrify them, right? That we acknowledge that as humans we are at risk at times and what we are doing to respond to those risks. And basically there's kind of a two-part formula that we'll use. The first is the risk assessment itself. And what we'll do there is we'll say, what is the likelihood of this thing happening? What is the frequency, what is the potential that this thing could happen? And so when I do these exercises, I often say, What's the likelihood of a zombie apocalypse? Um, and you know, people hopefully laugh a little bit uh and and say none. And I say, well, I don't know, maybe maybe not none, but but pretty low, right? It's just it's not all that likely. Now, the the other side of the equation, though, is severity. What if this thing did happen? How severe would it be? And there are a few different ways that you can measure severity. One is impact to life, right? So people's physical safety is a critical one. Another is reputational, environmental. What are the other ways this thing could affect us? Um and financial, right? A lot of times when we see these risk assessment calculators, they're actually for financial risk or insurance-driven risk, those sorts of things. We'll we'll come back to that in a second. Um, but if you then kind of take a step back and you say, all right, let's go back to zombie apocalypse, the severity of a zombie apocalypse is through the roof, right? There's no there's no more severe event than I can that I can think of. And so low likelihood but high severity, well, how do we prioritize that? Pretty low, because it's really, really low likelihood, if not no likelihood, arguably. Um and so we're we're not gonna spend a ton of time, energy, and effort responding to or managing that. What we can do though is then we can go on to another set of conversations and say, well, what are the other higher likelihood and higher severity things that could happen? And for almost all schools across the country and around the world, there's a fire, is one risk that we face that is reasonable likelihood, right? It could happen. Um, and a really highly severe event as well. It could be of major concern to people, to reputation, to property, right? All of these things could be affected. And and so we've got to prioritize that. In many schools, we have another natural disaster of some sort: an earthquake, a tornado, a hurricane, um, a severe weather event. If you're in the Southern California area, a hurricane is now one of those concerns where you have both a hurricane and an earthquake at the same time. Hopefully that's a one-time thing. Um, but uh, you know, so we've got that kind of category or that concern. And then in most schools, we do also have the possibility that a person might be on campus to cause harm. And what we try to do is we try to bundle, and this is not to say that those are the three for you. This is to say those are often the three. Um, but we try to bundle those three potential scenarios, those three potential concerns that are reasonable likelihood, right? They could happen and very, very severe. And we focus in on how do we ensure that our entire community can respond to that event as effectively and cohesively as possible? What do we want people to do in a fire? We want them to get the heck out of the building. What do we want to do during an earthquake? We want to drop cover and hold. What do we want to do during a tornado? We want to shelter and hold, right? We go through those series and we say, what do we want to have happen? And can we actually teach teachers and staff and even students to proactively do these responses when that emergency presents itself or when that drill presents itself? And it's not to say they're on their own, because we still build in all the infrastructure to communicate to them and to help them and to remind them what to do. But in emergencies, time is life. And so what we want to do is we want to reduce the amount of time as much as is humanly possible before they start that response and reaction. And ideally, we want them to do that before we can even get the messaging out to them. Because our best-made plans, our emergency notification system with a text, a phone call, an email, a PA announcement, all those sorts of things, that takes 30 seconds to log into the system and to get the message out and to hit send. It takes another 30 seconds to 90 seconds for that message to be received. It takes another few seconds to realize you got the message, open it, go, oh my God, what's going on? Right? To go through those steps, it just takes time. And so what we really want is we want for faculty, staff, like I said, even students, to be able to do some of that work proactively. And so that's kind of phase one of risk assessment. What are the risks that we need everybody on campus to know how to handle? And how do we teach them to basically navigate those incidents until we can get the communication to them? Phase two is what do we do about all the other ones? Because it's not to say that we don't all have some risk of a student falling and breaking an arm, right? That's a possibility. We've got monkey bars, we've got swings, we've got all sorts of hazards, right? Like our car that we get into and drive every day. And so the next step is how do I take those maybe lower severity incidents? And I'm always careful when I say that, because of course, those are really severe when you're the person affected, and those are really severe when it's your child affected. So I don't mean to be dismissive as I say that, but I would say more isolated events, those sort of focused events. Well, what do we do about those? And how do we mitigate the risk of those things occurring? And just like you already have some sort of safety plan for your playground, or just like you have some sort of safety plan for your dismissal with duty posts, and you've got a specific place where every staff member is supposed to stand, and you hopefully are out there and saying, Hey, I'm noticing you're not there when they're not there. Those are the ways that we mitigate those maybe more isolated or you know, quote unquote lower severity risks, and and you're probably already doing them day to day. And so I would challenge folks as you're listening to this, and and by the way, I'll I'll kind of break into a really, really isolated moment in a second. Um, but I would challenge you to sort of give yourself credit for what you're doing day to day, because often, as educators, what I've learned as a non-educator myself is that we're not giving ourselves enough credit for the work that we do every single day. And so recognize and celebrate that progress and then start to look at those potential opportunities for improvement around our higher severity and higher likelihood events. But as we sort of got into this conversation, we were talking about threat assessment, and that always presents yet another challenge or another maybe discussion, which is that we can take that same risk assessment strategy that we just talked about using for your entire campus and your entire community, and we can apply that to a single student or to a single adult that's on campus or in our community. And when I say that, what I'm really getting at is there are times where a student or an adult in our community becomes an acute concern. They show up on our radar as somebody we need to be paying extra attention to, and we can use this same structure. What's the likelihood of something happening? What's the severity if that thing does happen, to try to analyze what we might do to support that person and ensure that they are as safe as they can possibly be and they're as connected as they can possibly be. And so I know that sometimes we in the safety world can make things more complicated than they need to be. This is one place where we can keep it really focused and we can try to reuse some of the same strategies for huge and macro community level events and also really, really isolated and specific concerns.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I I really like uh I had in here on my notes, ask about threat assessment versus connection assessment. So I think that's where you're going with that, right? Is that um I've I've heard you uh speak about that, and it was so the idea was so compelling. And I'm wondering if some of that comes out of your own personal life journey. I mean, I'm you just touched on it, but I'd imagine that in your early years uh you were at risk for not having that connection in your life, and then it sounds like you give your you give your adopted mom tons of credit and kudos for for your success in life. Can you talk about how perhaps personal this is to you?

