Afford Anything - How a Blind Man and His Guide Dog Survived Sept. 11 — and What His Mindset Can Teach Us, with Michael Hingson

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

#749: Michael Hingson was on the 78th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit on Sept. 11. He felt the impact, but couldn’t see it. Michael has been blind since shortly after birth. Alongside his guide dog, Roselle, they descended 1,463 steps – escaping just before the South Tower, 100 yards away, collapsed. They then helped a woman who was temporarily blinded by the dust. Michael's story answers the question – What do you do when something terrifying is happening, you don't have enough information, you cannot control the outcome, and everyone around you is beginning to panic? Michael's answer is surprisingly practical. 1. Prepare before you need the preparation. 2. Know what you know, know what you don't know. 3. Stop mentally rehearsing outcomes you cannot control 4. Keep acting on the part that remains within your control. He had deliberately learned the World Trade Center's exits, emergency procedures, physical layout, and systems long before Sept 11 because he believed that was part of being responsible for his office. When the building was struck, he describes that preparation as a “mindset” that simply kicked in. ⏱️ TIMESTAMPS Note: Timestamps may vary slightly depending on dynamic ad placements. (00:00) Life before September 11 (24:34) The plane hits the North Tower (34:03) Fear takes over in the stairwell (1:04:01) Turning tragedy into a new career (1:28:02) Challenging attitudes about blindness (1:38:01) Supporting guide dog organizations 🔗 RESOURCES MENTIONED michaelhingson.com guidedogs.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael Hinkston was on the 78th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8.46 a.m. He joins us to describe what happened next. Welcome to a very special episode of the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything, which means it's a show all about making choices. and fear and hope and everything that comes along with it. Welcome, Michael. Thank you. Good to be here. Michael, September 11, 2001, let's start at 12.30 a.m. just after midnight. Where were you? What were you doing?

I was sleeping. I and my wife, we had two dogs, my retired guide dog, Lini, who now was more Karen's dog than my dog, and Lenny got to sleep on the bed, but my guide dog, Roselle, the number fifth guy dog, had to sleep on the floor, but she didn't seem to mind too much. But one of the things that happened with her after we moved to New Jersey is that she developed kind of a fear of thunderstorms. And so if there were a thunderstorm coming, she would start to shake and shipper and pant and the closer the storm got the worse it got.

And at 1230 on the morning of September 11th, she woke me up. She was panning and she was clearly fearful, and we didn't hear any thunder yet. She was our early warning system, and so it was clear, though, that something was bothering her. So since she woke both of us up, I told my wife I would take her down to my office in our basement, which I did. And as I was going down the stairs, I started to hear a little bit of thunder. But we got her down, and she went under my desk. anybody who says that God doesn't have a sense of humor

doesn't know what they're talking about because the thunderstorm literally came right over our house and it sounded like explosions. It didn't even sound like thunder anymore. It was just that crazy and that loud. But I did a little bit of work. I had a Braille embosser and I was printing some material that I was going to use

later in the day because we were going to be conducting some special sales seminars teaching some of our reseller partners how to sell our products. I worked for a company called Quantum Corporation, which was a Fortune 500 company at the time. And I was hired to open an office in New York City because Wall Street likes manufacturers to actually have a real physical presence in the area. And Wall Street kind of dictates what happens in the world, especially when you're selling to them. So we opened the office. I never thought I would open it in the World Trade Center, but there was a bombing in 1993 that

It wasn't serious, but it caused a lot of people to move out. And so when I went searching for office space and talked to the Port Authority real estate people, they, as I love to put it, made a big mistake by expressing that kind of a weakness to a sales guy who's trying to negotiate a rate. And we got a wonderful rent, and we ended up moving into the World Trade Center on the 78th floor of Tower 1. So we were on the south side of the building. The south side of the north tower. The south side of the north tower.

Anyway, so with Roselle at 1230 and afterwards, she was pretty fearful until the storm passed us by. And then, of course, she calmed down. And she and I went back upstairs, and by two, we were back asleep. And then at five, I got up to get ready to go into the World Trade Center. So you were on three hours of sleep. Well, I had gotten to sleep before then. You know, I went to sleep probably around 9.30 or so. So I got a few hours.

So I got five to six hours of sleep, which was sufficient. Okay, good. But speaking of sleep, I don't know if the microphones are picking up the sound of snoring right now. But the sound of snoring, if you can hear it, is coming from your current guide dog. He breathes very heavy. Even if he's awake, he'll kind of breathe heavy. But, yeah, my current guide dog is a black Labrador retriever. His name is Alamo.

He is number eight. I've had Alamo since February of 2018. In fact, I consider him a birthday present because we graduated from Guide Dogs for the Blind where I've gotten all of my guide dogs from. We graduated on February 24th, which was my birthday. Before you started working at the World Trade Center, you spent some time walking through and making a detailed map. You actually walked through with a cane, I believe,

and made a detailed mental map of the area. Yeah, it was even deeper than that. when we decided to open the office in the World Trade Center and we started that process, I, as you pointed out, started walking around and I used to cane mainly because there were a lot of things that I wanted to know where they were and the dog would have just gone around some of them. You need to understand what a guide dog does and does not do. Guide dogs do not lead blind people. Guy dogs don't know and I don't want my dog to know where I want to go and how to get there.

oh, if I travel one route long enough, the dog's going to figure it out. But I actually usually try to break up routes because I don't want the dog to know because that's not what the dog's job is. The dog's job is to make sure that we walk safely. So if we're walking down a sidewalk and suddenly the dog stops, I have to figure out what the issue is. Now, if we're walking down a sidewalk and I know that we're going to be crossing a street, when the dog stops, I can be pretty certain that we stopped at a curb,

although it's possible that we stop because there's something blocking our path or whatever. But the job of the dog is to make sure that we walk safely, not knowing how to get there. And I don't want the dog to know that, as I said. So my job, as the team leader of our team and make no mistake, it is absolutely a team effort. My job is to be the team leader to direct the dog, to keep the dog focused, encourage the dog, which helps me as well. And so we formed a team, Alamo and I, and I believe it takes a good year to truly get the kind of a relationship where we really know what the other's kind of thinking and we know how they're going to react in different situations. But I think it takes a good year to do that because the dog needs to learn to respect my job. But I also need to totally and truly respect the job that the dog does.

So we're walking down a sidewalk. Suddenly the dog stops. My immediate response is, not you dumb dog, why did you stop and let's keep going, but I have to figure out why the dog stopped. Now, there's that very rare point zero zero zero one percent chance that the dog saw a duck and wants to go visit, but they're chosen to guide because they don't get distracted by those things. And so there's really a good reason for it. On the other hand, if it turns out,

that the dog saw a duck, and I'll know that because the dog starts quacking or whatever, but I can tell you that the team is going to have a conversation, we're going to discuss the behavior of one of the members of the team. But the reality is that just doesn't happen, because we each respect the other's job. So I know that if any of my dogs, whether it's Roselle or now Alamo, stops or does something that I don't expect, there's a reason for it. And I'm going to work with that dog and follow the dog and go from there. It really is a teeming relationship that's second to none. It's a strong bond and it should be a strong bond.

Didn't you have one particular dog who kept running you into a mailbox? Well, my second guide dog, Holland. That was a mischievous one? Well, he was pretty mischievous. We were walking down a sidewalk and there was a mailbox mounted up on a pole. He just went under the mailbox. And of course, the mailbox hit my hand and I jerked back and I made him do it again. And he walked out of the mailbox again.

It took him three or four times to finally discover, oh, you don't want me to walk under the mailbox? Innocent little face that he had. But yeah, that did happen. And, you know, there is no denying that dogs have a sense of humor. Holland once got corrected for doing something. I forget what it was. I think he walked me through a mud puddle or something like that, and I corrected him. And somebody was watching this.

We continued walking. We were on a patio. I was going to the stairs to go down, but right to the right of the stairs was kind of a little ramp. Well, it wasn't really a ramp because you couldn't walk down it. But Holland led me so that he walked down the stairs and he was going to send me down the ramp, this Culford thing. You know, somebody yelled and we stopped, but they have a sense of humor. But it's all in fun. You know, you can't get mad at a dog for doing that.

