Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 189: 9/11 Part I - The Day

Episode Date: August 29, 2015

It's the first of our three part 9/11 series as we cover exclusively the actual events that happened both in the sky and on the ground in lower Manhattan on September 11th, 2001.

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Marcus, let me know when you're ready to start the show. We're ready to start the show. Marcus said that we're not allowed to piss our dog meat set.

That we are not allowed to piss around today. Welcome to the last podcast on the left everybody. I am Ben Kissel as always staring right at Marcus Parks. A dog meat. A dog meat. For new listeners to the show, he just became dog meat last week. So it's gonna take me a second. Dog meat?

But you know the thing is that he just became dog meat officially on this podcast last week. But guess when he's been officially dog meat since the day he was fucking born? Yeah. All right. And of course you're Henry Zabrowski or do I have to call you too real? You could call me too real if you wanted to be correct. You long bitch. All right.

All right. So this is a very important episode. Very special episode. If we were the cast of Saved by the Bell, we'd talk to you afterwards all in Mrs. Bliss' classroom together. And let you know how serious this episode will be. We're discussing 9-11. Now you guys remember this is the important episode. Kind of like you know how in gym they would separate the girls and the boys.

And the boys they would tell them, like I remember my class. They separated the boys and they told all of us. Like here's the key to owning everything. That was the first thing that they said. And they're like, just so you know, you're on top, you're always going to be on top. Don't worry about being toppled. We all high-fived each other. And then we all showed each other how we could pee standing up.

Is that what you guys did? I was always sent to the Yeti room. And I was just there alone. And they would say, turn the lights back. On and off. On and off. On and off. Yes, you are young Yetis.

One thing you must know is, number one, always be hidden. Never be seen. Never be seen. Do not take a picture even once because I don't even know why. And fish are in rivers. I love a good river full of fish. No, today we're doing a very serious episode. Yes.

These are the facts as the mainstream knows them. That's what we're going to be going through. So for all the people who want to discuss the conspiracy theories, we'll be getting to that. Yeah, this is the event itself. Do we even say the terms that we are covering September 11th, 2001, the events of that day? Right. What we're going to discover, one thing I will say about conspiracy thought is that you know that it's a conspiracy video when they call it September 11th, 2001 and not

9-11. It's very specific to the way they set it up. Because they want you to know that it was just a day in time. 9-11 is the brand. Yeah. And I really do believe that. I think today we are going to be covering the hard facts about just the day. And the hijackers that committed this deed.

This is a very upsetting topic, of course. The one thing we wanted to talk about at the very beginning. If you really want to do this episode right and you are home and you've got nothing to do and you really want to just ruin your fucking day. Watch 102 minutes that changed America. It was a history channel documentary and it is all found footage from that day. People who recorded the events. Right.

If you think Clover Field is a horrific found footage movie, you're going to be amazed at 102 minutes that changed America. It's the most horrific found footage film of all time. I watched it with my heart and my throat. Marks and I both have cried a number of times. Oh my God. Don't bring up the tears. Come on.

I'm just saying this. We're being vulnerable. I want to break a little bit of the, I know you guys look at me as a strong warrior. Yes. A proud man. I've heard that. Impenturable, cold, but also important in his stance. Like Atticus Finch.

But this is a very vulnerable episode for me. You guys, what happened 9-Eleven, the brand that is known as 9-Eleven is becoming a conspiracy hub that is our generation's JFK assassination. They did the same with the JFK assassination. Every single school of conspiracy thought dumped something on it to get involved in it. 9-Eleven is no different. It's the hub of a lot of very esoteric thought that covers this. What we've talked about all time, right?

What attracts a lot of conspiracy thought? Something that the government wants to attract a lot of conspiracy thought because deeply within it, there is something very fishy. And they like that fringe thought to kind of cloud everything that happened on the day. And today we're covering what the day was. September 11, 2001, a beautiful, temperate day in New York City that was fucking destroyed. And the reality of it is mind-numbing and heartbreaking. And I just want to say really quick, at no point are we going to make fun of the victims

of 9-Eleven or of any terrorist attacks whatsoever. We would never do that on purpose. Our hearts go out to them and our sympathies are always with them and their families. I think that's a really important point to make. This episode is about the fact that this is real. I forget that it's real. But we will be making fun of some dickhead terrorists. Absolutely.