SPEAKER_01 27:42

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we I I I'm writing a book right now and uh and and getting ready to push it out. And one of the things that I had to do as part of that process was um sort of go back and and and try to look at data on people uh of all sorts, right? The data that exists. And so, you know, that's job data and performance data and how people did in the school academically, how many people show up to school. And one of the data points I cite all the time is that the more like the more uh safe students feel, the more likely they are to come to school. And we have a direct connection to likelihood to show up at school and truancy. Um, and and I sort of reflected back and thought about my own siblings and biological siblings and said, well, you know, if they had felt safer, would they have shown up at school more? And and if so, would they have had increased opportunity? And and those sorts of questions have have sort of uh, I don't know, plagued me for some time. Um but where where I sort of activated or or discovered the connection assessment most um specifically, I guess, is the word I want to use, is uh as we were doing a quote-unquote threat assessment. So for those that that are are new to this language, we you know, as I just said, we kind of take that same risk assessment framework, we apply it on a really, really focused basis, and we say this student set made a threat to do XYZ. What's the likelihood that they could commit that or complete that threat? What's the severity if they do? Um, and so we were analyzing a specific student, and so of course we had the police department involved, we had the school psychologist involved, we had the health office involved, we had the art teacher involved, everybody's at the table, and we're all analyzing this one student saying, you know, is this student going to be able to come back to school tomorrow, or is there a risk that they could cause harm? And what we discovered in that assessment was that this student was going through a divorce at home. And this student had just developed a new, developed, maybe not the right word, but uh had a new sibling enter the home. Um, and so they've got this really shaky family environment going on at home that they were really afraid of. And so they were expressing it in some violent art and some violent storytelling in an English class, and they've been to the health office 15 times and A short period of time. And because we had the data, we were able to find that and we were able to raise the alarm and say, this is a student we want to provide concern for. But through conversation and actually talking with people who knew this student, we were able to say, wait a second, we've we've misunderstood, right? The data has not painted a complete picture for what's going on. Instead, what we really need to be focused on is how do we provide connection and support for this student. And I say all of that to say, in my own life, I, you know, I fit a lot of demographics for somebody who would be of concern, right? I'm an adopted black man. I was raised by a single mom. Uh, there are lots of reasons that I should be uh you know of concern according to the data that we would all look at. But that data for you know on me would tell an incomplete story because of the connections that I have had uh through my mom and through so many others, teachers and coaches and uh et cetera. I and the list goes on. Um and even some today in my work that I do day to day. And so, you know, what I I guess where I where I find myself struggling is that we can inadvertently either pathologize or criminalize depending on some of the language that we use. And as a result, really well-meaning educators will say, Well, I don't want to do that. I don't want to activate the threat assessment because I don't want to pathologize or criminalize. And so I'm not suggesting or advocating for actually a change in the process. I'm suggesting and advocating for a change in the name. Because, in simply redefining it as a connection assessment, all of a sudden we get many more people who are willing to go out and say, we need to do a connection assessment on this child or on this adult. And we can then start the work of how do we provide support? Because so often that's all it is. We just need to provide some extra support and some extra connection for that person.