Anyway, the reality is the dogs do have a personality. And I learned that that is the case. Roselle liked to steal socks and slippers. She didn't chew them up. She hid them. You have to go find him. Ha, ha, ha. She had that habit ever since she was a puppy, and I learned that from her puppy raisers, the people who took her into their home and raised her and taught her basic skills and so on. But the dogs do have a sense of humor, and it's fine. I'd rather have a dog with personality as long as we can communicate and the ground rules

are set and the ground rules are obeyed on both sides. That's what matters. And so this brings us back to September 11th. Roselle is very scared of thunder. The storm came right over your house. It passed. You go to bed at 2 a.m. You wake up at 5 a.m. And now it's 5 a.m.

on the morning of September 11th, 2001. And it's time to begin the workday. We're going to do something that I normally don't do on this show. Because the story that you're about to tell next, I don't want to interrupt the story with a sponsor break. So we're going to take a break right now to hear from our sponsors because what comes next should not be interrupted. Welcome back. All right. It is the morning of September 11, 2001.

It's 5 a.m. The storm has passed. And it's time to go to work at the World Trade Center. Start us at 5 a.m. I got up and did all the things to get ready to go to work, went downstairs, and we were on the second floor. I should explain my wife Karen was in a wheelchair, her whole life. So we built the house that we lived in, and there was an elevator so she could go to any floor, including the basement and so on. She also liked to sleep later than I did.

She also liked to go to bed later than I did usually. But anyway, I went downstairs. made breakfast for me. She was still in bed, but I went up when I knew that the car that was going to take me to the Westfield train station was going to be arriving and kissed Karen goodbye and gave Lenny my fourth guide dog now retired a pet

and then went downstairs and harnessed Roselle and about that time the car showed up and we got in the vehicle and went over to the Westfield train station. I expected to get a train, I think it was supposed to be at about 618 because I wanted to get there earlier than I normally would. I wanted to get into the office by about 720, 725. But wouldn't you know it?

I got there and was standing, waiting for the train, and suddenly we hear an announcement that there was a problem with the train and a new train was going to be sent and there was going to be a little bit of a delay. And the bottom line is that when the next train showed up, it was actually the train that I would usually take in. I could have slept later if I had known. But anyway, so we got on the train and went into Newark, New Jersey to Penn Station in Newark.

And from there I caught what's called the Path, Port Authority, Trans Hudson, which is a train that goes directly in our case from Newark Penn Station, making a couple stops along the way, straight into the World Trade Center. And it goes to the fourth sub-level of the World Trade Center, which is where the Path Station is. Roselle and I got a seat and it was pretty crowded, but it was okay. But we went in and eventually got off the train in New York under the World Trade Center, and then the path train goes back out to New Jersey. I mentioned before the job of the guide dog is to make sure that we walk safe. And so I don't always take, and it can be difficult, but I don't always take the same way from the path train to the,

the One World Trade Center lobby, there were two ways that I could go. One was through some parking lots up an elevator that would go to the first floor that would let me out inside of the lobby. The other way I could go was be to go out of the parking lots on the fourth sub-level and go to an escalator that would go all the way up from level four to level one. It would let me off kind of partway between towers one and two, and I would go over to the to the One World Trade Center. In this case, I remember that morning, I walked through the parking lots and just took the little elevator up. But I deliberately would use different routes because I didn't want Roselle to figure out that there was only one way to go. And there's a story behind that,

and that is when I was getting my first guide dog, they were telling us a story about dogs getting into habits. And there was a woman who lived in San Rafael right near Guide Dogs for the Blind. and every day she would go into San Rafael, and every month she would pay her electric bill on a given day. Then she would go off and do her business. Well, she decided on a particular day with her guide dog that she wasn't going to go in and pay her bill right away. She wanted to go get a cup of coffee.

The dog would not let her pass the electric company without going in and paying her bill. She couldn't go get coffee until she paid the bill. It's habit, you know. Right. And it could be... Makes sense. memory, autopiloting.

It is. But that's why I use different ways to get around in the World Trade Center. And that's hard. I mean, how many ways are there to get around in the World Trade Center or anywhere? But we got to Tower 1, between 730 and 735, and then I went over

to the elevators, went up into Tower 1, into the lobby. I had my badge that I could scan at a gate that would let me go in and get to the elevators that would take me to my floor. Our floor 78 was what was called a sky lobby. There were two of them.

There was one on 78 and there's one on 44. And elevators would go straight to those floors without stopping. Of course, I took the elevator up to 78. I knew where it was and where that bank of elevators were. We went on up to the 78th floor. What's fun about that is, of course, I'm amazed at the number of people that didn't really travel in the World Trade Center that often so they didn't know that the elevator went straight to 78 from floor one.

So often I would tell my customers who were going to be coming in or I would do this in front of my other salespeople and they would do the same thing. They would say, we're going to reserve an elevator for you to come straight up to the 78th floor. And they fell for it. It was great. Anyway, I got up to the 78th floor and I got to my office door and I just checked the time. It was 740 and I heard somebody else there and it turns out that it was a guy with a cart from the Port Authority cafeteria on the 44th floor. He was there because we had ordered breakfast for the people who would be arriving pretty quickly getting ready for the sales seminars that we were going to be teaching.

We have a major distributor, Ingram Micro, and Ingram worked with a lot of little resellers rather than us keeping all those accounts. Ingram was the distributor and they kept the accounts. They would buy products from us and resell them to their small resellers who would in turn then sell them to customers. And so the problem is that all the little resellers had never really learned how to sell the products. And Ingram had asked me in August of 2001 if I would do seminars to teach people how to sell our products. Well, I'm pretty technical anyway.

We haven't discussed it, but I have a master's degree in physics and a secondary teaching credential. I got my master's degree from the University of California at Irvine. I've always been technical. I'm a ham amateur radio operator as well. My father was an electronics and electrical engineer. We both got our licenses at the same time and had ham radio equipment set up all over the house so that we could literally be in separate rooms

and talk to each other, which drove ham operators who knew us crazy because I would say, hey, it's raining outside. What's the weather over where you are? And my dad, 30 feet away, would say, oh, it's really clear here. It drove people crazy. But the bottom line is that I was technical.

And so I knew a lot about our products very deliberately. because there were times that I could help solve problems. I was almost an additional pre-sales engineer, if you will. So I was going to be doing the seminar because I was the Mid-Atlantic Region sales manager. I was hired to open that office. I was hired to run it. I was hired to hire salespeople, which I did and others.

So I was the natural one, obviously, to have the major contact with all the people who would be coming to the seminars that day. We had 50 people scheduled to come to any one of four seminars. Anyway, the guy with the cart came in with me when I opened the door and we went into our conference room. I showed him where to set up and I went into my office, dropped off my bag. I got my laptop computer out and I also got my laptop projector, which had been in my office. And I took those back to the conference room and I set up the system because we were going to be doing a PowerPoint presentation.

Make no mistake, blind people can do PowerPoint just as well as you cited people can. We use Braille scripts so that if the lights go out, we can read our script in the dark, which is the difference between us and you have normal people who are light dependent, which brings up another whole story, but I'll get to that in a minute. But the bottom line is that I was able to do the PowerPoint presentation. I knew that probably I didn't necessarily have the projector totally 100% aimed right at the screen where I wanted it. but at 8 o'clock some people arrived

including David Frank who was from our corporate office and David was in charge of pricing and distribution sales and so he was the guy that did pricing models and so on and so David he didn't have to do much

but we did a little anyway he finished making sure that the projector was aimed just exactly where we wanted it and then we went into my office there were early arrivals from Ingram Micro that came with David so they stayed in the conference room and ate breakfast. And David and I went in and did some final things. And the last

thing we had to do before the seminars were to start was to create a list of all of the people who would be attending the seminars. What we had the list, it was in an Excel spreadsheet. Right. But we had to print it on letterhead and then fax that on letterhead to the port authority security people so that they would have a legitimate list that they trusted of all the people who would be coming so that if anybody came, they could say, my name's Elmo Schwartz, here's my ID, check the ID, decide it's a legitimate person, rather than having to call us up to get approval for Elmo Schwartz to come up,

since they verified his ID and his picture and all that, they issued him a badge, and then he could go to the appropriate gate, scan the badge, and go through and get on the elevator. They took him right up to our floor. Right. I was literally reaching for letterhead to put in the printer,

to create the list, when we heard kind of a muffled explosion, felt kind of a thud, and then, if you imagine my arm is the tower, the building just began to tip and tip and tip. We probably moved about 20, 25 feet. Now, here's the situation. When I first started working in the World Trade Center, I spent a lot of time learning all I could about the complex. I learned what the emergency evacuation procedures were. I learned where the emergency exits were, since I don't read signs. I learned what the fire department would do in an emergency and what the police did and so on.

And I also then learned a lot of places that we would normally go to offices and other things like that, where the restaurants were and so on. So that, for example, if we were having someone come up to the office and we were going to be showing them our products and then possibly negotiating a contract for them to buy products later. In the middle of the day, I observed, it's lunchtime. Anybody want to go get lunch and people would say yes.

