An Army of Normal Folks - Tim Brown: 100 Friends Were Murdered on 9/11 (Pt 1)

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

9/11 firefighter Tim Brown helped save lives that fateful day, but he also lost 100 friends who chose to save others knowing it would likely be the last act of their lives. His mission is to honor this Army of Normal Folks and make sure that America never forgets them.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

He said to me, Timmy, this is really bad. And that is, for us to say that to each other is significant because we do bad every day. And he was saying this is exceptionally bad, right? And I said, I know, Chris, be careful. I love you. And he said, I love you. And after he said that, he turned around and he went in the stairwell. He went up to save the lives of people he didn't know. [♪ music playing and sound of footsteps approaching, music continues to play in background.

Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur and I've been a football coach in inner city Memphis. In the last part, it somehow led to an Oscar for the film about our team. That's called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems are never gonna be solved

by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits, using big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks. That's us, just you and me deciding, hey, maybe I can help. That's what Tim Brown, the voice you just heard, has done. Tim is a 9-11 firefighter who saved lives that fateful day, but he doesn't view himself as a hero. Tim lost 100 friends on 9-11, each of whom chose to save others

knowing it would likely be the last act of their lives. I cannot wait for you to meet Tim right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets.

Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart TrueueCrimePlus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it.

I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first Black sailor to be awarded the medal, stories of courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daley, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and

beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature I'm Jake Hanrahan, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, resilient favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. This is unique access with straight forward on the ground reporting.

We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. Away Days showcases what the mainstream cannot access. Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the Your Way Days podcast reporting from the underbelly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases. Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder.

Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Open AI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be an aberration,

a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show better offline the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why open AI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you happen to get your podcasts.

Alex Hilton Well, first of all, I want to say welcome to a live recording of an Army of Normal Folks. What is this Alex? Number six we've done of these live ones, maybe six or seven. Alex has no idea. He's we're at a brewery and he's already had his first beer. So the production, the production quality

just went through the basement. But anyway, we are here in Memphis and have a very special guest. But first, I wanna say to everybody who came down tonight to meet our guest, thank you very much. Give yourself a round of applause. Yay!

All right, so as you can hear, we've got a number of folks here. Our guest today, Tim Brown. If there's anybody in this room who listens to this man for the next little bit and doesn't get a lump in their throat or tear in their eye, you've missing some of your humanity. Tim was a firefighter with the FDNY for over 20 years. Tim responded to World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as a member of Rescue 3, which is the fire department, New York Fire Department's version of the Navy SEALs. To say that Tim is high speed would be an understatement. In 95, Tim joined New York

Task Force One, which is a FEMA urban search and rescue team with whom he responded to the Oklahoma City bombing that same year. In 98, Tim was detailed to the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, which was headquartered in seven World Trade Center. While Tim helped to save the lives of many on 9-1-1, he does not view himself as a hero. This man sitting next to me lost over a 100 friends that day, including many Fire Department brothers, who each chose to save others, knowing, as you will hear soon, that they went up the stairs expecting to die. During this interview, that we're really going to benefit from, Tim will beautifully pay tribute to his heroic friends and share a series of miracles, honest to goodness miracles

y'all, that helped this man survive hurricane force winds and a firestorm. Before I say thank you and let him start I want to say something a little bit off script. I think there's three occasions in our country's consciousness over the last hundred years that we cannot forget. Certainly Martin Luther King getting shot in Memphis, the Kennedy assassination, the Oklahoma City bombing, things like that are etched into history in our memory and they matter. But I don't think they're transformative

in the way that the three things that I think are. One is the stock crash. It led to the Great Depression. It led to countless suicides. And today, the Federal Reserve acts on economic principles taught to us by the Great Depression, the crash a hundred years ago. It's transformative. It's etched into the ethos of our American selves. The second would be the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It's etched into the ethos of ourselves. It could be argued that our country would never have been in World War II. Our island

protected by the Atlantic and Pacific was at that time unreachable and we were sucked into that war as a result of Pearl Harbor. And I will tell you that the relative peace we've lived in the last seven decades were a result of winning World War II and our military and infrastructure being intact because all of Europe's was destroyed and our Navy remaining intact. So it was a maritime power, the only maritime

power, it was the time after World War II that enabled the country, our country, to be the world's sheriff, which led to what we all recognize now or feel now as normalcy of globalization. That doesn't happen. The world doesn't change without Pearl Harbor. And I think that's etched into our memory. But you know, you got to think about 1941. That's 59, 79, 83 years ago. If you were nine years old during Pearl Harbor, you are today 92. If you were 18, you're 100.