That's for sure. And some loopy summer school like Antics in a fucking Tallahassee or North Carolina flight school. But it's really true. This was an event. 3,000 people died. Truly innocent people, janitors of the world. Just as innocent as innocent can be. If you look at the world, yes.

There have been horrific events all over the world. This is just one. The difference between this event and many other events is how much it was covered by the publicity and people on the street filming it. This was like what we talked about with Columbine. We already said before how Columbine was the micro-event that changed America and that 9-Eleven is the macro-event. This is the thing that was just from minute one to minute 99.

I'm going to show 102 minutes. Hold documentary about it. It's in the title. It's in the title. That's how you know too. It's also convenient because you know how long it is if you're doing laundry. I'm not saying I was doing that necessarily. So you're just using this horrific documentary as a timer for your dirty whites?

It's a good time. That's nice and sensitive, Henry. If you're trying to measure out 102 minutes of time, just watch all of the footage at 9-Eleven. Just keep it on the background. Don't watch yourself. This is from the time of the first plane hitting and the second tower falling. That's the 102 minutes. All right, Marcus.

Jump us in. All right. So we're going to start with the 1993 terrorist attacks. What a lot of people don't know is that this was the second attack on the World Trade Center. A lot of our younger listeners, of course, don't know about the 1993 attack, which was up till September 11th, the only foreign terrorist attack on the nation by terrorist. I mean, World War II, Pearl Harbor. That was a militaristic attack.

It was a constructed event in order to get us into World War II. Maybe not unlike something that happened in September 11th, 2001. Conspiracy theories are the next episode. The conspiracy theories are the next episode. We're not going to do that. You're right. You're right. All right.

All right. So that first attack was in 1993 and was perpetrated by the same people it supposedly did. The second attack, Al Qaeda, the terrorist group that was founded by Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is the boogeyman. Osama bin Laden has been America's boogeyman for what? 15? How long did it take? 12 years?

We got him! We won! We won! Of course. The U.S. funded Al Qaeda for many, many years as they fought the Russians over in Afghanistan. It's a very interesting relationship that he's had with the U.S. And the U.S. basically armed the Taliban, a.k.a. Al Qaeda. So Osama bin Laden wasn't always public any me number one, as a matter of fact, the Bush family is very, very close with his family.

And of course, his ties go back for generations. And absolutely. And as everybody knows, from the years 2001 to 2007, he was played by Tony Shalu. Oh, I love him. He's quirky. Yeah. So in February 26, 1993, six people were killed when a rented van loaded with nitrate hydrogen was set off in the basement. And this is amazing, one of the terrorists that were arrested, he was arrested when he went to retrieve the $400 deposit he had left for the rental van that they used in the attack.

A bit of a cheapskate. Yeah, exactly. The problem, you know, he would have just been known for the fact that he was the funny guy who slipped on a banana peel walking into the rental office when he went to get the van, you know? And he was also carrying a bunch of plates full of messy food. And then after he got the deposit right before the cops got him, he just walked right through a plate glass window that two movers were carrying. Well, you got to give him some money. Give the guy a payout. So when all the explosion killed six people, injured more than a thousand, and caused nearly $300 million in property damage.

Remember, that was the first and only major foreign terrorist attack on USO oil until September 11. Because you keep your borders up. You can't get up in here. They did. They did. When? An airplane. When? When's September 11, 2001? The whole airplanes go up way high.

Damn, I got to change over that sign because that was the thing. I said we had that, you know, zero days, like, you know, 10 days since, like, a 10th and 10th accident. So out of the 19 hijackers on September 11, 15 of them were from Saudi Arabia. Two were from the United Arab Emirates. And one was from Lebanon. And the face of 9-11, Mohammed Atta, the most intimidating looking of all terror, of all the terrorists, was from Egypt. Not a single one of these guys was from Afghanistan. Remember, Afghanistan was only the place where Al Qaeda was based. These guys were not Afghani. I like him because-

Nor were they Iraqi. I like him because you can't miss Bella's last name. Atta! Either way. Forward or backwards. Yep, yep. Same thing. Very well cast.