I couldn't say, oh, I'm blind. I don't know where to go. Someone's going to have to lead me. How's that going to look if I'm supposed to be the leader of the office and negotiating a contract? I needed to know so that I could say, okay, what kind of food do you want? Deli sandwich is a great deli down on the first floor

called Fine and Shapiro, let me take you there and lead the way. That's my job. That's what any other leader would do and it's what I needed to do. Now, my employees swore that I was faking it and I wasn't blind because I always knew how to get to all these places. They were teasing me because they knew. But the bottom line is that I knew all of that and I learned it deliberately because I was the leader of the office. And on September 11th, as soon as the building started to move, kind of a mindset kicked in. I'm just all at once because I knew all of that stuff. And I knew why the building was tipping. Tall buildings like that are made with expansion joints. So, for example, if there's a heavy windstorm and you're in the building, you could actually feel it move a little bit

because they're made to be flexible in storms and so on. Now, we didn't know why the building was tipping and why I was tipping so radically, but that's what it was doing. So I went over and stood in my office doorway. David was holding onto my desk and just standing there. Roselle was asleep under my desk. Our other guests were in the conference room. David and I were speculating about what happened. We had no real clue. People say to me all the time,

well, of course you didn't know because you couldn't see it. Well, you know, I wish people would grow up and get a life. The reality is that blindness had nothing to do with it. It didn't matter that I was blind. The reality is the airplane hit on the north side of the building between floors 93 and 99, so I just say on average floor 96, and they hit on the north side. We were on the 78th floor on the south side. The last time I checked Superman and X-ray vision are fictitious, we couldn't see through

18 floors of steel, rebar, and concrete. The fact of the matter is that we didn't know. No one knew, and I'll prove that more in a little bit. But when the plane hit and was doing what it was doing, David and I, finally said goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78 floor plunge to the street because the building it tipped so far. But then it stopped and slowed down and it stopped and it started moving back the other way. I remember letting out my breath and finally the building got vertical again and as soon as it became vertical, I went into my office from the door where I was

standing and I met Roselle coming out from under my desk. I took her leash, I told her to heal, which meant to come around on my left side and sit, which she did. And about that time, the building dropped straight down about six feet. Why? Because the expansion joints were going back to their normal configuration. Most people wouldn't know that, but those are the kinds of things that I learned. When I was getting my undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics, one of the things that physics professors constantly drummed into our heads was pay attention to details.

You know, you can't just get the numeric answer right if you're calculating something and the units are wrong or other kinds of things. If you're going to do a solution to a problem, every part of the problem has to be able to be solved. So like acceleration is feet per second squared or meters per second squared. And if you're calculating the acceleration and you get feet per second, you did something wrong. Pay attention to details was always extremely important to be able to do. And that lesson has always been with me, and that's why I learned so much about what I did. But also, because I knew being the leader of the office, I needed to be responsible for everyone who was in there. And that blindness doesn't have anything to do with that.

Bottom line is, the building dropped. And then immediately, David turned and looked out our window and started shouting, Oh, my God, Mike, there's fire and spoke above us. There really is a piece of burning paper falling outside our window. We've got to get out of here right now. We can't stay here. slow down David I said no we got to get out of here well I could hear debris rushing by our window I didn't know it was debris until David told me that he saw millions a pieces of burning paper and they were coming outside our window

so I knew what was going on and I kept telling him to slow down our guests began to scream and they started moving toward the exit and finally David used what I call the big line he said you don't understand you can't see it well excuse me what have you been describing all this time David I didn't say that but that's you know kind of what I was thinking. The bottom line is I knew what was going on because David was telling me. The problem wasn't what I wasn't seeing. It's what David wasn't seeing, namely a dog sitting next to me, a dog who I knew what she was like when she was afraid. She wasn't afraid. She was yawning and wagging her tail going, who the heck woke me up? I was sleeping real good here, sports fans. What happened? And clearly wasn't bothering her. And I wasn't smelling smoke, and I made the determination that at that point in time,

we could try to evacuate in an orderly way. And I finally got David to focus, and I said, get our guests to the stairs. Do not let them take the elevators, because I knew that in an emergency, especially where there's fire, that if the fire got into the elevator shafts, which it likely would have done, and in reality did do, anybody in the elevator cars was doomed. So I didn't want that to happen. So I said, David, get them to the stairs. Don't let them take elevators.

Then come back and you and I will sweep the offices and we'll go. So he took them to the stairwell. And I called my wife Karen. She was still asleep. I woke her up. The media hadn't gotten the story yet because this was now 847 or so in the morning. So it was only like a minute or a minute and a half after it all occurred. I told her there had been an explosion or something

and we were going to get out and she said, well, what's going on? I said, I don't know any more than that. When I learned more, I can tell you, but I don't know anymore right now. David came back. We swept the offices and we went to the stairs and started down.

As I said, when I called Karen, she had no clue what was going on. I love to say I scooped Charlie Gibson in Good Morning America by eight minutes and I don't get any credit for it. Nobody's given me a Pulitzer. so, you know, forget them all. But seriously, we got to the stairs and we started down, and I began smelling an odor. And it took me a while to realize it took me four floors. And so

it was about 8.50 in the morning, I suddenly decided, I'm not kind of keep an eye on the time. And it was 8.50 when we got to the stairs. And there were a lot of other people on the stairs. They were speculating about what they were smelling. They couldn't figure it out. They didn't know what was going on. We got down about four floors, and suddenly I realized what I was smelling. and I observed to all the people around me, hey, you guys, what I'm smelling are the fumes from burning jet fuel because I did a lot of travel for my company up to 100,000 miles a year. I knew what airports smelled like.

And I was smelling burning kerosene, burning jet fuel. And when I observed that to other people, they went, yeah, you're right. That's what it is. We must have been hit by an airplane. You see, no one knew. And none of those people were blind, by the way. But the reality is no one knew. We were all on the other side of the building,

or we were in situations where nobody saw what was going on above them. And there were people from a number of floors above us that were on the stairwell with us when we got into the stairwell and then other people joined us as we went down. But we figured out an airplane hit the building, but that's all we knew because of the burning jet fuel. We got down about 10 floors to about the 68th floor, and right behind me then a woman stopped.

He said, I can't go on. We're not going to make it out of here. And I literally turned around and turned Roselle around and other people joined us. We literally had a group hug with this woman right there on the stairs. And I said, come on, you can do it. You can keep going. And other people said, yeah, come on, you can do it. We're all on this together.

Come on. Roselle gave her kisses. And she was able to continue down the stairs. And let me pause you there because right around the 68th floor, it's a little after 8.50 a.m. What was it about that moment? because this woman is thinking that she can't make it down roughly 70 flights of stairs. What was it about that moment that made her feel like she couldn't do it? Was it the overwhelming smell of jet fuel?

Was it the crowd in the stairwell? Well, I don't know. I wasn't going to ask her. I didn't think of that. But it could be all of those things. It was the fear. She clearly heard us figure out we must have been hit by an airplane. she probably felt she couldn't go down 68 more flights of stairs.

I don't know. The fear overtook her. That's one of the things that we deal with all the time is fear. We are afraid of so many things in our lives. We what if everything to death, and mostly we don't have any control over all the things that we're afraid of. Well, what if this happens? What do I do?

Well, did you have any control over that happening? No. why are you worried about it? You can be aware, but you don't have to fear. And that's what I've learned and discovered maybe initially sort of intuitively, but I realized that that knowledge is power. And knowing what I knew and also knowing what I didn't know, or not knowing all of what I didn't know,

but knowing that I didn't have control over a lot of things, there was no time to worry about them. I kept listening, you know, is the building going to come down on me? And I guarantee you I was listening all the way down in case the building started to rumble. But even if it did and the building fell, I wouldn't be able to do anything necessarily about that. What exactly caused her to fear? I don't know. But I'll give you another example here in a sec about all that.

So we continued down the stairs. And people were speculating. we got down to the 50th floor and suddenly David next to me suddenly said, Mike, we're going to die. We're not going to make it out of here. Now, I told you I have a secondary teaching credential and I love to tease people and say, part of getting a secondary teaching credential is that you take that secret course that no teachers ever talk about. It's called Voice 101, How to Yell at Students. And I got my sharpest teacher voice and I said, stop it, David. If Roselle and I can go down these stairs, so can you. Now, there really isn't a voice

101 or anything like that, but I deliberately shouted it David because I needed to break through whatever was going on in his mind. And he told me later that brought him out of his funk. He was imagining all sorts of things that could happen. He was just worried, and he was afraid that we were going to die. We're not going to make it out because that was his makeup. But me snapping at him like I did. As he said later, that brought him out of his funk. He actually wrote an article that got published in a Reader's Digest about some of that experience. He then told me, after I snapped at him, he said, okay, I'm better now. Do you mind if I walk a floor below you and tell you what I see on the stairs? And I said, no, if that's what you need to do. I said, that's fine. And he said,

okay, I'll walk below and I'll shout up to you what I see on the stairs. So he left and he went down. and so by the time I got to like the 48th floor, David said, Mike, I'm on the 47th floor. All's good here. Going on down the stairs. And I got down to 47. Mike, 46th floor, all good here. Walked down a couple more floors.

