Transcriber: Vini Premkumar Reviewer: Mohamed Salem
Hi. So I’m going to give you guys all a pop quiz really quickly.
Can you raise your hand if you actually looked at
the emergency exit signs when they were just pointed out to you a minute ago?
OK, that's pretty good. I see we have some liars in the crowd tonight.
I was watching. If you asked me a year ago,
I thought that the entire world would raise their hand because any time I'm in
a movie theater or on an airplane and my mom turns to me and she says.
Where is the nearest emergency exit? I always know.
But it wasn't until I asked my high school boyfriend something very similar,
and we were about to go on a hike.
And I said, What are we going to do if we get lost?
What are we going to do if our cell phones lose connection?
I just wanted to talk about it, right?
And he was so upset and he was so uncomfortable that
I wanted to go through these worst case scenarios.
And his biggest argument was, this is never going to happen.
So will you please stop talking about it?
And I was so confused, and I was I was shocked,
I was floored because I have spent my entire life going through worst case
scenarios. I always know where the exit sign is.
And I always think about what I would do if I got lost.
And we got into this huge argument, and we never went on the hike.
But I was really left with this realization that most people are more
like him than like me and most people wouldn't have raised their hands.
Now, maybe you don't think it's that cool that I know where the exit sign is,
right, like big deal, but my mom took it a step further.
And ever since I've been able to stand on two feet,
she has been losing me on purpose.
She's been putting me through these Real-Life tests.
Now I know what you're thinking,
what kind of a mother loses their most beautiful. Perfect.
Well-spoken, beautiful child on purpose, right?
But this was and still is very normal to me.
So any time we're in an airport or a mall or a restaurant even and
I became occupied with some distracted toddler activity, which I inevitably did,
she would just leave. She would walk away and she would watch from afar.
As I realized that she wasn't with me and I would look around
and my eyes would start, you know, balling up into tears.
And, you know, sometimes I would start crying.
But eventually I realized, you know, I got it together.
And I asked the security guard or a worker or a family if
I could use their phone and I call her and she would come.
And the whole point of all of these tests were that she knew that
I was perfectly safe while I did not.
And when that little girl grew up,
she matured from getting lost into malls to something much bigger.
And that story starts with a book called Into the Wild, and it's a biography,
and it's about this guy who immerses himself in nature and he finds truth
and meaning and purpose. And he also finds his abandoned school bus right.
And it ends up saving his life, and it's amazing.
And I was so inspired after reading this book that I said to my dad, You know,
we got to find the bus ourselves right now.
I will mention that this book is not an autobiography,
and that guy actually died trying to get out of the wild.
But that didn't deter us at all. You know, we're so cool, we're so hip.
We're so young and healthy,
so we prepare for months to be dropped in the middle of Alaskan wilderness
and find this bus from the book.
And when I say wilderness,
I mean, no trails, no footprints, no lifeguards,
no porta potties, absolutely nothing.
And like any good story, something went really, really wrong.
But we actually did make it to the bus,
and it was amazing and it was life changing.
And it was everything that it was supposed to be.
And now it's time to get back to our extraction point.
And we thought to ourselves, You know, we've already done it once.
There's no fun in that. So let's follow this random creek instead, right? Right.
Like that makes sense, Yeah? wrong.
The creek dries up. And we thought to ourselves, again, you know,
we must be pretty close to our extraction point,
so let's just let's just focus and stop filtering water
and push through this last mile.
That last mile turns into four hours of cutting down trees just to take one step
of our boots sinking into this mud and swamp terrain,
all while the sun is relentlessly beating down on us four hours later.
We have no idea where we are. We have no water.
My dad is entering heat exhaustion and suffering dehydration,
and I'm losing every ounce of optimism and charm in me,
and I remember thinking this couldn't get any worse.
But it did. It did get worse.
So for those of you who don't know what their spray is, it's like this really,
really strong pepper spray and it's chemically compressed in this aerosol can,
right? And it's so strong that if a bear is attacking you,
you spray the spray and it deters it, right?
So on one of these breaks,
I'm leaning against a tree about eye level with
the bear spray dangling around my dad's neck.
The safety pops off.
The spray goes directly into my eyes,
into my mouth.
all over the side of his body.