If we want to get conspiracy theories with it as well. Very well cast. Group of headshots there. Next one. Mug shots. It is a great- it is- that's his driver's license photo. Actually, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Mohammed Atta, seen as pretty much the ringleader of all the attacks,

lived a relatively boring life prior to his radicalization into Islam, as did most of the hijackers. These guys were just- a lot of them were from middle to upper class families. Some of them- In students? Students, yeah. Some of them had, you know, some of them came from a religious background. Some of them came from a secular background, but they were- and they were almost all students. Mohammed Atta, he studied in Germany as an exchange student.

He lived with two teachers who eventually kicked him out after six months, citing his close-mindedness and intensely introverted personality. Oh, so he was a real dickhead, huh? That's weird, because it seems like the guy who flew one of the planes into the World Trade Center would be kind of fun. Yeah. Well, that's the- You know- Well, that's one of the weird things about some of the other terrorists is the guy that hijacked United 93.

That's exactly how he was described. The people who- his girlfriend, his parents, the guys who knew him at the flight school, they were like, hey, do you have a beer with us every once in a while? Yeah. It was almost like he was a patsy or something set up by the government. Oh, yeah, because, of course, people who kill people never hang out with regular folks and have beer with them. Jeffrey Dahmer. Mr. Bumblebutt himself.

Uh-oh. And Kimper. Everybody's best friend. Yeah, everybody's best friend. Yeah, and that's what gets me about these conspiracy theories is that, like, very, very quickly about a lot of these conspiracy theories, especially with people like- people like, oh, okay, they don't fit the profile. There is no profile. There is no profile.

There is no profile, and also, like, they just don't understand humanity, people. It's like, yes, you can be a fucking psychopath, it's gonna kill thousands of people, but you can also enjoy a little twist and pinch of a nipple. Hmm. You can enjoy drinking beer. That's the first thing you thought? Twist and pinch of a nipple. Well, I'll tell ya, this guy, I can't imagine how close-minded he must have been if the Germans kicked him out.

Yeah. You know, not exactly a people known for their warmth. He was the only one who did not like standing in line. He was the only one who did not like a- according to living- according to very strict rules. I smile when I hear the bell that tells me to put my pants on. You got to. So it's thought that Atah joined Al-Qaeda in 1997, and while studying in Germany, he formed what was called the Hamburg Cell, along with Marwan Al-Shehi, who piloted United 175, the second plane to hit,

and Ziad Jarrah, who piloted United 93, the guy that everyone said was a fun dude, which was, some say, shot down. The most accepted story is that it was actually taken down by the pastor's famous story, but while the hijackers may have been actually at the very most, I would say, annoyed with American culture- I mean, we're loud. But the thing is, we're fun. Yeah. So there's no- they hate our freedom or anything like that.

Every other person involved in the attacks, all these guys, their main motivation was American foreign policy, our support of Israel, and our, I guess, our incursion into the Middle East during the first Gulf War. And we talk about this regularly on top. And Americans' foreign policy is other countries' domestic policy. They live under that rule. Yeah. And our foreign policy is very aggressive in a lot of these countries and extremely controlling. And they don't like the fact that the white devil comes in and tells them how to live.

I also want to bring up the idea of groupthink that we talked a little bit about when we were covering Manson and the Manson family. So there's a lot of the bridge between talking real hard about wanting to bring down the great devil and getting into a group, creating a group of people that you kind of hang out, and I'll talk about how you want to do something about America and the American foreign policy going on in your country. And that bridge to doing something can be really shortened depending on how isolated you are and how ignorant you are. And it's like the Manson family went from hanging around, sucking each other's dicks to murder in the afternoon. Right. Because they had been kind of built into this sort of all-inclusive small society.

That's where extremist thought is very dangerous because you can go from taking a very esoteric idea about doing something about American foreign policy to then enacting the plan where you're hijacking planes and flying them into buildings. I'm certain because they are people, there must have been moments where they were like, is this what we should be doing? But then it's like, we're part of a greater purpose. And you keep hearing it over and over again that it's a greater purpose, that you're doing something for your country. And at the end of the day, you don't want to look in your brother's eyes and tell them you're scared. And tell them you're scared and backed out.

And basically at that point, be a liar. Yes, absolutely. You've been a hypocrite this whole time. But also, what, I just want to say this outright, whatever it is that they wanted, it's like, did you really want America's fucking hand all the way up your asshole into your guts like it is right now? Did you want that? Because you got it. Yeah.