I'm on 45, David. Mike, on the 44th floor, this is where the Port Authority cafeteria is, not stopping going on down. Now, why do I mention that? Well, first of all, David was doing something that got his mind off of fear. But more important than that, David was shouting up to me, which meant that anyone, within the sound of his voice, heard somebody who was essentially saying, I'm okay, we're going down the stairs, this is where I am, and everything is good. He, by definition, had to keep hundreds or thousands of people from panicking because he was shouting up to me, but all those people could hear him. And it's something that doesn't get talked about very often.

David had to have been one of the major forces in our environment that kept people focused and going down the stairs. We got to about the 37th floor, and people were starting to get quiet again, and I was a little bit concerned about that, so I figured I got to deal with this. So I spoke up and I said, hey, everybody, I don't think all of you can see me, but my name is Mike. I'm blind. I got my guide dog here.

I don't want anyone to worry because if there's a power failure, we lose lighting on the stairs. Roselle and I are here, and we're offering a half-price special to get you out today only. And it made people laugh, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. And we walked down a couple more floors, and then I said, you know, they're not going to let us back in this building right away. We know there's fire somewhere. But when they do let us back in, because who knew, right? When they do let us back in, let's all meet on the 78th floor at 8.45 in the morning and walk down the stairs together. what a great way to lose weight, huh?

You know, and again, it made people laugh. And David was counting the floors as we went down. And finally, David got to the 30th floor and he said, hey, Mike, I see firefighters coming up the stairs. Everybody moved to the side, let the firefighters buy. You know, he became our advanced warning scout. Well, I went on down to where he was. And when I got to where he was, I said, so what are you seeing?

And he said, well, they're coming up the stairs. They've got fire axes, oxygen cylinders, heavy backpacks. and then the first guy got to us and he stops right in front of me and he says, hey buddy, you okay? You know, blind people can't hear. He's got to yell at me. He did, and he did.

He was talking pretty loud. And I said, look, I'm fine. Well, that's really nice. We're going to send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure you get out. And I said, you don't need to do that. And I was very deliberate about saying that. And he said, well, yeah,

but we're going to send somebody. We want to make sure you get out okay. I said, look, I got my guide dog here, Roselle. We're going down the stairs. I've lived away from home for a long time now. I hardly ever feel lonely. I'm really good. And he said, well, that's really nice, but we're going to send somebody with you.

What a nice dog. And he starts petting Roselle. It wasn't the time to give him a lecture that would have said, if I had given him the lecture, don't pet a dog in harness. The guy dog is working. Don't distract the dog. And that's a lesson that everyone should understand. If you see a guy dog or a dog in harness like that, don't pet the dog.

You can ask me if you can pet the dog. and if I have time, I will say not right this moment, but I'll take the harness off and then you can pet the dog because the harness is the symbol that the dog is working. And so I don't want people disturbing that dynamic. In this case, you know, he just started petting the dog. Roselle liked it. She gave him kisses.

It also wasn't the time to give him the lecture. Blindness isn't the problem. It's your attitude about blindness. That's the real issue. So I just said, look, I got my friend David over here who can see. David and I are going on the stairs together, and the fireman turned to him, and he goes, you're with him. And David goes, yeah, leave alone. He's fine.

He said, okay, I'll let you go. And he gave Roselle a few more pats. And then he went on up the stairs, and we started down. And David reassumed his scouting position to give us all advanced warning of everything that he saw on the stairs. Probably about 50 firefighters passed us that day, and they were all carrying their equipment. why were they carrying their equipment? Why couldn't they just pick it up somewhere in the World Trade Center

rather than carrying it up and down the stairs? The answer should be reasonably obvious to people. Where would you put it? Let's say you started on the 45th floor and fire broke out on the 44th floor. You couldn't get to it. The only way that they could have their equipment with them was to carry it. And they trained for that and they did that, and I knew that.

But I and other people said, can we help you guys do whatever it is you're going to do? And they just said, no, your job's to go down and get out and our jobs to go fight the fire or whatever is going on upstairs. And we continue down the stairs. By the way, time check again. It was now 9-10 at the 30th floor. At one point, going down the stairs,

somebody passed up water bottles. They had opened a water vending machine and passed up bottles of water. And David brought one up, and he and I had a little bit of water out of it. And then we made our hands into cups and gave Roselle some. Because it was getting hot, not really, because of fire necessarily, just it was all the bodies of all the people on the stairs. There were thousands of people.

So we continued down. Finally, David got to the first floor and he said, hey, Mike, there are water sprinklers on. Right at the bottom of the stairs, you're going to have to run through water to get out of the stairwell. And then David was gone. I got to the first floor from the second floor where he warned us, and I heard this torrential downpour of water. It sounded like a little waterfall. I picked up Roselle's harness. I said forward and gave her a hand signal, and we literally ran through this curtain of water to get out into the lobby. The water was there to either keep fire in the

stairwell if it came down the stairs from up above and that would keep it out of the lobby, or if it broke out in the lobby, it would keep it from getting in the stairs and being sucked up because the water was running, so fire wouldn't be able to get in. Well, we got out into the lobby. David was waiting for me on the other side of the curtain of water. And immediately I heard a bullhorn this guy yelling, go this way, no, don't go up that way, don't go that way, go this way, go to the central part of the building. No, no, no, don't go outside, go this way.

They wouldn't let anyone go out through the main doors to the outside, probably because that was right below where people were jumping and where the plane had hit. Wow. But we didn't know that. Then this guy comes up to David and me, and he said, I'm with the FBI, I'll take you where you need to go. And I said, what's going on?

And he said, there's no time to tell you. Now, I can imagine he didn't know me. He didn't know that for me, information is valuable. And I would have loved all the information I could get without panicking. And we went out through the doors into the central part of the World Trade Center, past the Ben and Jerry's ice cream kiosk right outside Tower 1. No time to stop for a scoop, darn it. But we kept going and we went through the whole complex and up an escalator by the border's books over on the other side of the whole complex.

And outside, finally. And when we got outside, I checked my watch and it was 9.45. So literally basically an hour from the time the plane hit and now we were outside. And throughout all of this time, I mean, while you were in the stairwell, there's no cell phone signal. No. And you can't hear anything from the outside while you're in the stairwell. No. So there's no information.

No information at all. and no one was for people who knew they weren't saying and I'm sure that some of the people that we passed or whatever the firefighters and the FBI guy knew well they did they had to know but they weren't telling us and before we move on there was also

while you were in the stairwell there was a point where a couple of very badly burned people came through right I forgot to mention that you know the woman I can't remember whether they passed us before the woman said I can't go on, I think they passed us first. And people were yelling, burn victim coming through, moved to the side of the stairs.

I think that that probably is also part of what triggered her concern, but I don't know. They were very badly burned. They were walking down the stairs. I'm sure somewhat in shock, but people were helping them. And they passed us and they continued on down. And they were walking of their own accord. They were walking on their own accord. but with various of your burns.

Because like one person, several times we've heard about it on the news, about a person who was standing in front of an elevator and fuel vapor droplets just ignited and severely burned her face and so on. You know, it's just kind of one of those things that did occur, but she was able to move and she got out. So we got outside, and the FBI guy and other people said,

okay, you need to leave the area now. But before we did, David looked around and he said, Mike, I see fire in Tower 2. And I went, what are you talking about? He said, I see fire in Tower 2. We didn't know. We thought maybe because our building, which had tipped toward Tower 2,

had tipped enough that the fire jumped across, but we didn't know. And just to clarify for everyone listening, you were in Tower 1. We were in Tower 1. We were in Tower 1. So he's saying he's seeing fire in the other tower, which doesn't make.

any sense. Why would there be fire in the other tower? We had no clue. So we just thought maybe the fire jumped across because we didn't know. So we stood there for a moment and then we walked over to Broadway and we started walking north on Broadway on the west side of the street. So if you're walking north on Broadway it was the left side of the street. To my left was a building to my right was Broadway and we kept walking north. We crossed several streets and finally got to Vessie Street. and David said, I want to stop and take some pictures of the fire I see in Tower 2 because we're really close to it like 100 yards away. David took out his camera and was taking some pictures.