There's very, very few people walking the face of this planet anymore that can tell us the realities of Pearl Harbor. We live them through history. We live them through books. We live them through documentaries. But we can't really talk to anybody who knows it and feels it and understands it. And if we forget the lessons of the stock market crash, we're certainly to repeat them in our banking system and in our the way we handle the

Fed. If we forget the lessons of World War II, we're certainly going to pay for that geopolitically one day. With that as a backdrop, if we forget the lessons of 9-11, we will certainly live to see it again. And it needs to dawn on you that this May, across our country, there will be countless seniors graduating college who are the young adults that are gonna form the next three and four decades of our policy and how our country works that weren't even born on 9-1-1. It doesn't even feel that way to us because we were all alive, as that's in our memory, but only a generation away.

Ask anybody 20 years younger right now who sings your favorite songs from the 80s and they won't be able to tell you. Ask who was in St. Elmo's fire and who was in Raiders of the Lost Ark and these 20-something year old they won't even tell you and everyone in here knows the answer to that. Ask them what happened on 9-11 and they won't be able to tell you and that is scary. It is why Tim's story matters. Lest we forget, history will repeat itself. And it is men like this who have been through horrors that most of us cannot imagine that will sit up here and courageously recount this for you. Not to be sensational, not to garner attention to himself, but

because men like him do not want you to forget his friends who died in the service of their fellow man. And it's men like him that don't want us as a public to forget what we must remember lest we repeat it. Tonight we'll have a couple of laughs. You will hear some somber stories. Most importantly, I hope you're challenged to make sure we never forget. Tim, welcome to Memphis. Thank you, brother. Happy to be here.

My first time. Your first time? Yes. Well, you got a beer. You're a New York firefighter. I think beer's part of the diet. We're at a brewery, so. Yeah, that's it.

Here we go, yeah, Memphis. that's it. Here we go. Memphis. That's it. There it is. I am typically very engaged conversationally. And I'll interject when I'm like, hold it, what? I don't understand, because I think maybe our listeners might not understand something you said. I typically open army and normal folks to tell me where you've

come from and all that. We're not going to do that. One thing I got to say is is when Tim and I finish our discussion we have a microphone out here and the floor is open for questions and I hope you guys have them because you're not gonna get many opportunities to talk to a hero. So you all have an opportunity to speak up and if you do hey you're gonna be on a podcast and thousands of people are here,

you see, might as well ask questions. Tim, maybe give us a little background, just a little, on your time in the fire department, how you ended up in the position you were in, and reading the paper, and from that step forward, the events of 9-11. Thanks for having me here in Memphis. It is my goal. We said never forget, right? Every firehouse in New York City, every fireman's car on the bumper was a bumper sticker that said never forget.

That is our mantra after 9-11 and I live that every day of my life and I think it's very important that we continue as you said before to live that mantra and pass it on especially now to the next generation. I was a bad kid. I was a bad kid. When I was 12, 13, 14 my parents were getting divorced. I got lost in the shuffle of five kids and I was lashing out, I guess. And I had no direction. I had no mission. I had nothing that interested me until I found out that I could be a junior fireman at 15 years old in Newington, Connecticut. And that changed my life. I stopped doing the bad things, you can imagine, and I

started focusing on being a junior fireman, then EMT, and I say this because I encourage young people to take this path because it will give you direction and meaning and mission and purpose, which is what it did for me. And I was a volunteer fireman, then I was a paid fireman in Connecticut, but then am I allowed to say how old I am? In 1984. Holy crap, you're old. Yeah.

In 1984, I was blessed by being hired in the New York City Fire Department. I worked in what some people might remember in the South Bronx as Fort Apache. That was my first assignment for seven years. So you can imagine we were pretty busy there with fires and helping people that needed help. I went to Times Square for a bit and then I went back to what I call the Bronx Harlem Special Operations Command, Rescue Company Three, that we were also the building collapse company

for the entire city. So we were very busy with quite a lot of emergencies and fires and such. But then in 1998, I had become friends with Mayor Giuliani and he convinced me, he and his team convinced me to go to his newly formed mayor's office of emergency management. I took off my fireman helmet and I put on a tie and I went to 7 World Trade Center on the 23rd floor, which was our office, and I became a supervisor within that group.