So congratulations. Sounds like a Toby Keith lyric there. Kind of a Toby Keith thing there. You got America's hand all up in your guts. Can you feel my high school ring underneath your top of your mouth? We didn't really get the great music that the Vietnam generation got. You know, CCR, the band. We got nothing.

Nothing wrong with Toby Keith. So on May 17th of 2001, Muhammad Atta applied for a United States visa. He got a five-year tourist business visa the very next day from the United States Embassy in Berlin because this guy, he lived in Germany for about five years. He was just a student. In fact, he had a, quote, strong record as a student. And he came from money and wealth. Yeah, he came from money.

So it was just like, yeah, of course, like go ahead. Like they didn't even really check him out. And at this point, he had been going back and forth to Afghanistan a few times. Like he had supposedly met with bin Laden himself and bin Laden had blessed him. It's like, yes, you will be the attacker. Him and Ziad Jirah. Well, you know, those first three meetings are just playing connect four with him because that's how he gets to trust somebody.

Oh yeah, absolutely. You better lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have to be able to repair his dialysis machine on a regular basis. Someone needs to come and get the shit out of my fucking kidneys, huh? Hey, listen, do you fuck? You come here and you fix dialysis machine, or I will take my cock piece out and I will piss all over your mouth, huh?

Hey, I'm a son of bin Laden. You like, huh? You friends? We friends, huh? Hey, here is $5. Go get me a fucking whopper, huh? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not a problem.

So on March 22nd, 2000, Mohammed Atas sent an email to the Academy of Lakeland in Venice, Florida, inquiring about flight training. This is the actual email that he sent. Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries. Now we are living in Germany since a while for these study purposes. We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilot. You know how you do. In this field, we haven't yet any knowledge,

but we are ready to undergo an intensive training program. I mean, what gets me about this email is that this flight company got this email and all they know is that like, okay, a bunch of Middle Eastern guys who live in Germany were hanging out. They want to come to Lakeland, Florida. They want to come to Lakeland, Florida, and they all decided together with no experience previously that they all wanted to become commercial airline pilots.

Do you think the fact that Florida looks like a penis? Do you think if you're looking at the map of the United States, you're like, where do we go? Where do we cut off the great scene? We go straight to the fucking heart cock of America. Right? But I will say what is very interesting is that was the final plan. That was what got them in the door

and got them the flight training that they needed. One of the failed plans that ATTA attempted in order to get them trained as pilots is that ATTA was watching American television and saw the dude, this is totally true, saw the dude with the question marks all over his suit. What's his name? Matthew Lesko.

Matthew Lesko saw him on TV, bought his book about how to get free money from the government. He wrote this big application saying he wanted to finance a crop-dusting chemical tank. Like, they were going to get together, they were going to develop this new thing. He met with a loan officer from the government. He got that far.

The book works. Right? You can be a 9-Eleven terrorist and get free money from the government. Right? He showed up to the loan officer's desk and she was like, no, no, no, no. Because all of the science was wrong.

It was like the whole application was filled out badly. She was like, no, I can't do this. But she was like, I want to help you kind of, because the standard like, we want to help you maybe come to America, though. You're a good student. Like, what are you good at? And he, apparently,

Otto was obsessed with a picture she had on the wall of the Washington Monument. And he was like, I want this picture. I want this picture. She's like, okay. And she's like, what are you even talking about? He pulls out a wad of cash the side of a softball. Which he said.

He peeled off bills. And he was like, how much for to buy the picture? She's like, well, you could just get like a postcard of it. And he kept pointing at stuff. He's like, pentagon. That's where the pentagon is here. Right there. She's like, yep, that's it.

He's like, what are security measures for the pentagon? And she was like, I don't know. Is that the lone officer about the security measures of the pentagon? She literally was asking questions about security operations at the World Trade Center. And then he was like, what about in Chicago? Or Los Angeles?

Or Seattle? And she's just like, I don't really know how to tell you how to answer those questions, but I'm sure we could get you a pamphlet. But before you go, now what book did you read? Lesko? I gotta get that Lesko book. I want to kill all of America,

except for men with question marks on jacket T's. Fucking pretty cool. Also, I like that fucking Aliyah. Like Aliyah's a very good singer. She died in playgrounds. Too bad. We don't talk about that. That's sad.

She died in playgrounds. All planes must be destroyed as well. Might have been what sent him over the edge. And of course, the question mark sort of looks like a nine. So if you think about that. I've never thought about that one. No one's ever thought. No one's ever thought.