I got out my phone and I tried to call Karen. I couldn't get through. We didn't know at the time that what was happening was that people were saying goodbye to loved ones up in the towers and so the circuits were all busy. I had just put my phone away and David was putting his camera away when a police officer suddenly yelled, get the hell out of here, it's coming down now. And then people just started turning and running.

And I heard this sound, I describe it as kind of a combination of a freight train and waterfall. You could hear metal clattering and glass breaking. And then this white noise sound, as Tower 2, 100 yards away from us, started collapsing straight down, doing exactly what it was designed to do, but nevertheless it was doing it.

People ran, I literally lifted Roselle by the harness, turned 180 degrees, and started running back the way I'd. came. So now the building was on my right and Broadway was on my left. We're running back away from Vessie Street. I thought to myself, God, I can't believe that you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And as soon as I thought that, I heard in my head as clearly as you hear my voice right now, I heard a voice that said, don't worry about what you can't control. Focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself. And I had this sense of conviction that. And I had this sense of conviction

that if we worked together, we'd be fine. So we kept running. We got to Fulton Street, which was the next street back. I turned right on Fulton because there was a lot of debris falling, and I was hoping that maybe getting a little bit more of a building between us and what was happening would keep us from getting hit by more debris. We ran about 25 yards and suddenly caught up to David, because he had suddenly realized that he had just run off and left me,

and he was going to try to come back and find me, but I found him first, and he apologized, and I said, don't worry about it. Let's just keep going. The buildings coming down, David. So he and I started running. Then we were engulfed in all the dirt and debris, the dust cloud of Tower 2's collapse. As David described it, the dirt and debris was so thick that he couldn't see his hand six inches in front of his nose. For me, it was so thick that with every breath I took, I could feel stuff going down my throat and getting into my lungs. I've never smoked cigarettes. Don't want to smoke cigarettes. And if that's what it feels like, forget. Get it. Anyway, so we kept running, but I also started telling Roselle, right, right. Remember,

the building was on our right, and I wanted her to go into the first opening she saw. I didn't know whether she could hear me. I didn't know whether she could see my hand signals, but I kept saying, right, Roselle, right, good girl, right, right. And suddenly I heard an opening on the right. Try it sometime. Walk down a hallway where all the doors are closed except one, you can learn to hear that opening and hear the open door. The sound is different. Anyway, I heard the open. I heard the and Roselle must have known what I wanted because she turned right, she took one step and she stopped and she wouldn't move.

Come on, Roselle, keep going. She wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle. She wouldn't move. Remember what I said about what guide dogs do and don't do? I suddenly realized, focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself, which is part of the message that I had been given.

I realized she must have stopped for a reason. So I stuck a hand along the wall, stuck out of foot, at the top of a flight of stairs. Roselle had done exactly what she was supposed to do. She stopped at the flight of stairs. And she was waiting for the right command, which, after getting a hug, I gave her, Roselle forward. And we walked down two flights of stairs into an arcade entrance to the Fulton Street subway station. I heard a woman crying nearest, somebody's shouting, help me, I can't see. I don't want to fall down into the subway. We came down close to her, and I was.

went over and reached my hand out and took her arm and I said, hey, don't worry, you're like 10 feet away from the stairs. You're in good shape. Because I knew the station. Don't worry about it. You're in good shape. What's your name? She said, her name was Carol. And I said, I'm Mike. Just try to clear your eyes out and see if you can get more eyesight back that way. And then this guy came up the stairs from further down into the subway system. His name was Lou. He introduced himself as an employee of the subway system. And he said, I'll take you all down to an employee locker room. So I asked Carol if she needed help and she said, no, I can see now. I got things cleared out a little bit so I can see. There were about eight or nine of us and we all followed

Lou down more stairs into the subway system to an employee locker room where there were already some other people and there were fans running, there were benches and there's a water fountain so we could kind of hack and cough and clear our lungs. And we stayed there for maybe about 10 minutes or so. and then a police officer came and he said you all have to leave you can't stay here the air is clear or up above now he wouldn't tell us what was going on we followed him up the stairs through that little arcade i mentioned a moment ago then up the last two flights of stairs and we got outside and as soon as we did david looked around and he said oh my god mike there's no tower two anymore and i said what do you see david and he said all I see are pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall. The tower's gone. You sure the smoke's not hiding

the tower? No, it's gone. We stood there for a moment, not fathomping what was going on, and then we just turned and continued west on Fulton Street out of the area. What were you thinking in that moment? Like, did that make any sense to you? The tower's gone? None of it made sense. And at the same time, you know, we were focused on trying to generally leave the area, but there wasn't really time to fear For me, I believe David, there wasn't any doubt about it, but there wasn't time to try to speculate why did the tower fall? We knew there was fire, but we didn't analyze it. There was no time to do it at that moment. So we walked west.

We went about 10 minutes. Then suddenly I heard that freight train waterfall sound again. We were in a little plaza, and David looked back and he said, there's another dust cloud coming after us, and we knew it was probably our tower collapsing. there was a small retaining wall there. We got behind the retaining wall. We ducked down. We waited till everything passed us by.

And it got quiet. We stood back up. David looked around and he said, oh my God, there's no World Trade Center anymore. And again, I said, David, what do you see? And he said,

all I see are fingers of fire and flame hundreds of feet tall, pillars of smoke. It's gone. And we're sitting in there thinking, three hours before we had gone in just to do our jobs and then in a blink of an eye it was gone.

No idea why. Had no clue. And so we stood there for a moment and then I decided I'll try to call Karen. This time I got through and as I describe it after kind of tears on both sides of the phone line, she's the first to tell us

how two aircraft had deliberately been crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania. That's the first time we really heard what happened. I'm going to cheat and just say here, we haven't talked about it, but I have a podcast called Unstoppable Mindset. And on September 11th of this year, I'm going to be, we've got the recording and it will air, talking to Bob Ellis, who was in the Pentagon and had just literally

walked out a door and was outside when the plane hit the Pentagon. So he's a Pentagon survivor, and he has a great story to tell. Anyway, Karen told us what had happened. And still, it was hard to believe. My first reaction was, how could anybody value life so little that they would do that? And I also immediately knew this wasn't a religious thing. No matter what they want to claim is religious and all that, this was a bunch of thugs, a bunch of criminals. We've seen so many times in our history where religion is used as an excuse for something,

but this wasn't religious. This was just a bunch of criminals that tried to get their own way. And I am sure that when they died and went to somewhere that Mohabin wasn't there greeting them and that wasn't the way it worked. They took lives. They took 3,200 lives that day. That wasn't something that any religion would condone. And they don't. But we couldn't figure it out.

We had no clue. So we continued to walk out of the area. We eventually got to Canal Street. we sat on a little retaining wall and I had a transistor radio in my pocket or in my backpack so I took it out and about the time I turned it on Rudy Giuliani came on and he was telling people if you're down south move north of Canal Street because we don't know if the gas lines will explode or anything like that while we were a canal we thought we were pretty safe we had no real clue what was going on other than the terrorists that attacked us about 1130 we got to

to a little Vietnamese, I think it was, restaurant. And I said to David, we need to eat something because we didn't get breakfast at the World Trade Center since we didn't get to go into the conference room and have breakfast with everyone. David ate a little bit, but he wasn't very hungry, but I ordered a big bowl of soup and we split it. And while we were sitting eating that,

suddenly we heard jets outside. And somebody ran out because we didn't know what was going on. And they yelled back in, it's okay it's our guys we have the skies they were air force jets david had called a friend of his named nina who lived in the university area of new york so 17th 18th street she said come over you can stay at my apartment with me so we started walking but then he saw some people in a van they were sitting there and somebody was getting in and he went over and asked if they might be going north and could they take us to Nina's apartment?

And they said, sure. And they took us up the rest of the way. And so about 1.30, well, maybe a little bit before. But around 1.30, we got to her apartment. She wasn't in because she had gone off to get food for us all. We stayed there, and about 10 minutes later, she came in, and we went upstairs. It was the first time to sort of decompress. You know, even so, how much can you really decompress?

She turned on the National Public Radio station. And we listened to interviews and so on. I called Karen and let her know where we were. Then probably about 4 o'clock or so, Karen reached back out and said that friends had told her the trains were running from New York to New Jersey again. And I wanted to get back home, needless to say, David wanted to get to where he was staying up in the Upper East Side of New York with his sister who lived up there. So we left Nina and we went to the New York Penn Station. So I went to catch the train going to Newark, New Jersey to Penn Station. And David then left to walk back up to the Upper East Side where his sister lived.