And our job, our job, or my group, was to respond to major disasters and emergencies in New York City and represent the mayor. So that's a very quick summary of how I got there to the morning of September 11th, 2001. Along the way, you live with these guys, you eat with these guys, you bathe with these guys. You literally become brothers with firefighters. And even though you find yourself in the mayor's office with a snazzy tie, you're still at the heart of yourself.

You're a firefighter. Give us a sense of the relationships that exist. So I think you nailed it there a bit. We did everything together. We went to horrific emergencies, fires, building collapses, car crashes. We carried our own out of these disasters, our own who heroically went in and got injured badly and we carried them out. We carried out little kids, innocent little kids.

We carried out innocent grandmas. We did all this stuff together and we worked together. I'll talk a little bit about firefighter Chris Blackwell and September 11th, but firefighters like Chris were exceptional. And Captain Terry Hatton and Captain Patty Brown, who saved dozens and dozens and dozens of lives. And we would come back from some horrible thing and we would eat together, we would sleep in the same room,

we would, you know, we actually built a steam room because the smoke was very bad for you. So we, you know, we would take a steam at the end of work and maybe have a beer after work or something. Maybe. Maybe. But you could actually, when you sit in the steam room, you could actually see the stream of black soot draining out of your body.

And that was the poisons leaving, the poisons that were going to give us cancer, leaving our body. So we would stay there after work and we would hydrate and let this poison out of our bodies and we would talk about the day. I mean these guys were like my real brothers. You loved them? Every one of them. Every one. everyone. And now a few messages from our generous sponsors but first allow me to throw throw an idea out there for you guys. If you do a good deed one time or maybe it's weekly service that you do would you consider sharing it on social and including a message like join an army of normal folks together we can solve our problems and tag us in the copy at an army of normal folks. We hope to share many of your posts on our accounts. Now this isn't about bragging about what you're doing

because then you'd be a turkey person, but it's about sharing the power of what normal folks can do so that more normal folks can realize that they can do it too and hopefully grow the army. I hope you'll give it a try. We'll be right back. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results.

Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and re-examining the culture of fat phobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm JR Martinez. I'm a US Army veteran myself. And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes

on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, from Pushkin Industries and I Heart podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daley, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor,

going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRad street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. Away Days showcases what the mainstream cannot access.

Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. A murder happens. The case goes cold.

Then over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a journalist and historian on our our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases. Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder. Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling.

I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley.

And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI, along with other AI companies, are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. What's that Tuesday morning look like for you? So I go into work, 7 World Trade Center, and I go in a little early. I got in around 7.45 or 8 a.m. and I always, our office was a 23rd floor, and I always went to the third floor first, and that was our cafeteria floor. So I would go there into the cafeteria, get my Cheerios, my orange juice, and my hot tea. And I would, I say this when there's a lot of young people in the audience. We used to have something called newspapers back in the day,

because you couldn't get your information from anywhere else. You didn't have a smartphone. And so I would have all the local newspapers, and I would sit there and eat my Cheerios because you couldn't get your information from anywhere else. You didn't have a smartphone. And so I would have all the local newspapers and I would sit there and eat my Cheerios and go through all of that, all those papers. The power went out in the building all at once, a bit unusual for the for a modern high rise building in New York. And I knew something big had happened, but I didn't hear or see anything.

So the power went out and within five seconds the power came back on. And I knew our backup generators for the building had kicked in. And the people who were sitting at the glass windows facing the north tower, One World Trade Center, all at once jumped up and started running toward the exit running by me and I had to grab one young lady by the shoulders and like shake her back to reality and look her in the eyes and and I said what happened that she said a plane hit the tower and that was the first that I had or knew of it you know we call it the big one you. We try to do our best to train and drill and prepare

as much as we can for the big one. This one turns out it was something you could not really prepare for. I mean, a little bit, but you couldn't even imagine it. When you first hit it, when it first happened, and you're there, are you thinking small plane, heli-cop, I mean, you're not thinking... Yeah, no. It's not mean, you're not thinking.

