 The usual narrative about Katrina recovery is FEMA came in late, and we know all these stories have been messing up. What is interesting is people don't know what worked, right? It's much easier and obvious what didn't work, and the stories of the good stuff that happened are harder. You got to dig them out a little bit. It's a motivation for research too, which is you guys think you know what's going on here, but using this framework and this kind of evidence, we can tell a different story. Walmart as hero, right, that sentence right there is enough to turn people's worldviews upside down. When the storm hits, they have a major American city under water, and so the big question was how are you going to get water and food and clean up equipment to people in the aftermath of the storm? The first question that people ask coming at it from the kind of perspective that a Mercado scholar would do is what's the information, what's the incentives? Walmart's great skill is inventory management. In the 1990s, their ability to speed up inventory management was a measurable part of GDP in some of those years. This is what Walmart does, right? It moves stuff to where it needs to be. Unsurprisingly, companies like Walmart have their own hurricane preparedness protocols, and they were able to immediately start getting supplies into New Orleans and to the places along the Gulf to the east. One of the problems they had was that in a couple cases, FEMA wouldn't let them in. Walmart was sitting there with trucks of water and stuff, and there were these various fights. Agencies like FEMA lack the information, their incentive is to avoid error rather than solve the problem, which are two different things. That lack of information and incentives facing the public sector agency like FEMA is a real problem. Plus, they only deal with these things on rare occasions. It's not like they have a hurricane every single day that they have to respond to. Walmart has supply management issues every single day, so they're really good at this. Something like 110 stores were damaged in the aftermath of the storm. Most of those they had up and running within about 10 days. I also think we can't ignore with Walmart, too, that the management at Walmart sent a very clear message to their employees. Do the right thing, right? I mean, we know you're going to have to make decisions without being able to consult your bosses. One storm assistant manager in Waveland, Mississippi, the store was just flat. It was nothing. And so through the wreckage of the store, she ran a bulldozer through it, kind of scooping up whatever she thought was still usable, and just scooped it into the middle of the parking lot and said to people, you know, come get it. One place they broke in, the manager broke into the pharmacy, raided it for drugs, brought them to a local retirement home. The fact is they're part of those communities. Their employees live there. They have no desire to see those communities go under. So if it means we have to take an economic loss to do right by our neighbors, they're going to do it. And again, it's not that there's not profit considerations here. There's just multiple considerations. It's the idea that the Duke's Commerce thesis, right, that commerce civilizes us. It makes us more peaceful. It makes us treat each other better. For a private sector firm like Walmart, they know what people need after a storm. The classic story I love to tell is they know that the most popular food item is strawberry pop tarts, right? Why strawberry pop tarts? Well, you know, kids will eat them, adults will eat them. They don't need to be cooked, strawberry, because that's the least defensive flavor. You know, and they're not perishable. They don't have to heat them up. So they know this kind of stuff. They have profit reasons to know this. So I think the key is local knowledge. That idea, like we saw with Walmart, giving responsibility to lower level employees and recognizing the initiative there until we saw with the Coast Guard. You have with the Coast Guard a very decentralized organization, an organization with a strong culture of initiative in it. They have great relationships with the local people who are along the coast. And so one of the things they were able to do was get local fishermen to bring their boats and do boat rescues. Coast Guard rescued, you know, over 20,000 people and kept a lot of folks alive and did really good work in that process. For me, that's a particular point of pride, is that this research has mattered, right? It's changed the way people think about an important issue. How do people respond? How do they build from the ground up? What information did they have? And that's a very kind of Austrian school point. When we think about the incentives facing the political process, right? Facing the public sector. That's a particularly sort of public choice type insight. Some of the other parts of the project looked at the role of the church or these other, you know, social organizations. And that's a very Bloomington School, Indiana, Ostrom type story. And what's happened since Katrina is that a lot of local area, municipal governments and local disaster management folks have engaged in collaborative ventures with the private sector to at least work them into the protocol process and to recognize their role. But I think the thing that really sets this apart is what we looked for as the evidence to tell the story. We didn't go download a big data set. Let's go look at what people said was happening. What did the actors on the ground have to say? What were they doing? So that meant looking at media reports. That meant doing interviews. That meant getting oral histories. Doing that kind of legwork, that qualitative data type work is a unique thing, I think, to the Mercatus program, to PPE that differentiates our product. And it lets us tell stories that other people can't.