How To Feel Safer In A Chaotic World | Dr. Raj Panjabi

Plan for the worst without spiraling, catch trouble early, and turn bad news into fuel.

Dr. Raj Panjabi, MD is the author of Safer: A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community. He served as Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the White House National Security Council (2022-2023) where he co-led the largest vaccination campaign in history against COVID-19 and U.S. responses to other public health crises, including mpox, influenza and Ebola.

A Harvard Medical School physician, Dr. Panjabi is the co-founder and former CEO of Last Mile Health, which has trained thousands of community health workers to bring care to communities beyond the reach of any health system. One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World and TIME's 50 Most Influential People in Healthcare, twice named to the FORTUNE World's 50 Greatest Leaders list, and to FORBES 250 Most Successful Immigrants, Raj has received the TED Prize, Clinton Global Citizen Award, and World Economic Forum's Social Entrepreneur of the Year award.

In this episode we talk about:

• Why denial is hardwired: the evolutionary roots of normalcy bias
• How pre-mortems and Stoic "premeditation of evils" calm the nervous system
• Setting triggers in advance to avoid both overreacting and underreacting
• Missing his infant daughter's heart failure, and what it taught him
• Fleeing Liberia's civil war
• The three circles of community
• Curiosity over control: asking "what's in the way?" instead of blaming
• Holding your purpose tightly and your plans loosely, especially in a disrupted economy
• Why to embrace uncertainty, and how to come out of it stronger

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