No. It's not even, you can't even fathom what we now know, right? So what's going through your head? Yeah, small plane, maybe a helicopter. We had had that happen in New York City before. And you see now it still happens. So I don't think anybody initially imagined that it was a passenger jet. That's what I was thinking. I think it's a big thing, but we're going to be able to take care of it. What do you do? It's my job to go into the command post, not to be the incident commander, but to support

the incident commander who is the fire chief and support him with all things other than kind of his primary focus which is the firefighters and stuff like that right so anything else he needed the utility companies the EMS a little bit but you know there's all kinds of people we need when something like this happens and so it was my job to kind of stand there at the command post and the incident commander would turn to me and say, get me ABCDNE. And he would not have to worry about it and we would take care of it. What does command post look like?

So there's an actual structural command post in the lobby of both the North and South Tower, which the fire department frequently uses and frequently practices and drills with a lot because they're 210 story buildings. We go to a lot of alarms there. We go to a lot of emergencies. Each floor is at one acre big. That's 110 acres each tower. You can imagine the number of people and the number of emergencies and the number of problems

that we would go there for every day. I guess what I hear that, but if you have an emergency management center, there's got to be, I'm imagining, maybe I've watched too many movies, but I'm imagining about a thousand of those TVs and cameras and connections and communications, almost a hub of information. So it's two different things. There's a command post inside one World Trade Center, which is in the lobby. The people setting up, doing the work. Yeah. And right, the fire chief, the incident commander, says one in the North Tower,

there's one in the South Tower. Our OEM command center is what you're talking about with, it's Star Wars. It's 500 screens, it's 500 computers, workstations, and that is to support a city-wide emergency or disaster in support of the real incident commander in the end who is the mayor. disaster in support of the real incident commander in the end who was the mayor. Right. So everyone reports to the mayor. So in the end for policy deciding it was the mayor. And that's what our 23rd floor command center was built for. Well, at that time in the morning, was everybody at a station or did you have? No, we would call them in. Yeah. We would manage it, but we had to bring them in. So at this point, the World Trade Center's got a fire on it.

You think a helicopter or something, but it's still a big deal. Part of the story is that our what we call watch command, which is our communications hub, has to make up to 150 or so phone calls to bring people in from our federal, state, local, and private sector partners to help us manage this disaster. And we had done this many times before citywide health emergencies, West Nile virus and and things like that, but this is more of an instant shock to the system. But we knew the right people to call, we knew the right people to bring in, and we had people on the way very quickly to come support us.

My job was to go into the North Tower to that command post and assist the incident commander, the fire chief there. So you're calling everybody in and you're saying we're go. I'm coming up making up words, but 100%. We're all in on this. All in, yep, yep, yep. And then once you get that set up at your office, you're headed to the trade center. They're doing that while I'm doing the,

while I'm running to the World Trade Center. So I go to my car and I took off my tie and my dress shirt and my jacket and I put on leather boots, heavy leather boots, a jacket that said, Mayor's office on the breast and on the back and then they made us wear this stupid green helmet which was really embarrassing. Stupid green embarrassing helmet. After wearing my fireman helmet for 20 years or whatever.

So they can identify us. So I put on the stupid green helmet and I were trained as firefighters, when you go into a building under destruction, before you go in, you try and look at three sides of the building to get a current size up of that building. And I wanted to take a second that morning to do that. So in order to do that, I had to go up

like one and a half stories from street level to plaza level, the plaza that was in between the towers. And in order to do that, I had to go up a concrete staircase exterior. So I ran up that staircase. It's an important part of the story because later that concrete staircase becomes the biggest heaviest artifact in the 9-11 museum and they call it the survivors staircase because I ran up early on but later on in the morning hundreds or thousands of civilians

ran down that staircase and ran away to live and I make that point really because it's what we do our military our first responders our, our firefighters, our paramedics and others, when something happens, we run toward it. We run toward the problem because there are people in trouble. And that's how the morning started out for all of us. All the firefighters and police officers and EMTs and paramedics and others. And authority. Yeah. Well, yeah, all of them, you know,

ran toward this impending disaster. So I looked out over the plaza and- Why do you check three corners? To get a current size up of what's happening with the building. Well, what do three corners tell you? Well, it's hard. We would do four, but then you have to run

all the way around the building. Got it. And it takes too much time. So very quickly, you can kind of get three sides of a building. Are you trying to see if it's structurally sound or if it's on fire? Both. So in the end, I had to look up like this, 90 stories. You can't really see much. So it was less helpful to me than it was to my best friend,

Captain Terry Hatton, who was coming down the West Side Highway and rescue one with binoculars. He could see that there were seven or eight or nine or 10 floors that were already on fire. All right, I think this is a question a lot of people have. Maybe other people know it, but hey, it's my show and it's my question, so I get to ask it. And I'm here for you.