Now, bear spray on your skin is bad. It peels.
It stings, it gets hotter with the sun.
Bear spray in your mouth is detrimentally bad. It coats your throat.
I couldn't breathe. It felt like I was drowning. Bear spray in your eyes.
Is blindness, and despite all
the pain of this chemical seeping into my entire body.
I was blind.
And that's when my dad makes what he tells me now was
the hardest decision that he's ever had to make.
And he leaves me there writhing in pain,
letting out these horrible like primal noises,
shaking back and forth on the ground in the middle of Alaska to go find water
for my eyes.
Yeah, that was bad.
And he hands me the search and rescue phone.
And knowing that I didn't know any of the buttons or I couldn't see it.
And he just leaves. The fear and the hopelessness that I felt in
the hour that passed is something that I hope to never feel again,
knowing that you are more likely to die than to live.
And this fear brings up panic and shock and pain,
and all of these feelings are just begging you to make one mistake that will
cost your life. Whether I lived or died in the hour that passed became
a mind game and it was me against the panic and the shock and everything
I just described to you fighting for my life.
To list the amount of things that could have gone wrong would be impossible if
I tried to get up and find my dad or if I started rubbing my eyes
because they were stinging so badly or if I started making noise
and attracted an animal. All of these are just tiny mistakes that
I could have easily made under the cloak of vulnerability and panic.
But all that would have ended my life.
But as you could, probably, yes, I'm alive. Yeah, that's crazy.
So my dad, he fell into some mud
and we rub this like disgusting mud all over my face and I could see again
and we we made it out of Alaska. But you know, that's not the point.
No one cares about that. The point. The point is why?
Why was a 16 year old girl recently blinded and stranded in
the middle of Alaska, able to endure
the mental strain of thinking that she was either blind for the rest of her life
or going to be dead within a matter of hours?
And I’ll tell you why
it’s because all of those times that my mom was being weird when I was little,
she was actually forcing me to form mental models
and mental models are like crutches.
There are these things that you build with experience and with thought.
And when you're faced with something new in the future,
you fall back on what you did before and what you've built on what you learned.
So all those times that she was losing me
and she was putting me through these tests,
she was actually psychologically training me to deal with these same feelings
of danger and of being so blatantly confronted with the unknown.
So even though I had never been bear sprayed in my eyes and blind in
the middle of Alaska, I knew how to not panic and how to react
because believe it or not,
it wasn't that different from losing your mom in a mall.
As a three year old, you're facing all of those same feelings of panic
and of danger and just the fear. It's all the same.
And I knew how to react to that
because I've been doing that my entire life.
Right now, my mom is a brilliant woman, shouted to my mom,
but she did not invent this idea of mental models at all.
And my favorite study about it is
on pilots who have had to execute emergency landings.
And you can look at the difference between the ones who suffered
the most damage and the least.
And there's one thing that separates these two groups,
and it is that before the flight ever takes off,
the pilot looks at the co-pilot and they go through worst case scenarios.
They say, what are we going to do if the engine fails
or if we hit some bad weather and they just talk about it?
And just because they did that, they literally saved lives.
It's like they studied for a test that they didn't know if they would have.
Right? And I know that many of you are not pilots, right?
And I know that you probably won't be stranded in
the middle of Alaska anytime soon, hopefully.
But I do know one thing about every single one of you.
And it is that you cannot predict the future
and this this really isn't about losing your weirdo kid in the mall
and seeing what they do. This is about how you had the same chance as
the person next to you that something bad is going to happen.
But by just understanding mental models, you can prepare for it right now.
We as humans want to turn away from anything that makes us anxious,
like that’s why some of you didn’t raise your hand in the beginning of this, right?
You don’t look at the exit sign because you don’t want to entertain
the idea of using the exit sign.
But acknowledging this discomfort
and dealing with that worst case scenario is
the best comfort you could ever give yourself.
But so I want I’m begging you to stop thinking,
Oh, that’s never going to happen to me and start thinking,
What would I do if it did?
What would I do if smoke clouded this entire auditorium right now
or if my laptop crashes during this midterm?
And just because you did that,
you are so much better prepared for the future than if you hadn't.
And if you're anything like me, it might even save your life. Thank you.