Was it hard to split from David at that moment? Because you guys had just been together all day through a very powerful experience. No, it wasn't only because we knew where we each wanted to be. I got on the train. People saw me all dusty and grimy because with the ones, water that had fallen, you know, between the stairwells and the stairwell, all of the dirt and debris from the collapse of Tower 2 and so on. I was really dirty. And a few people on the train said, were you down near the towers when they collapsed? I said, yeah, I was in one before it

collapsed. And, you know, they saw the dirty suit and all that. So I got to Penn Station in Newark. I had called Karen, and she said they'd come and get me because the they was a friend of hers from high school named Tom Painter, who had also moved to New Jersey, as soon as he heard about the World Trade Center, without checking or anything, just came down to be with either one of us or both of us, depending on whether I was in the tower or whether or whether I was home or what, because a lot of times on any given day I might not be in the tower, in the office, I might be out with a staff member of sales guy or meeting a customer. So Tom just came down. He said he would drive Karen and our accessible van to the train station to pick me up. And so at about seven in the

evening, I got to the train station. And as I got there, I heard our van pull up. The ramp came down. I went down the stairs from the train and across a platform and down the stairs onto the sidewalk and across and then went into the van and finally got to hug Karen and Tom. And Roselle got some pets. And then we went back to our house. So we got home. reached down to unhook Roselle's harness. I was going to take her out. But as soon as I took the harness off, Roselle would have none of going outside.

She ran off, grabbed her favorite tug bone, and started playing Tug of War with my retired guy, Dog Lini. Meanwhile, I went up and I took a shower and got out of the dirty clothes and all that and came back down and Tom had taken Roselle out. She finally decided she'd go out. And no one could make sense of it. It was just crazy.

Who would think anyone would do that? The next morning, I woke up stiff as a board because I had walked down 78 floors and walked all day. And as Karen said, you walk like a really old man, not somebody who's only 51 and a half. And I ended up for the next week using the elevator probably a lot more than she did. We both went down, we had breakfast, and she said, you know, you really ought to call guide dogs for the blind and tell them that you're okay. and I said, yeah, you're probably right, because people from guide dogs in San Rafael had visited us in the World Trade Center because they knew I worked there. So I called about 11 o'clock.

The person who answered the phone was the switchboard operator, Barbara Browning, and I told her who it was and what was going on. And she's, hold on. She transferred me to Joanne Ritter, who was our public information officer, who later became the director of public information services for guide dogs for the blind. she said you know do you mind if I write a story about you because I think people would be interested to hear it and I said I guess I don't mind I wasn't thinking and she said you know I'll bet that he'll be able to be on TV if you have a choice what TV show do you want to go on

first I wasn't thinking so I just said Larry King live that was now on Wednesday the 12th and on the 13th joanne called back and she said you are scheduled to be on Larry King Live tomorrow night on the 14th. They'll send a car to pick you up. But she wrote a story and the media, of course, really did pick it up and we got very visible and people started calling and asking for interviews and started being on other shows. And then people started calling and saying, we've heard your story, we've seen your story. We want to hire you to come and tell us what we should learn from September 11th and talk to us about leadership and teamwork and other things that you think we should know, because clearly you have something

very relevant that we need to hear. We got so many of those that by the beginning of 2002, a couple of things had happened. The first was that I had been invited by the CEO of Guide Dogs for the Blind, a new CEO, Bob Phillips, to come and speak at the annual holiday fundraising luncheon for Guy Dogs, which was in early December. Then Bob also pointed out that Guy Dogs had a float in the Rose Parade coming up, and they wanted me to be on that float. Anyway, we came back out for the float, and while out, Bob said, I want you to become our public spokesperson.

So I agreed to do that, which meant we would move back to California, which Karen loved because she was a native. And even though I was born in Chicago, I spent most of my life in California, but I wasn't there for the first five years, so I couldn't be a native. she wouldn't let me. Anyway, he offered that, but also people had been calling, and I had decided to travel and be a keynote speaker. And as Karen and I decided selling life and philosophy was a whole lot more rewarding and relevant in the world than being a computer hardware sales manager and selling computer hardware for a living. So we combined those two careers, and so we moved

back to California, and I was the National Public Affairs Director for Guy Dogs for the Blind until the middle of 2008. And then a new CEO had joined the organization and Bob had left in late 2007. And I was called into the office of the CEO in like April of 2008. And she said, nobody's interested in the World Trade Center anymore, so we're phasing out your job.

And I said, well, you know, you can. I think people are interested. Well, no, they're not. I think there was a lot of politics there, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, I continue to be a keynote speaker and I continue to be a keynote speaker till this day. I've been traveling and talking about teamwork and trust,

talking about leadership, talking about resilience and so many other kinds of things, because what happened with Roselle and all of my guide dogs is it's a team relationship. And I learned a lot more about teamwork and trust from eight guide dogs than I would ever learn from Ken Blancher, Tony Robbins, all the leadership and management, and motivational people and so on,

because it's really living it with a guide dog, working with a creature that speaks a completely different language and thinks entirely different, but the reality is you can learn to communicate, and the two of you working together can have a great relationship, and that's what we had. You said it was important that on September 11th, when you came home, the moment that you took off the harness.

Right, and I'll tell you that now. The day afterward, when I called guide dogs, I also said I want to talk to one of the veterinarians. They had veterinarian came on, and I told him a little bit of what happened, and I said, how do you think this will affect Roselle? And his question was, did anything threaten Roselle directly? And I said, no, nothing did. Nothing came at her, nothing like that, nothing that would cause any kind of reaction.

She just worked really well. And he said, well, there's your answer. Dogs don't what if they live in the moment. we would if everything to death, which causes us to have so much more fear than we need to have, it was over for Roselle. That's why she wanted to go off and play. It was done, which was true. The next year in December of 2002, we went to the American Kennel Club K9 Yucanuba Awards

because Roselle was going to be given an award for her bravery and all the work that she did. And while there I met George Berger, who was the publisher of the AKC Gazette. and George said, you ought to write a book. I said, I hadn't thought about writing a book. And he said, you should. Well, he and I kept in touch, and he had an agent who wanted me to write a business book. And I said, I don't want to write a business book. I want to write a general book that people will read.

And I've been taking a lot of notes and thinking about the format. And then in 2010, I got a phone call on a Sunday afternoon, and a woman identified herself as Susie Florey. And Susie was writing a book called Dog Tales. It was going to be 17 chapters. each chapter about a different dog and she wanted to include Roselle. And she hadn't heard a lot about my story. So she said, can you tell me your story? Well, I told her probably almost as long as we've been talking about

what happened. And when I was done, there was this pause for a moment. And then she said, you got to write a book. And I want to help you write it because I'm a professional writer. And I have an agent and I think we can make him interested in it. So the next day, she and I called her agent, Chip McGregor, and talked a little bit, and he said, well, I don't want a 9-11 book. I said, good, I don't either. I want a book that's going to teach people about blindness. That blindness isn't the issue. I want to tell people what happened to me, but why it happened and why things went the way they did. He said, well, write a proposal and send it over and I'll

look at it. And Susie and I wrote a book proposal and sent it to him. All I can say is when he called us on the phone, he was bouncing off all the walls. He loved it. And in less than a week, we had a contract with Thomas Nelson publishing, which is now part of Harper Collins. And we wrote Thunderdog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog, and the triumph of trust at Ground Zero, which was published in August of 2011. Now, it was published, I think, on the second, and on the 11, we were in our home in Novado, California, because when the job ended at guide dogs, we just stayed where we were, and I was able to do a couple things to function in our moment. a living one was a lot of speaking, but I also was asked by the president of the National Federation

of the Blind, Dr. Mark Maurer, to coordinate distribution and sales of a product called the KNFB Reader mobile. And I can describe that in a moment, but it's actually an app on a cell phone that could take a picture of a page of material, whether it was print or typed or whatever, and it would read it out loud. But anyway, on the 11th of August, we got this call and it was among other things the editor who had worked with us on the book. They said, we've got to tell you something, but you got to sit down. And he sounded all horrible and sad and all that. And I said, well, Karen's sitting. Does that count? Of course, they knew she was in a wheelchair. They said, no, you got to sit too. Well, I was sitting. So I just waited for a second. They said, okay, I'm sitting now. And the next words out of their mouth was,

in its first week out, Thunderdog is on the New York Times bestseller list. They were bouncing off the walls. We all celebrated and so on. When the pandemic occurred in 2020, I knew that people were going to fear it. And I realized that I had been talking about how I survived with the World Trade Center for at that time 20 years. But I had not really taught other people how to learn to control fear. And I knew that fear was something that you can control. It doesn't need to be a natural reaction that as soon as something happens, you go all paranoid and you can't make decisions. Seal teams, military teams, so many people learn how to control fear. They don't say it doesn't happen, but they do say you can control it.