At this point, you've got 110 story, one of the tallest buildings in the world with six, seven stories on fire. That's bad. It's very bad. You think a small plane or helicopter hit it, and you know people are burning and dying and trapped, and that's bad. What I'm dying to understand is did you ever conceive at that time that this building could fall down? Was that even part of

the calculus at this point? No I mean the question that was asked early on was two things who can we save and is it going to collapse? So it was a question. It was a question from the mayor. Why would they even conceive of it collapsing? Honestly, I think part of the collective nation's gasp was not that it was on fire, but the damn thing fell down, how?

You know, now we know how, but I just, so you're saying even then people had enough foresight to think hmm. But the answer was no. The answer was no. The answer was no. It can't collapse. Well we've never had that happen in a steel high-rise building before in America. So it's not gonna happen. So well. We don't think it's gonna happen. We, our best judgment was that it was not going to happen.

And the other answer was we can save everybody below the point of impact. And that was very sobering in the moment very early on because basically that said the people at or above the point of impact we probably can't help them. You just said one guy's name. Which which of your friends did you say was looking through binoculars? Captain Terry Haddon, my best friend. Yeah, we'll get to him. Yeah. We'll be right back. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary

results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets. Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait, head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm JR Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself.

And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and I Heart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor, going above and beyond the call of duty.

You'll hear about what they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. the world. Live from the underground you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing, Brazilian favela life and much more. All real completely uncensored. This is unique access with straightforward on the ground reporting. We're taking you deep into the dirt without the usual airs and graces of legacy media. A way that showcases what the mainstream cannot access.

Real underground reporting with real people, no excuses. For the past decade I've been going to places I shouldn't be, meeting people I shouldn't know. Now you can come along too. Listen to the Awaiday's podcast, Reporting from the Underbelly, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

A murder happens. The case goes cold. Then over a hundred years later, we take a second look. I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator. And I'm Kate Winkler-Dawson, a journalist and historian. On our podcast, Buried Bones, we reexamine historical true crime cases. Using modern forensic techniques, we dig into what the original investigators may have missed. Growing up on a farm when I heard a gunshot, I did not immediately think murder.

Unless this person went out to shoot squirrels, they're not choosing a 22 to go hunting out there. These cases may be old, but the questions are still relevant and often chilling. I know this chauffeur is not of concern. You know, it's like, well, he's the last one who saw our life. So how did they eliminate him? Join us as we take you back to the cold cases that haunt us to this day.

New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Barry Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. OpenAI is a financial abomination, a thing that should not be, an aberration, a symbol of rot at the heart of Silicon Valley. And I'm going to tell you why on my show Better Offline, the rudest show in the tech industry, where we're breaking down why OpenAI along with other AI companies are dead set on lying to your boss that they can take your job. I'm also going to be talking with the greatest minds in the industry about all the other ways the rich and powerful are ruining the computer. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, wherever

you happen to the three corners. It's on fire. We don't think it's going to collapse. I looked out over the plaza and there were a lot of building parts and plane parts that were on fire and other debris and I started to doubt my initial assumption that it was a small plane but I couldn't prove it you know I didn't know I didn't know and so I went into the North Tower at that level and in order to go to the command post at the street level I had to go down an escalator inside the building and there were hundreds of civilians kind of like a funnel trying street level, I had to go down an escalator inside the building. And there were hundreds of civilians, kind of like a funnel trying to get onto that escalator, to go down.

They were trying to evacuate them underground. And something struck me as I approached this group was that they weren't doing what you might think. They weren't pushing each other out of the way. They weren't trampling each other. In fact, for every person who was disabled or obese or injured or pregnant, there were four or five civilians, not firefighters or police officers, helping that person out.