Because I'm not the boy from the strange incident with the dog at night. That autistic boy from that book. It said that the hijackers were quite difficult students. Unable to follow directions and would get very angry at tiny little things. Especially when they would have two guys stand next to each other standing up all the way really straight.

And then one guy would go... Here I come for a good house landing. And they're all like... It's like their act-outs are very funny. Right. Good improv. So on April 11th, Atah and Shehi rented an apartment at 1001 Atlantic Boulevard apartment 122 in Coral Springs, Florida. Only $840 per month.

And helped with the arrival of the muscle hijackers. And here's the difference here. There were two groups of hijackers. There were the pilots and there was the muscle. The pilots were the guys that got into the cockpit. They were the ones that flew the planes into the targets. The muscle were the guys with the box cutters in the back. And the mace.

We know from one of the... I believe it's the Flight 11 call that they had both mace and box cutters and stabbed pretty much everybody that they could. Right. So they brought the muscle into the country. And on September 10th, they all ate at Pizza Hut together. Oh, I love pizza.

Now was this during the stuffed crust pizza place? I must have been at the birth of that. I can't believe... I mean, honestly though, they're experiencing Florida. They're experiencing Pizza Hut. Don't you have a change of heart? That's why I think these people are soulless. You know, if I went into a country and I didn't particularly care for it,

the moment I have their fast food version of pizza, I'm in love. I'm in love with it. I would also say, but this was not the only thing we were doing, leading up to the attack. They were spending a lot of money going to Las Vegas, getting hammered, buying prostitutes, buying like two hundreds and hundreds of dollars of sex toys,

hanging out with women. It's very interesting what was supposed to be a very solemn time, preparation for their sacrifice to a law, I guess was filled with a lot of American-style Donald Trump celebrations. Oh, that's the best thing they ever did. Before you go into battle, you're allowed some drink and some women and things like that. Yeah, and they also said that they wanted to appear American.

They wanted to appear naturalized. That's why they... That's why they were all clean shaven. I will say they definitely appeared Floridian, you know, switched to Vegas and acted like white trash. You know what? And also on the day of September 11th, half of them, they were saying the whole crew that went to get Flight 77,

that crashed into the Pentagon, were all stopped by security and given extra security measures. They all failed the first test and then were left right on through. Yeah. And I'll tell you, nothing dates you more than watching those old, like the security cams of those guys coming on to the plane. Oh, yeah. Like all the pilots and the slick, they still got their shoes on.

You know what I mean? That's crazy. Also, since when does footage from 2001 look like it's from 1987? No, no, no, see, I explain that to you. It wasn't the future until 2004. I forgot. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, interesting. Yeah, it just looks so old. But now it's the past. Yeah, now it's the past. But 2004 was when the future arrived. Before that, it was still the past. But if you think about it, it makes sense. I'm still not convinced a nine doesn't look like a question.

I'm going to hold on to that one. So on September 11th, in the morning, they boarded their respective planes, armed with their box cutters, took off to meet their destinies or as a talk called it in his diary, quote, his marriage in heaven. So my sister wrote about fucking the guy who played Legolas. No, yes. She was in seventh grade.

Oh, very attractive guy there, sensitive. So now, I think we've reached the end of how much we can joke around on this podcast. So just so you know, it's going to be a little serious from here on out. Because we are now waking up in the morning of September 11th. May I just ask the question? Where were you and what were you doing on 9-11? This is the date to your analogy earlier about JFK. I mean, this is even larger than that.

Everyone knew where they were when he was shot. I was personally woken up, waking up in a hungover stupor missing class from a phone call in Menominee, Wisconsin for my mother, asking me if I was OK as if Menominee was the next target. As if they were like, we're going to UW Stout and we're blowing up Ben's dorm room. Oh, we got to blow up rumpels. I hate how they got free wings on Tuesdays and Girls' Night on Fridays. I swear to God, everybody in small town Wisconsin thought they were next.

But everyone around the country did, you know, it's very bizarre. No, no, no. I know Ed Larson from the Round Table gentleman in the brighter side. He said he just sat and stared at the Capitol building in Tallahassee because he was convinced that the terrorists were coming after Tallahassee next. To be fair, he would have been doing that anyway. Yeah, he was on mushrooms. Also, Eddie wanted to join the Army right after.