SPEAKER_00 31:59

As you relate that from your own life, I'm thinking about, and I won't mention the particular school because it's not necessary, but one of the most high profile and worst uh school shootings uh in in recent memory from just a couple of years ago. And in reading the state uh congressional report uh analysis, um, I was drawn to the fact that the particular student in question who perpetrated this just horrible, horrible crime uh had been involuntarily disenrolled from the school district for uh truancy and lack of attendance, like in ninth or tenth grade, and then comes back a couple years later, returning to his, and I can say his because it's almost well statistically, it's almost always male, unfortunately. Um, returns to his fourth grade classroom to to visit this terrible event on the school. And that's not to say that every student who gets suspended is gonna come back and do that, but I think about that was just a poster child for a kid who had no more connection. You know, whether educators had given up on him or not, I don't know. I can't put myself in their shoes. Have family members given up, I don't know. But man, you know, it's it's hard enough being a teen, right? If when we're connected to other people, it's it's really, really, really tough. Um uh I did, I'm what I'm excited about your book coming out. I pre-ordered it on Amazon, so um excited, and I hope you are gonna consider. Are you gonna do an audible, an audio version too?

SPEAKER_01 33:45

Yeah, I things I didn't know. Uh, but you I'm actually auditioning to read my own book uh later this week. So we'll see how that goes. But but somebody will read it on Audible or one of those platforms.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Yeah, that's that's that's awesome. Uh I've taken I I've found that the auto the audio book fits into my life because I can I can listen on my commutes and my workouts. So uh there's something about that that uh uh fits in really well. Um I want to return to the the theme of 9-11 uh briefly. Um the 9-11 commission, obviously, there's been a lot written in the last 22 years about about the uh events of 9-11, but the 9-11 commission, the government commission, uh came out with uh a number of conclusions, and one of them was that um federal law enforcement, local law enforcement, and government officials quote lacked imagination in the run-up to the terrible events of 9-11. Now, obviously, after action is very different from before, um, but in essence, what the commission found was that the authorities were slow to pivot from what was essentially a Cold War mentality to the decentralized realities of uh the turn of the century and terrorist groups around the world. What role do you think imagination and adaptation play in your field in supporting schools and other entities in the safety and security?

SPEAKER_01 35:33

Yeah, you know, it's a it's a good question. I think one of the I'll sort of start tactical and we'll we'll zoom up on this one. So one of the one of the best ways to activate imagination for your school, for any school, is you have a faculty or staff member, and they're gonna come to mind when I when you hear this, and so don't say their name out loud. Um, but you have a faculty or staff member who is that like really negative, I'm afraid of, or or honestly, it's not even really as fear as much as it is like uh a focus on the bad things, right? And and sometimes, unfortunately for finance, it can be branded as the finance people. It's not always the finance people, sometimes it's a fifth grade teacher, sometimes it's a second grade teacher. Although I do find that it's it's less frequently, especially our youngest teachers, teachers for our youngest students, um, tend to be some of our most optimistic folks on campuses. Um, but and again, that's a broad generalization, so uh so please don't hold me to it. But but you you probably are already starting to think of that person, right? Where you say we're gonna serve pizza at lunch for the staff and faculty meeting, and they say, why not subs? Or you say we're gonna do an extra day of training at the end of June because we want to try to pack in some more training before the start of the school year, and they say, Why not move it to August? And they're that first person that pops into your mind. Well, one way that you can activate imagination is bring that person into your risk assessment. Because when you start putting post-its up on the wall and saying this could happen and this could happen, and this could happen, you would be amazed at the number of things that they have in the back of their mind that could potentially happen on campus. And it's not to say that you need to chase every one of those leads, but it is to say that you've got perspective there that you can then start to kind of fill in the gaps that may exist in the rest of your leadership team's planning and say, oh, well, I hadn't considered that. We are only a block away from an oil refinery, and it's possible that there could be a problem there. We're in a tsunami zone, and we there could be a problem there. You know, we're, and those are maybe more obvious, but if you were to say, well, it's possible that a member of our community could be arrested by law enforcement on campus, right? We start to get into these places where, oh, well, how would we handle that? Do we have a role to play in that? Okay, well, what about if that were a situation and there were somebody that was running from the police and that that person were arrested on or near our campus? Well, what if it was a bank robbery? Well, okay, where's the closest bank? Right, and you can already kind of find yourself going in this circle of hmm, where are the other risks that we hadn't pondered yet? And so I would say that's one way to activate imagination in your community and to kind of broaden that out, I think you know, we probably more often than not are focused in on the emergencies that we see on the news. Right? We're focused in, especially these days, on somebody on campus with a weapon with an intent to cause harm. And as a result, we can lose focus or we can forget that we have hundreds of people coming together every single day for teaching and learning. But as a result, there's going to be drop-off, there's going to be pickup, there's going to be lunch, and those are our three most porous times of the day. And they're also the times where we have new adults that are a part of the community: parents and babysitters, and guardians, and caregivers, and all sorts of other folks who are a potential risk. And so I think what I would kind of encourage folks to do is to activate your curiosity, activate your imagination around the potential events that could occur at those times, especially. And again, it's not to like sort of turn yourself into somebody who's afraid during those times, but it is to turn yourself into somebody who's activated, who's aware, and who's paying really close attention. And then a next step I would take is like every event that you have. And again, you can go back in your Rolodex or go back in your mind and say, what are the 10 emergency events that we've processed on our campus over the last three years, five years, 10 years? COVID's one of them, you know, check. Uh, but what are the others? And you can actually take those and then keep going with them. All right, we had a bank robbery where the police chased somebody onto our campus, we went into lockdown, the person was quickly apprehended by the police. Well, what if, right? And now we can start to sort of what if ourselves in a non-emergency setting, in a small closed group, preferably, not in a full faculty and staff meeting, um, but in a small space and say, well, what if this had happened? And then we can kind of jog our memory or jog our perspectives, get the group thinking about what are the potential other ways that that could have gone, and we can start to find our way towards emergencies that we never even began to think about. And that can be a really useful exercise to pull people away from I'm afraid of an active shooter, which is real and valid and present, and yet is is probably the least likely event by statistics to occur on any one campus.