And you can make fear a very powerful tool to help you focus. So I decided that I really wanted to teach people how they could learn to control fear and get away from what ifing everything to death, for example. And so I started writing a book, and I worked with a friend of Susie's because I love collaboration, Carrie Wyatt Kent. The book was entitled, Live Like a Guy Dog, True Stories from a Blind Man and His Dogs about being brave, overcoming adversity, and moving forward in faith. And we talked about bravery. We talked about teamwork. We talked about resilience.

We talked about so many things that people could do to make their own lives a lot more focused. not fear so many things. How many people will do it? I can only hope everybody does, but that's still something that isn't happening probably as much as it should. In reality, we can learn to control things. Right after September 11th, I started reacting, at least internally, every time I heard people say, we got to get back to normal, we can't let this happen again, we got to get back to normal. It took me a while to realize why I became so frustrated and upset when I heard that. what I realized was normal will never be the same again. We can't get back to normal.

If we do the same thing is going to happen again. It's different. And for a while, this whole country was unified, and then politicians started to mess that up, which is unfortunate. But the reality is that normal would never be the same again. And the other thing, as I mentioned that I heard from God, focus on what you can control. Don't worry about the things that you can't control.

focus on what you can. The rest will take care of itself. You don't have to fear them. And so those are things that I do talk about regularly. We started this conversation with the story of how Roselle was really scared of thunder. So much so that she woke you up shortly after midnight. Right. And you had to sit with her until 2 a.m.

Right. And what was remarkable was that as the North Tower, tilted so far that you thought the tower might fall to the ground while you were in it. I mean, as that was happening, she was snoozing under the desk. And then even with the scent of jet fuel, and you think about how sensitive a dog's nose is, even with the scent of jet fuel filling the stairwell and thousands of people packed in there, she was calm throughout that. How do you contrast the fear she has around thunder, but then the total,

calm that she had during 9-11. So two comments. One, what happened at 1230 was thunder and lightning. And the reason that she detected it so far in advance is that a static charge started kind of building up on her fur and she had a kind of prickly feeling. And she associated that with thunder. That was probably what gave her her first warning that something was going on and she woke me up. But on September 11th at the World Trade Center, that wasn't thunder. It was totally different. And as we were going down the stairs, I knew that my job was to keep her focused and calm. And so all the way down, I kept saying, good girl, Roselle, what a good dog. Keep going, what a wonderful dog.

Good girl. You're doing fine. Good girl. Because I had to transmit the message to her that I was okay and keep her from being stressed. I believe that's extremely important always. I don't want her to be stressed or any of my guide dogs to be stressed. and the reality is guiding is a very stressful job. The dogs take it so seriously.

They'll work until they drop. Several years later, I spoke in Kansas City. A woman came up to me, and she said, you know, it was like about the 54th floor in the World Trade Center or the 52nd floor. You just passed the doorway, and we heard you talking to your dog and saying, what a good dog she was and so on.

We just decided if you could do that and be calm, we're going to follow you and they followed us and so many other people did the same thing. Because I was keeping Roselle focused and she just did a great job. So she had to sense that a lot of people were afraid, but she's looking to me. If I had been stressed, it would have been a totally different situation. Or if I had acted stressed. How would that have been, like, piece of picture. Well, she would have become fearful.

She would have started shaking and, you know, who knows. Certainly her heart would have raced and, you know, any number of different things could have happened she'd have been worried about me because she expects me to be the focused one. Right. And that keeps her going. That's my job. And so when people talk about the guide dog led you down the stairs, that's not true, but it's also true that it's a team effort.

So it almost sounds like mutuality. You and Roselle have a mutual responsibility to each other. It's a team relationship in every sense of the word. It is as close-knit of a team as you will ever see. and it's mutual respect, mutual responsibility. I'm sure we think of it differently, but nevertheless, that's what we have. And that's what I have with Alamo down here,

and I have with all of my guide dogs. It's the way it's supposed to be. If Roselle had been stressed, or if Roselle had been worried about you, what would that have looked like? It's an interesting question. How would she, well, let me do it this way. There were times that we were walking,

where there were thunderstorms around us. And she was worried, she was nervous, she was shaking a little bit, but she guided through it. She continued to work, and I encouraged her. So I think that no matter what had happened or what could have happened,

she would have been able to work through it as long as I continued to support her. If I weren't supporting her, it would have been a totally different thing. But that was what my job was, was to support her. And as long as I did that, she would do her part.

That's the relationship, that's the love, that's the admiration. That is just all of the kinds of thoughts that we have about each other. That's what teamwork is really all about. And she didn't even steal any socks when we got home that night. For me, you know, people ask me, you know, how has this changed your life? And my response is, it isn't so much that it changed my life. Yeah, it did. I have a different career.

or maybe not because I'm used to speaking on any given day when I was in sales, I could be speaking to members of the board of a company or to IT people or whatever. But what happened on September 11th to me was a validation of my beliefs of everything that I thought. When I was born, I was born two months premature in Chicago. Medical science had been alerted to the fact that a premature, child put in a pure oxygen environment could see their retinas misform and they might become blind because of it. But most people in medical science didn't believe it. They couldn't accept that even too much

oxygen could be a bad thing, right? At four months of age, one of my aunts, who was also living near us in Chicago, Aunt Shirley, was at our house and she said to my mom, Sarah, I think Mikey is blind. she called me Mikey and my mom said why and she said he's playing in the sunlight and he's not reacting to the bright light at all well they took me to the hospital

and the doctor's diagnosed and said yeah he's blind send him to a home for handicapped children because your son will never be able to grow up and do anything or amount to anything and he's going to be a drain on you he's going to be a drain on your family and he's going to suck up all the love that you

even have for your older son two years older than me who was cited and my parents said no you are wrong he can grow up to do anything he wants to do and we're going to give him that opportunity and i don't remember how old i was maybe nine or ten when they told me about that story maybe i was even younger but they told the learned medical profession in chicago that they didn't that the medical people didn't know what they were talking about and they brought me up that way And I've always believed blindness isn't the problem. It's societal attitudes about blindness that continue to be the problem.

That's why we still have an unemployment rate among unemployable blind people near 70%. The fact of the matter is it's not that we can't work. It's that people think we can't work. We had to fight for years to get legislation passed because insurance companies weren't giving us life insurance. They said, you're a higher risk. but they didn't use any of their normal precepts to make that determination. They had no mathematical evidence. They had no statistical models.

They were using basic prejudice that blindness is a big problem. And Karen, being a person in a wheelchair, who had scar tissue on her spinal cords, so there was no other kind of disease or anything. She couldn't buy insurance. When we learned that they were really doing this basically only out of prejudice, I and others in the National Federation of the Blind and others started working to get legislation passed in every state in the union that said, you can't discriminate unless you've got actuarial statistics or evidentiary data.

And to this day, 41 years after the last law was passed, nobody's come up with any proof that we're a risk because we're not. It doesn't have anything to do with any of that. People fear difference. Now, I was in a hotel in 2023. My aide, Josie Rinozo, had entered me into a contest to win tickets to go to the Kelly and Ryan live after party. Uh-huh. After the Oscar party.

And so the Tuesday before the party, I get this call and somebody says, congratulations. I says, for what? Well, because you won tickets to the after party. party. I didn't know anything about it, and I got Josie to fess up. She has five children and a husband, and we only could get three tickets. So my niece and nephew and I went down, and it was Saturday afternoon about three. We got to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and checked in, went up and dropped off our luggage in our room, and then we were coming back down the main stairway. Suddenly about

halfway down, I hear people screaming. And I asked my niece, Tracy, what are they screaming about? We just lost power in and around the hotel. It's dark and all that. But remember what I said. The first floor was there. It's the hotel. Tons of windows, lots of light coming in, but it wasn't the light that everybody expected.

They lost their ability to have light on demand. And they were panicky over it. And I realized that in reality, that is as much, no matter what anyone says, that is as much a disability as, me being light independent, if you will. The fact of the matter is Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb and others involved invented the electric light bulb in 1878.

If you use the terminology of the Americans with Disabilities Act as a guide for this, they invented the light bulb as a reasonable accommodation to provide light on demand to people who are light dependent. And that's what it was. And for the last 148 years, we have worked to continuously make light on demand more readily available to people who need it. It doesn't mean, though, that your disability isn't there. The fact is that the light on demand covers it up until you lose power and don't have a smartphone or a flashlight nearby.