And it gave me hope because I said, that's the truth of humanity, of 99% of humanity. If we go outside right now and someone trips on the sidewalk, you'll see four or five people reach down to try and help them. Because that's humanity. Is there evil in the world? Yeah, man, there's evil. But there's a lot of good in the world too and it gave me hope that no what no matter

What happened that day that we were gonna be okay? because that's The truth of humanity kind of the power of an army of normal folks. Yeah, just normal people right they they just came to work They're just trying to do their job. Yeah on a tower They're doing that right and they're following their heart and they're following their kindness and their love of their fellow humans. And that one example lifted me up.

And it wasn't firefighters or police officers. I could talk about them all, this whole thing. But the regular people were doing God's work, in my opinion, when they were called to it. And I got into that crowd, that kind of funnel of people, and I'm going down this big long escalator. The lobby was like two stories tall. It was a big lobby. And as the lobby revealed itself to me and I looked out over the lobby, I could see hundreds of

firefighters awaiting their orders to go up at the command post. And they all had their protective gear on with their yellow reflective stripes and all their equipment. You know, they say 60 pounds. It wasn't 60, it was more like 100 or 120 pounds because they were carrying extra equipment up more, way more than normal. And I had to actually do something that firefighters are very reluctant to do.

And I had to admit that the cops were right. And we are very reluctant to do that. And I had to admit to myself that the cops were right because they called us bumblebees. And now I'm looking out over the lobby with all these firemen in their yellow stripes and they were right. It looked like a whole hundreds of bumblebees awaiting their orders to go up. And as I process this in

my mind, I wind up giving it the nickname the Hive of Heroes. Because that's what I was looking at. At these firefighters who were willing to go up and save the lives of people they don't know. So I got to the bottom of the escalator and I looked to my right and I saw it was a bumblebee and I looked up at his face and it was my very good friend, firefighter Chris Blackwell from Rescue 3, the Bronx Harlem Rescue Special Operations Command where I worked

and I worked with Chris for seven years on the same shift. So as we said before he was like a real brother to me. I love this man with all my heart and we were the Bronx Harlem guys we didn't follow the rules so much. We didn't we were very busy we didn't have time to follow the rules but he wouldn't shave all the time and his face was smudged with smoke and his reflective stripes were kind of hanging off of his coat from being burned up and his helmet would sit a little crooked on his head because of all the fires that we went to in our careers. I love this man. I love this man.

I love this man. And so when I saw him, he saw me, we always greeted each other the same way. And so we turned toward each other like this and we came to attention and he would reach around with his arm in a big arc like this and take the unlit stub of a cigar out of his mouth. This guy fought fires with a cigar hanging out his back? Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. This is an old-school dude. It was all part of the character and he took it out and he put it down to the side and we both bent at the hips and we leaned in and we kissed on the lips And we came back to attention and he went like this with his cigar And he put the cigar back in his mouth and we did that we did that we did that every time we saw each other Because we loved each other like brothers. We really did. I imagine there's a guy that the firehouse are like y'all are gross. Yeah. Yeah. Well So we also the second reason we did it is because it freaked out all the cops and firemen around us.

And we just loved watching the reaction. It was a good funny moment, but also an expression of true love, you know, and true brotherhood. And after we did that, he said to me, Timmy, this is really bad. And that is, for us to say that to each other, is significant because we do bad every day. And he was saying this is exceptionally bad, right?

And I said, I know, Chris. Be careful. I love you. And he said, I love you. And after he said that, he turned around and he went in the stairwell and he went up to save the stairwell and he went up to save the lives of people he didn't know. Right? He had free will. Right? He said the words to me, Timmy, this is really bad. He knew that he was possibly going to lose his life or even likely

to lose his life. But he still turned around and went in the stairwell and went up. So why? Like the question we ask is why? Why? Because he took an oath 15 years earlier, as all firefighters and police officers and military and others do. And in that oath it says, I'm willing to give my life for my friend, for my neighbor, even for someone I don't know. Firefighters and police officers right around here take the same oath. You never know when that moment is going to come, when that challenge is going to come, right?

But he took the oath. So Chris chose to fulfill his words in action and in deed. He chose to follow his words, to go up and help people he didn't know. He had free will, he could have turned around and gone back to his loving wife and children and and lived, but that's not the choice he made. So when I think about this and what all these firefighters and police officers did that day, they all as the last act of their lives perform acts of the greatest love, they all, as the last act of their lives, perform acts of the greatest love, as it says in the Bible.