SPEAKER_00 40:47

I really like the idea of the swarm of bees that you've that you've used, because I um I think mistakenly, or perhaps in a small-minded way and an uh intellectually simplistic way, I always thought, you know what, and I tend to be a type A personality kind of guy, and I'm like, you know what? Forget this drill stuff. Like, pretty soon, like by October, we should be pulling unannounced drills. We should be, you know, we need to see what it's like to be in the fire. You know, we need to see what it's like to really uh experience that uncertainty and the fear and and be forced to push through. And then you said something really interesting on a podcast that I'd like you to expand upon. You said, actually, there's a beauty that comes in drills because there's a learning that that comes, and we don't always have to go to the image of the guy carrying an AR-15. We can just use a swarm of bees uh to go through the thought exercises. Can you talk about just the power of drill and practice uh and how it can be meaningful even if we're not if we know it's not real at that point? And then also why you use the swarm of bees analogy.

SPEAKER_01 42:12

I mean, I'll so there's there's so much to unpack there. Uh I'll start with, you know, if you sit in front of a group of faculty and staff, as I do for a living, and and you present to them, here's what I want you to know, here's how I want you to be safe, and you use the word active shooter, you can watch people's shoulders creep up, and you can't see this, of course, but uh but you can imagine it. In fact, you might have even noticed your own shoulders doing this as you're listening. Um, you can see people check out, and honestly, you can see people go to one of two places. One, it will never happen here, denial. Or two, if it does happen here, I'm already not safe, right? There's nothing I can do. It's beyond me. And that is just absolute fear based and and and almost a like a give in to it, right? And neither of those are healthy, neither of those are productive, neither, neither of those are places where we can do our best teaching and learning, and where we can build the best possible foundation for somebody to respond to that incident. And so uh we experimented with this once, and we said, well, what if instead of using the word active shooter, we used a swarm of bees? And this was semi-intentional. We had had a swarm of bees the week before, I think we had this idea at one of our schools, and uh people had actually activated lockdown because they needed to get quickly all of the students that were on the yard into the classrooms, and they wanted to do so in a way that was focused and quick and effective, but they couldn't quite say, hey, everybody, there's a swarm of bees right there, and I want you to do this, this, and this, because that was just too much to try to communicate through one megaphone. And so that was an inadvertent sort of discovery of this. And we started to try all this with faculty and staff groups, and then eventually with student groups. And what we discovered is, yeah, you're you're addressing something that is different, but is potentially causing the same reaction. If your response is locked down, your goal is to get inside a closed locked door as quickly as you possibly can. And you can do that, you can have that conversation in a way that is frankly undeniable, right? Almost all of us can imagine that a swarm of bees could be on our campus at any given point. And almost all of us feel a sense of agency in that moment that, like, we can beat the bees, right? We can handle that. We, you know, it may be scary, we may be allergic, we may have students who are allergic, there may be all kinds of consequences. But we got this. And if you start from a place of confidence, and then instead of kind of starting from that active shooter, a really scary person, you introduce that later on. Once you've developed that sense of agency and that sense of confidence, well, now all of a sudden you've got a group of faculty and staff who are really engaging and who are willing to go with you to go back to imagination, who are willing to sort of take that imagination with you at the end of the training or midway through the training where you say, now we would use this for anything, including a person who's on campus with an intent to cause harm. But what I'll kind of pull back to is, you know, we often hear and see these drills occur where somebody says, I want to, you know, I want everybody to experience fire. And so I want to, you know, have a fire machine at the end of the hallway and have everybody walk by it. Or in one case that I'm thinking of, uh, and I won't cite this specific location or school, but a school in the Midwest said, I want to have people experience what it's like to um to be involved in a shooting. And in this particular case, they actually had police use pellet guns to shoot at and in some cases shoot people. And as you're hearing this, you're you're thinking, This is this is not good, right? Hopefully. Um and and the reality is, and I, you know, this is always this tough place, right? The the police department, I suspect, was using the best possible desire and goal and thinking that they could possibly come up with. And in truth, the police department, the fire department, EMS agencies, we train that way. But that's because the likelihood of us experiencing those events is much, much higher than a school leader or a teacher. And so, again, best intent, best strategy, best thinking, all that jazz, just the wrong audience. Had they been training their brand new police officers or uh training their new fire department colleagues or something like that, perhaps it would have gone differently. But where I go with that is to say, we want our drills to act not scary, not frightening and upsetting, and certainly not physically harmful. Ideally, we want them to be physically safe and psychologically safe experiences, but we want them to be an opportunity for learning. The very first drill we do every school year should be a basic fire drill. And it should be pull the fire alarm, everybody's heard it before, shuffle out of the building, do what we've done a thousand times before, take attendance. There are no gimmicks, there's no gotchas, there's no, there's nothing, right? We just do the drill. And then in our next drill, our next fire drill, when we do that same thing again, maybe this time we notify everybody in advance, we're gonna pull a student out of line and see if the teacher collects and and actually recognizes that that student is missing. That's a great test, by the way, to see if your teachers are actually taking attendance. Um, I prefer that we tell them in advance, at least the first few times that we're doing it, but it's a great way to test. But that way we're catching them doing something that they're ready for us to catch them doing. And again, I'm not an educator myself, so I take this with a grain of salt, but I would imagine that if a student was struggling with second grade math, that the idea wouldn't be to give them fifth grade math to see how they did, but instead that we'd maybe take a step back and say, well, you know, what are the the core pieces of this equation that are are causing us trouble? And we might try to find ways to break it down and make it more focused and more um attainable, and then kind of scaffold our way back up. And that's really what our goal is. Uh how'd I do, by the way? Is that reasonably close? Yeah. Um so our goal in in drills should really be similar. We want to break it down, we want to allow people to scaffold that learning from start to finish.