Oh, thank God you guys convinced him not to do that, Henry. Yeah, you'd be like a senator right now or some kind of lawyer or something. Maybe. I was senior year of high school and I remember watching it in my English class and it's that fucked up thing when I first saw it. I was like, oh man, this is like an action movie. Oh, yeah. I was like my first influence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it wasn't until afterwards when you realize like how real it was. You know, we're just so used to it. You're so watching action, you don't see something like that all the time. Then all of a sudden you see it happen and you're just like, it's shock. It's crazy. My brother's husband was right down there. He had to hide in a doorway.

I mean, it was, I mean, so many people. Yeah, so many. Yeah, it's one of our new guys here at the station. He was 11 and was downtown going to school and he saw both planes. It's unbelievable. Damn. So, let's get, let's start going through the timeline here. I am a flight 11 takes off from Logan International in Boston, 92 people, 815 United 175 takes

off also from Boston, 65 people aboard that plane at a 20, 20 minutes after flight 11 takes off. This flight attendant named Betty Hong calls ground personnel. She actually calls that the flight desk, the reservation desk. That's the only people that she can get a hold of. She calls the reservation desk and tells them the plane has been hijacked. She says Mace has been used. Two flight attendants have been stabbed and are bleeding out.

The pilots have been stabbed and are bleeding out. The hijackers have barred themselves in the cockpits. 820, one minute later, American Airlines Flight 77 takes off from DC. And this is also very interesting with what they talk about on the planes is that every plane's were only filled 30% capacity, which is very interesting. And also they figured out how to shut off the transponders on these planes, which is like technically they didn't have training to do. And they disappeared off of radar.

Yeah. Which is also very suspicious. I mean, turning off a transponder, you know, you put a box cutter to the throat of a pilot. He'll tell you where the transponder is. And all pilots, that's just weird because I just thought all pilots were kind of like on a base suicidal. No, no, no, different. Oh, the opposite.

I always thought they were sort of Harrison Ford and they like to hang out with large hairy creatures. So that's a whole different movie, I guess. Little, little quick note though, Boston 850 flight Seth McFarland, the creator of Ted and family, I was supposed to be on it, but he overslept. Yeah. Mark Wahlberg also supposed to be on that flight. Yeah.

I love Mark Wahlberg. We wouldn't have had Ted or Ted too. Yeah. And the sliding doors world. Yeah. We wouldn't have had American dad. Oh my God. So at 824, Muhammad accidentally makes a transmission to air traffic controllers instead of making

the transmission to the people in the cabin. Right. And we talk about these very serious things, but they have bloopers. Yeah. When Bundy would misplace his wrench or his, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've all got, they're all, you know, these are those weird human moments. Right.

Like those weird kind of humanizing moments that it's like, oh, they aren't. They, it isn't an action movie. You can imagine his reaction when you're like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. Yeah. Fuck, fuck, fuck. And then they have a good laugh about it. Like, huh, do you remember when you almost fucked it up? Yeah, good.

Okay, let's go do 9-11 now. That's crazy. He said, nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet. And then 10 minutes later, he said, nobody move, please. We're going back to the airport.

Don't try to make any stupid moves. And then some asshole in the back is like, I'm not trying to make stupid moves. I'm trying to make smart moves. Well, no, he was. Kill the nerd. Heroes. The people on those planes were heroes. So as far as the people on the ground were concerned, this is still a hostage type of situation.

These guys aren't, they're not scrambling jets or anything because the people on the ground are like, okay, these guys have a bomb. There's some sort of like, it's like those kind of, it's like those plane hostage situations that used to happen all the time in the 70s. And we will talk in further detail next episode about the war games that were being played during this time. Vigilant Guardian was being done. Another thing called, what was the other one called? Amalgram.

I told you about that, yeah. We'll get into all that stuff. Yeah, yeah. So all these people on the ground, they're thinking, okay, let's not scramble the jets just yet. This is a hostage situation. We don't want to spook them. Let's let this be for a second. But what you also realize is that everything that happens happens extremely fast.

All of this happens, but between the time that they hijacked the flight and hit the first plane, less than 20 minutes. Crazy. So 10 minutes later, the plane's transponders turned off, makes them pretty much invisible to air traffic control. And people always ask, why can you turn transponders off? Pilots turn the transponder off every time they're on the ground, because it interferes with radio traffic. So a pilot turning on and off the transponder is as natural as anything else. It's something that they do multiple times every day. I am very confused.