And not one of them said no. Not one of them turned around and left. They all went forward, and they all went up. And every one of them deserves that to be known. It is the most courageous, brave, selfless act that humanity knows and each one of them did that that day. And I use Chris as an example. He's the first one I encountered. I encountered others, my best friend, Captain Terry Hatton, my friend firefighter Michael Lynch, and many others who I witnessed, I witnessed with my own eyes.

I want to hear those two stories. Tell me about Dave Woolley. Yeah, well, Dave Woolley, and I will say this plainly, because we have to tell the whole truth, Dave Woolley as all of these heroes and all the 2,977 innocent human beings from 90 countries by the way, every one of them was murdered intentionally by Islamist Al-Qaeda terrorists and that is the truth. And all this other nonsense about the government did it,

conspiracy theory, George Bush blew up the buildings. It's all BS. And that angers me to no end because it takes away from the truth of who did it and why they did it. And it's just that simple. Ismis terrorists intentionally murdered 2,977 people on American soil. So Dave Woolley was my captain when I was in Times Square

for just under two years. And he was also a ghetto fireman before he went up the ranks. And so he understood my craziness. And my being very aggressive in Times Square, which is a very different way to fight fires in Times Square. And I got myself in trouble one night because in midtown Manhattan, there's a lot of emergencies that you would never encounter in the outer boroughs or anything. So we had a high pressure steam leak in a sub-basement of a high-rise building.

And high pressure steam is invisible. It's very loud, but it's invisible, you can't see it. And there was a report of an employee missing in traps. And so I'm the ghetto fireman, so I am down in the sub-basement and I'm going for this guy. I didn't understand the high-pressure steam thing. And Captain Woolley knew my act, and he grabbed me by the collar, and he yanked me back away from the steam. Look it was like a jet engine

you couldn't hear anything and he put a wooden hook in my hand, the hook we used to pull ceilings and he said to me if this hook disappears out of your hands stop and turn around because he knew that steam would chop me in half and as I understand it you can't see it. You can hear it. That's right. But because you can't see it It's such a strong steam that literally will slice you. That's right. It would chop my head off Yeah, it would chop my head off and I had no clue About that and and he saved my life

Did the hook disappear the hook disappeared? No kidding. Oh, yeah, I wouldn't you oh and I stopped yeah, yeah, no it he saved my life. Did the hook disappear? The hook disappeared. No kidding. Oh yeah. That would have been you. Oh, and I stopped. Yeah, yeah. No, he saved my life. And the worker got out. There was a back door that nobody really knew about. He worked there.

He knew about it. So he got out. Whatever, but we didn't know about it. But I would have been, you know, he would have been OK. And I would have been dead if it weren't for Captain Woolie's heroic How are you not brothers with people that literally say yeah life. Yeah to just enrich the understanding of the depth of your love for one another I

When I after 9-eleven in the hours, days, and weeks, I had my younger brother Chris with me. He was a firefighter in Providence, Rhode Island, and my friend Paul Conway, who was a chief in Milwaukee Fire Department. So they came to spend time with me and basically keep me alive after 9-11. And they would know that I was gonna hear another name

of a firefighter who I loved. And they would come behind me under each arm because they knew I was gonna collapse. And that happened a lot. And that concludes part one of my conversation with Tim Brown. And you don't wanna miss part two that's now available to listen to.

Together, guys, we can change this country, but it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right.

It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame, one week early and totally ad-free, on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. On Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. A lot of times big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up. So now I only buy one. Small but important ways. From tech billionaires to the bond market to, journalist and documentary filmmaker. Away Days is my new project, reporting on countercultures on the fringes of society all across the world. Live from the underground, you'll discover no rules fighting, Japanese street racing,

Brazilian favela life and much more. All real, completely uncensored. Listen to the Away Days podcast, reporting from the underbelly, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A body, a suspect, and a hundred years of silence. Buried Bones is a podcast about the forgotten crimes history tried to leave behind.

A common misperception about serial predators is that every single time they commit a crime, they commit it the same way. The past is a way of talking if you know what to listen for. New episodes every Wednesday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to buried bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.