SPEAKER_00 48:32

It it strikes me in your description of you know, running into that that school in the Midwest where the response seemed to be or the planning seemed to be pretty militaristic. Uh, you must at because you your agency, your company touches on so many schools um and entities around the country, you probably run into different approaches, some of which are not totally aligned perhaps with the values of your company, uh, as well as best practice. Um, how does Jaffe interface? You know, full disclosure, for example, at Einstein, I'm a trained um Alice, uh, I'm trained in the Alice response, right? Uh active shooter response. Um, we've several of our administrators have done that training. Um, but if that's all you're doing at Einstein, then we're missing out on a lot, right? Um how do you interface when you go into a school or a district with other approaches, other philosophies, other mentalities? I've, you know, you can Google the safest school in America, and there's a school somewhere. Actually, ironically, this is not to knock the Midwest. My daughter goes to college there, but I think this was a school in the Midwest where it was touted as the safest school, and you couldn't pay me enough to put my kid there. Every teacher had these panic buttons, they had these smoke bomb things that would go off in the hallway so no one could see anything, metal grates would come down everywhere. And I'm like, that's not a school, that's more secure than most prisons. So, how does Jaffe enter the space and add qualitatively to the conversation and augment what's there? Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 50:18

It does, yeah. And I mean, we see the full spectrum, right, from our most traditional schools that have been often those that have been around hundreds and hundreds of years, are among those that are most change averse. Um, and and they want to be they're they're culture, right? Schools in general are culture-oriented organisms, right? If you if you mess up culture, you mess up the whole thing. Um, and so they want to be most respectful, typically, of some of the traditions and values and and strategies of the organization uh of yesterday and tomorrow. Um, and then we have our really um extraordinary, and I I would say some specific groups come to mind, probably none worth naming specifically in for this context, but you know, there are the sort of military or militaristic type uh schools, and we've all been to them where there's an armed guard at the front door and they're greeting you, and you can't pass go without collecting your visitor badge and and all of those sorts of things. And then you know, you may be escorted by that person throughout campus, or you may have a team of folks that escorts you depending on where you are and what school. Um, I've had schools that do, you know, that check every single car that enters for bombs, right? And and others that that wouldn't know how to check for a bomb to begin with. Um, and so uh the net is I guess we we see the entire spectrum. And I think you know, where where we we kind of have two entry points. Entry point number one is we know that all emergencies end in reunification. Every single emergency, the basic promise that we make as schools when a parent drops off their kid in the morning is we're gonna give you back your kid in the afternoon. And between now and then, they might be educated, they might be hydrated, they might be fed, they might be uh exposed to social opportunities, right? All sorts of other stuff might happen. Hopefully it does happen, right? Hopefully those things are not mics, hopefully those are Wills. Um, but at the end of the day, our most basic commitment is we're gonna give them back to you. And yet, in spite of that knowledge, in spite of the fact that we know that every emergency is going to end in reunification, most of our schools have not, when they start with us, practiced reunification. And we've learned a few things about that. One is that the better we do at reunification, the more likely families are to feel confident dropping their kid off tomorrow. Right? We could make it through the emergency, and let's use the bank robbery we were using earlier. There was never any threat to students, but you know, we went into lockdown because we were trying to keep ourselves safe because the person was on or near campus. Went into lockdown, we did reunification at the end of it, and we did a phenomenal job at reunification. Every single student was given every single correct guardian, and we went through the process, we called that night, we said just double checking, everybody made it home, everything's great. That family is going to feel, those families are going to feel that much better about dropping their child off on today's Monday, on Tuesday, um, than if we had that exact same scenario and reunification was led by the SWAT team, as happens occasionally. And by the way, sometimes they insist on it, in which case you're not going to win. But um, but if you're given the opportunity and you've practiced and you've got the relationships with the police department that they know you've practiced because they've been participants in that practice, and you say, we really want to handle this, and we believe we can, and they say, Great, go for it, but that's just a fundamentally different experience. So that's kind of piece one. Piece two, and this gives me chills to think about, but you know, we have seen these experiences