But disability is not a lack of ability. That doesn't mean that I have any less or more of a disability than anyone else says. And I mentioned earlier that unstoppable mindset where inclusion, diversity in the unexpected meet. And I word it that way because all my diversity friends, when we have diversity people come on the podcast and we talk about what they do, they never mention disabilities. And I ask why, and they say, oh, because that's not really a minority. It's a social justice thing. And I said, the heck with you, of course it's a minority. The CDC says up to 25% of all people have some sort of a disability. Of course it's a minority.

They say, well, okay, but disability begins with dis, which means it's a lack of ability. I said, well, what about discern, discreet? What about disciple? Is disciple a lack of Iple. It doesn't matter whether it begins with DIS. It's not a lack of ability. Disability is a characteristic that every single person on the planet has, and we need to recognize that the only thing about it is it manifests itself differently for different people. But don't think that you are better or worse than I simply because your disability is different than mine, and there are a whole lot more people who have your disability that has covered up by light on demand. the fact of the matter is it's still there.

I love the phrase light dependent. Light dependent. Yeah, versus light independent. Exactly. Blindness isn't the problem. It's societal attitudes. And we need to have that changed. And it's hopefully something that will come out on this podcast.

Hopefully people will think about it. We all have characteristics. And we don't all have the same characteristic. That's okay. There are people who are left-handed. I'm sure there's some people who are right-handed. to think that if you're left-handed, you're defunct in some way, but not true. They call us visually impaired.

They used to call people who were deaf or hard of hearing, hearing impaired. If you say that to a deaf person today, they're liable to bust you right in the job, because they recognize we're not impaired because we can't hear. Deaf or heart of hearing is the right terminology. And we've been working to deal with that with blindness. All the professionals in the field came up with this thing visually impaired. which is wrong on so many levels. First of all, visually, I'm not different simply because I'm blind.

They shouldn't even be using that. But impaired, I'm not because I am blind. That isn't the issue. It's what I decided to do with my life, and my parents had the right attitude. We're going to give him the opportunity to do whatever he chooses. I wrote a bike when I was growing up. I rode bikes to school. I've driven a Tesla down I-15 over here.

Didn't you fly a plane once? I flew a plane once. I was traveling up to do a speech. I got to Boise and a friend of my brother-in-law's came to pick me up in a plane. And we were talking about some of the technology I used, like I had a GPS device and it had a built-in altimeter. And he said, why don't you take over the controls? And I flew the plane pretty much the rest of the way up to Haley, Idaho.

I just knew that you stay above the mountains and you won't have to worry. And I have driven a car literally several times. And I own a car. Just because somebody's different, it doesn't mean that they're less. than you. They're different than you, but so what? And we've really got to get to the point where we truly accept that, and we accept that just because we're different, it doesn't mean that we're less or more. We're part of the same world. We're all on the same spaceship Earth running through the universe. I love that you've spent the last 25 years promoting that message.

And continue to do it. And I hope that people will reach out. I hope people will want, after seeing this to have me come and speak to their organizations. I've traveled the world. Literally three days ago, I flew back from being in Australia speaking at a mining health and safety conference. What part of Australia? Queensland, Brisbane. Oh, nice. Actually, was on the Gold Coast. While I was there, I went to Karumban Wild Animal Sanctuary and got molested by a bunch of birds. I fed them and met a kangaroo, met an emu, held a koala for about five minutes, who just loved to get his neck scratched. Aw.

It was fun. Was Alamo with you? No. The trip got set up too fast because they don't have rabies there, and so we'd have to go through a process to get him approved, so he didn't get to go. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Is there anything I haven't asked about? Is there any...

Well, I will just say, and I know you're going to be putting it up in the notes and so on, but if people would like to talk with me about speaking, I'll work with them, and I'd never charge by the talk. We agree to have me come. I will do whatever they need me to do. But they can reach me by emailing me. It's speaker at Michael Hinkson.com. That's S-P-E-A-K-E-R at M-C-H-H-H-A-E-L-H-N-G-S-O-N-G-N.

They can go to my website, www. www.w Michael Hinkson.com. And there's a lot of information there. If anybody wants to be on the podcast, love to have you. We're always looking for guests. Oh, excellent. We convinced you to come on. We'll work on that.

Yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, thank you. I really hope that people will decide that we have something to offer. I look for a lot of speeches, and I've had a number of people write back and say, well, we really want industry-specific things. We don't want just an inspirational speech. And my response is, I don't either. I'm going to inspire.

That's part of it. But there's so many more things to learn. There's so much more to discuss about teamwork and leadership and trust. and resilience, emergency preparedness. In 2014, I delivered a speech in Washoe County, Nevada. It was during a conference on emergency preparedness, and I talked about my story in emergency preparedness and resilience. In January of 2023, someone who attended that conference

wrote an article specifically about me and my speech and talked about how wonderful it was and how much they learned from it, And as I put in letters that I write, how often do you find somebody who was so well thought of that somebody wrote an article about him nine years later? And that's true. But I work with event managers, event planners, people who are involved in doing events. And I believe my job is to not have it about me, but to do anything I can to help make the meeting better. And I will always do that. That's beautiful.

Well, thank you, Michael. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming all the way, and I'm sorry that you have to go back to all the crazy weather in New York. Thank you, Michael, for sharing your story, and thank you to Alamo, his dog. Michael was generous enough to invite us into his home, myself and two videographers. We were lucky enough that we got to spend the afternoon with him, and his story needs to be told, needs to be shared. every part of it. His message about abilities, about not underestimating people, about abilities and capabilities and not letting society's ideas about limitations hold you back. That's a big piece of his message that needs to be shared. And then of course, the memory of September 11th. Right now,

approximately one-third of the U.S. population was born after September 11th. People under 25 are approximately between 30 to 31 percent of the U.S. population. In New York City, it's 750,000 residents are under the age of 25. So that means we are rapidly entering into an era in which more and more of our population will be people who are born after September 11th, 2001. It's up to us, those of us who are old enough to remember it, to make sure that future generations never forget. A few other themes or lessons that really came out from this interview, number one is to prepare before you think you need it.

Michael had walked multiple corridors of the World Trade Center. He had learned various World Trade Center exits. He had learned the emergency procedures. He learned the physical layout. He made sure to take his guide dog on different routes so that the guide dog wouldn't autopilot. That is intense preparation for a low probability but high magnitude event. So prepare for the things that you think are unlikely

if the things that you think are unlikely would be calamitous if they were to happen. Prepare for things that you hopefully will never need to know. The best case scenario is that you spend your time preparing for something and never have to put that preparation to use. That's the best case scenario. That's what you want to happen. So prepare before you think you need to.

That's one major theme or lesson that came out of this. Another is to be aware of what you know and be aware of what you don't know and know the difference between the two. Know your known knowns. Know your unknown unknowns. Know your unknown unknowns. And recognize that you don't know many of your unknown unknowns. Which is to say, risk is the thing that's left over after you have prepared for everything

else. Another lesson is don't get caught up in outcomes that you. you cannot control. Stay focused in the moment. Stay with Roselle. Focus on the part that is within your control. Stay inside of what you can control. Those are all important lessons that came out of this interview. All of the sponsorship revenue from today's episode will go to charity, will go to a registered U.S.-based 50 NC3 nonprofit. In full disclosure, the way that sponsorship's work is we don't know specific revenue per episode. Our network tells us what the monthly number is.

So we're going to calculate it by looking at our monthly number for September, dividing it by the total number of episodes in September, and that will be the donation amount. If you are somebody who plans events or has speakers, please consider Michael Hinkson, go to his website, michaelhinkson.com, H-I-N-G-S-O-N. And if you have the time, if you are retired or early retired or regular retired, and you have the time to volunteer with guide dog training in the process of preparing

for today's episode, I gained a deep appreciation for how much effort that takes and how important volunteers are in training guide dogs, please, if you have the time, look into volunteering as a puppy raiser for guide dogs. It is a commitment of between 12 to 18 months, and it is a tremendous commitment of raising a puppy, not just raising a puppy, but raising a puppy to be a guide dog. Volunteers are so incredibly important.

Please consider giving your time and attention to it, if not consider making a donation to an organization that trains guide dogs for the blind. A few options include Guide Dogs for the Blind. Based in California, there's also an organization called Guiding Eyes for the Blind. There's the Guide Dog Foundation. There are many groups that do this. According to the Guide Dog Foundation, it costs about $50,000 to raise, train, and place one guide dog or one service dog. finally on the 25th anniversary of September 11th, 2001.

Let's honor our firefighters and our first responders. Let's honor the many, many volunteers who spent months at ground zero. Let's honor the families of the fallen. And let's make sure, again, all of us who are old enough to remember, as we get older and as our population, is increasingly people who weren't born yet. Let's keep sharing stories so that the memory of 9-11 lives on. Thank you very much.

This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pant, and I'll meet you in the next episode.