From firefighting to studying recovery failures

In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan Dworkis speaks with Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social scientist at RAND Corporation, whose work spans disaster response, risk governance, and organizational performance under extreme conditions. Drawing on experience as a wildland firefighter, disaster recovery volunteer after Hurricane Katrina, and applied policy researcher, Aaron explores why some systems adapt and learn after crisis while others repeatedly fail. The conversation moves across medicine, wildfire response, infrastructure, and emerging technology to examine how risk actually behaves in the real world.