where reunification is done from a fire station or a uh a Walmart parking lot or some other large location, right? An apparatus floor, whatever the case may be, um, and and people are going through the list, right? Is is so-and-so's parents here, is so-and-so's guardian here. And you know, you can imagine the fear that one would feel standing in that room waiting for your child's name to be called. And you can imagine the pain that would exist and only be exacerbated if you hadn't heard from your child and and if your child's name was still not called, you're down to the last few names and so on. And I, for the sake of this this conversation, don't want to like take us to that place, but but I want to name that if we've not practiced, we're at risk of winding up in that place. And so this is all to say that we we hold that as a sort of fundamental truth that if we do not practice reunification, we're not done. And so, our first goal with most schools that we work with is how do we design a reunification strategy that makes sense for this school? And then how do we backwards plan into it? And by the way, you don't need us to do this. Go to our blog, go to our website. Like there's a thousand and one resources. So, this is not me saying you should hire us to do it. This is me saying you should do this, set this goal, go out and accomplish it. Um, but uh, you know, what are the backwards planning items that need to happen, scaffolding items that need to happen in order to make that viable? Okay, well, we need to do effective drills. So we'll stop, right? We've got to be able to do our drills without reunification in order to get to a drill with reunification. Um, we need to have our emergency notification system set up. So we have to be able to send out a phone call, a text message, and an email that says this is where we're doing reunification, because often reunification won't be on our campus because it's not safe or it's not practical to do so there. So we need to notify people that we are in the Walmart parking lot or in the fire department apparatus bay. We need to know that our leadership infrastructure is solid and has some succession in place so that if not no Netflix reference there, um, so that if we you know need a number two or a number three or a number four to step in and take the role that our executive director or head of school or superintendent typically plays, that those people can do it. And so, you know, as we kind of work our way through that, well, now we can set a really realistic target. So let's do our reunification drill in 18 months, in 24 months, in 36 months. And I would caution you not to let it go beyond 36 months. I forget whose principle this is, but uh the basic premise that work expands to the time allotted. If you go beyond 36 months, you're probably just going to take more time to get to doing a drill. And generally speaking, unless you're a multi-site organization with like 10 or more sites, it probably is doable within 36 months in our experience. Not always, but probably. Um and so, you know, kind of set that anchor point, get the community excited about it, start talking about it. Know that if you have to move it, that's okay, right? If you push it back six months because you weren't ready, fine. But but by the way, one of the other backwards planning items is you've communicated to families, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're expecting of you, this is how you participate in the reunification. And so I this is a very long answer that's only half answering the question. I I'll come back to the other piece of it. But um, but the the sort of starting place is like we've got to get to an aligned goal. And that is true for every school, for every type of school, for every uh different strategy that might be used, lockdown, options-based, Alice, run hype fight, right? Across all of those different strategies, we know we have to give our kids back. And so I think we start there. And then I think the second piece, and this is really, this has come with the volume of schools and the types of experts that we're fortunate now to be surrounded by. Um, but you know, we we just held a debate, for example, on the difference between lockdown and run hide fight. And it, you know, as much as I would have loved to lead that debate, it was terrifyingly to me uh sitting in the center of Jackie Schilkraut, who has built the largest database of lockdown drills and basically the largest study on lockdown drills across the entire country, and Kate Schwite, who is the FBI agent, who created the FBI's active shooter response program. Um, and so again, terrifying for me because I'm stuck in the middle of the two, is they're seriously debating back and forth. Um, but what we try to do as an organization is to bring in those opposing voices and to really share those with our schools and to let folks know in some cases there's a governing body that requires one strategy or another, but in most cases there's not. In most cases, a school is reliant on consultants, on experts, on the police department, right? And trying to cut through the noise with all of them. And so our goal is to try to help do that and to try to present those potentially opposing voices and say, based on your set of circumstances, here's what we believe to be best and here's why, and to show our work on it so that you're not left having to choose between you know the Navy SEAL and the Green Beret, or whatever the case may be.

SPEAKER_00 59:28

Thank you. Thank you for that uh comprehensive uh answer. And I think it all of these uh points that we're talking about, give me, I'm jotting down notes on the side here for future work uh at my own end. Um how has the experience of being an author uh how has that been? Um I know your book's not out, but but um what what can we expect from that book and how has that experience of writing that been for you?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

You know, it um I I live my life as an iteration. And so, you know, everything I I'm just a full believer in interdisciplinary work and iterative processes, and uh, and so the scariest part of writing this book is that at some point I I stop editing and it's done and it's published, and and uh and so how quickly can we get to the second iteration? Um, and how quickly can that be released? Because the the value in so many cases is not, to me at least, it's not the the lessons yesterday, it's it's how we how we use them today. Um and so that part's been uh terrifying, frankly. Um, but uh the flip side of it has been I've gotten to re-engage with it's a book of stories, right? Stories of the last uh, we we called it the last decade, but really it's the last 15 years or so. Um, and it's a book of stories about specific events, specific incidents that we've responded to or we've participated in, or in some cases we've just learned from. And I got to re-engage with so many of the stakeholders and the people who experienced those events and say, like, where are you now? And what do you wish the world knew? What do you wish you knew before the event occurred? Um and maybe one of the most profound uh reflections, this is is briefly covered in the book. I wish I had done more. This is a great example. I can't wait to do V2. Um, but uh we had a student who experienced the parkland shooting, and one of the things we learned from her, she came out to talk to our leadership team about two months after the event occurred. And uh she I've done a bunch of talks with her since, and uh, and it she's just she's become a mentor in some ways and a partner and uh uh just like a source of hope, even. Um but one of the things that she said was, you know, we were in lockdown at that point for hours, and nobody communicated to us. They communicated with the teachers, they communicated with the parents, they'd communicated to all of these other people, but but students themselves had been missed from that equation. And so, you know, that's a a great example of you know somebody who we got to then re-engage with, we got to think about how she was going to be affected by this, but most importantly, that lesson that she's shared, we got to to pack in the book and share and and hopefully help somebody uh course correct so that should they be faced with that situation, they can handle it in a way that is respectful of and and mindful of the experiences that others have had. I think that maybe is the through line for all of this. I I I wish that that nobody had to have these experiences. Um I wish that we could be in a place where we're where we were safe. Um, but if if we can't get there today, then at the very least, we have to make sure that we have the benefit of other people's experiences and that we can learn from them and we can we can adapt as a result of them. Um and and so I hope that the book will help people do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:15

Well, I'm definitely looking forward to to reading it, and folks can check it out. I think you can pre-order on Amazon. Um uh so hopefully people will go ahead and and uh do that. I I just have a couple more questions for you, Chris, and I really do appreciate you taking your time and a busy schedule um today. I'm interested uh on the human level, uh, how you have time for things like um getting licensed as a pilot? Uh, I think I saw an open water certification for scuba diving. And I know you're a you're a marathoner, and I think you now serve on the nonprofit uh USA running, I think it's uh right. Uh how do you have time for that? And then more importantly, how do those pursuits inform and also complement the work that we've just been talking about for the past hour?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:13

Yeah, you know, the the time piece, I I don't know. Uh it's some combination of I I've found myself in the last couple of years, in particular, with an incredible team. Um, and our leadership team is uh a combination of folks that have been been there, done that, and been in this work for anywhere from 10 to 30 years, uh, to folks who who have scaled companies and grown products and and and really, you know, I wish I, this is one of the things I wish I had known uh 15 years ago, is you when you when you have when you're surrounded by the right people, everything gets a whole lot easier. Um and so you know, fortunately in the last few years, that's that's been the case. I found myself uh, in spite of me, surrounded by the best people and and the right people who can help to um to make this possible. And so that's allowed me to do some of the other things that I I have loved to do. Um it's it's not lost on me that all of my hobbies involve being away from my cell phone. Um, you know, I can't answer my phone in the sky, I can't answer my phone underwater, uh, and I try not to answer my phone on long runs. And so, you know, I think there's a through line that uh that getting away from all of that for just a couple hours here and there is is really valuable. Um, but I think you know, maybe more uh importantly, my I've been sort of down this road of, you know, well, like how do you how do you connect some of the dots from you know lessons learned from running a marathon to you know lessons learned in the fight of our shared lives in in the first couple years of COVID? Um and it it was just by coincidence, my last normal day before you know COVID hit was uh March 7th, I think it was, 2020. And I had finished the LA Marathon and uh and had a harrowing experience of sorts where my leg didn't want to work. And and I I found myself actually like hearkening back all through the first couple of years of COVID, in part because I really missed the days of being able to run and celebrate and do things together, um, but in part because it was such a direct uh correlation to what we were experiencing as a larger community. And you know, we were stuck in this marathon and we were finding people that were trying to sprint at times where we really should have been at marathon pace. And uh we were finding you know problems with our bodies literally and figuratively all throughout. And and and in so many cases, uh it was it was about making sure that we paced ourselves and that we could get to the finish line because there was one. And and uh and then we had lots and lots of psychological conversations around you know what the finish line was, and Amy Cuddy led some phenomenal work on that. And and so you know, whether or not we we sort of led our schools through that as uh as well as we possibly could have is something I'm still excited to to reflect on. I I still am debating whether or not we're there. Um but but I think that's you know the the greatest sort of power of those things is the ability to cross-reference and and kind of help tell stories and and keep the work going.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:33

Well, one of the most beautiful and also humbling bits of uh distance running. And I've I I've cut that way down on my mileage, but I've done marathons and half marathons before, and it is one of the few sports where there is no faking it ever. Like you could like buy cool basketball shoes and some shorts and get out there on the weekend and at least in warm-ups, like make it look like you know what you're doing on a basketball court in your neighborhood. But there's no you're gonna last one mile in a in a in a in a marathon or in a half marathon, kind of going above the pace that you're supposed to go or that you trained at, or maybe you didn't train at all, but it's humbling, it's gonna humble you, you know. And I I just that's the beauty of of I think some of these endurance pursuits, right? Is there's a lot of comparisons to and parallels to long-range planning. Like, you know, I don't care how cool your running shoes are, dude. You could buy the best Hokas or Nike, whatever you want to do, but if you're not putting in the miles come race day, it's gonna hurt, or you might not finish.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:52

Yeah. And you know, the the direct core uh you know uh correlation there is crisis management, right? You it you've gotta put in the work today, and and you've gotta be willing to manage your succession plan and develop your incident command structure and develop your leaders and and go through all of that training work today. Um, because when the emergency happens, you you know, everything you've done will prepare you for that moment. Everything you've done will help you get from mile one to mile five, from mile five to mile ten. And and everything that you've you've missed will will be present. And it's not to say you can't overcome it, um, but it'll be present and you'll be reliant on your team and you'll be reliant on the the runners around you, if you will, and the support system that you build um in order to get through them. Um, but but everything you do today will be there for you. And so if there's one thing you do, I I hope you go do something um to get ready for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:52

I I have one more question for you that's like a thought experiment. Before we get to that, is there anything that I haven't uh asked you that you haven't talked about today that that you'd like to share with the audience about the work you do and um even where folks can find you and your company uh online?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:12

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're so you know, as we've been talking about, our most of our conversation today um was focused around the preparedness side, right? What are we doing today before the emergency happens? Um we we do have two other arms to the business, and uh and we try to keep them to be our smallest arms because we want to do most of our work on preparedness, but we have a response arm, and so if you don't have a support system already and you're managing a crisis or you find yourself facing a crisis down the road, um you can call us for that. And we can, I always say, I want to be your first call and I want to help you figure out who else you need to call. Um, but we can support you from minute seven to year seven after the emergency occurs, and then we have a recovery arm, which is related, of course. Um, and that's really more like week seven to year seven after the emergency occurs. How do you rebuild? How do you rescaffold? Um, but our website is uh is probably the best place to go. It's joffeyjo-o-f e emergency services.com. Uh, you can Google us as well. Um I'd say my Twitter, my social media channels have been growing more and more over the last pandemic. Um, so on Twitter, I'm uh Chris Joffey, no, I'm Joffe Chris, on uh LinkedIn, I'm Chris Joffy. Um, and so those are probably the best places to get in touch.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:31

Great, thank you for that. Um, so the hypothetical, and let's see, you your headquarters is uh Santa Monica. Is that right? Uh so what's the closest big freeway? You got is it the 405? Are you five? 405. We'll say the 405 because that's everybody likes to sit in traffic on the 405. Um so hypothetical, um you Chris, you get the opportunity for a billboard on the side of the freeway, um, your own personal billboard, uh, that is going to send a message to the world about what you believe in, uh, what motivates you in your work, and what you think the world should know about that. Uh, think about folks driving by. Ideally, they're going 65, 70. Some days they're going seven miles an hour, but what does Chris Joffy's billboard look like to the world?

SPEAKER_01 1:12:27

Um you know, it's probably it's probably a plane taking off. Um and up in the sky, there's uh there's some lettering and it says have hope. Um, because I think for for so many of us, we we find ourselves at odds with progress, at odds with reality. We you know, we stumble upon a major crisis or or one of those isolated ones, right? We we see an individual student emergency that that just tears us apart. And as somebody who's seen far too many of those events, um I I can't shake the hope uh that we can do better and that we can overcome these concerns and that we can design a world that is safer for the next generation and safer even for this one, right? And I I've not lost hope for us, uh and you know, those of us that are graying and and what have you. Um there's uh I I I retain hope and and that at least so far I refuse not to. So I think that's probably what it would say.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:38

Thank you so much for that, Chris. I think it's apropos to the conversation and to the remembrance of 9-11 today and and um everything you've talked about. I really appreciate you uh coming on the show uh and just hanging out for about an hour.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:53

Thank you so much for having me and and truly thank you for doing this show.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:05

Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchal for editing and production assistance, and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.