It doesn't make the plane like the Wonder Woman plane, but I'm not a scientist or a pilot. No. So it does take them about 20 minutes, in 20 minutes, the FAA, they contact Norad, who scrambles jets to locate and tail flight 11, but not one jet would even get off of the tarmac before the first plane hits. I mean, 20 minutes is, that's so quick. It's unreal. Yes. So at 8...

You literally could, you would not even get through an episode of, you know... I don't even know. I've been watching... I've been watching Review Lately. I'm a big fan. It's a good show. Thanks. Good show.

I would also say... But that's a... But technically, our government had been preparing for this. That's where the lies come in later on, when they say that we were never prepared for planes to fly into our World Trade Center, when they had actually had to be planned for the thing over and over. It's, you know... Next episode. Next episode.

Well, I mean, they understood that it was a possibility. Yeah. I'm not going to say I've been screaming in an apartment for five days about what the government has done. I'm not going to say that I've been balls deep in raw news footage for five or six days. I'm not going to say I spent four hours at the 9-11 museum yesterday. I'm not going to say that all of my dreams have been horrific or confusing, like that dream that I had where me and Miley Cyrus wrote a 9-11 musical together. How's Carly doing, your girlfriend? We had a big fight last night.

Cool. Yeah, because I'm dead inside. I've been kind of hollow and not talking at all. And I got, and we got mad at each other because I didn't think she could quote-unquote handle it. And she took that as an insult, which brightly she should have. It's cool to date us. I was thinking, the TV show I was thinking about was According to Jim. Oh, 22 minutes.

According to Jim. I can't believe all the 9-11 happened over one episode of According to Jim. Jim Belushi should have never been famous. So at 8.42, Flight 93 takes off 40 minutes late, and this is extremely important because all of the flights were coordinated to take off at the same time. They were all supposed to take off around 8 a.m. Or at least within like 10 minutes of each other. And this one takes off 40 minutes later, and this is Flight 93. This is the one that crashes outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

And the fact that this plane was late is the only reason why it did not crash into the Capitol building. That is the only reason why. If that flight would not have been late, they would have destroyed the Capitol building. Because we know, because Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the architects that we captured a couple years afterwards, that's what they asked him, what was the fourth target Capitol building. So that would have been completely destroyed. Again, not Menominee, Wisconsin. No point was Menominee, Wisconsin.

Never once not Lansing, Michigan. Not Troubadour, Texas. No, not even Troubadour, Texas. So this is when it starts getting intense. 8.46 a.m., first plane crashes, takes seven floors of the North Tower. It takes from 93 to 99, while the plane disintegrated instantly, passengers from the plane were thrown out, and landed on the ground, still strapped into their seats. No, this is when they first thought, when it first happened, everyone thought it was an accident.

So they reported it like it was an accident. There was some kind of pilot error. And you recall there was a baseball player who flew a single-edged plane into a building a couple years following. So these things did happen. I mean, this was the biggest one of that. This was probably the biggest bumble of all time. Well, no, there was a plane flew into the Empire State Building in 3940. Yeah, it's not unheard of.

Yeah, it's not unheard of. Yeah, but that's when planes were made out of like balsa wood, and it just had a guy with a big rubber band attached to like, he would be doing a bicycle for the fucking propellers to spin on the side of it. Right. I love your vision of the 40s. So the wingspan of this plane, half a football field long, and the wings of the plane loaded with almost 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. And most of that fuel is still in it again, such a short trip. Yeah, such a short trip.

So Marsh Inc., they were a company that was located on floors 93 to 100. That was the location of the impact. They lost 295 employees and 63 consultants instantly. While five floors above, Cantor Fitzgerald LP, they were an investment bank. They were on floors 101 to 105. They lost 658 employees in the ensuing fire. Well, that reminds me of a time I was working in the finance district with a guy for a headhunting agency. I had sort of conned my way into this job.

These are the events that literally made some of these Wall Street traders into Vietnam vets. Right. And I met one of these guys, who was this guy named Will Stavenhagen, who was a headhunter that I worked for in her office. There were three people in the office and he was a fucking nut back. And he used to walk back and forth screaming like, I never want to see you off the fucking phone. And he was insane.

Sounds like Jordan Belfort from Wolf of Wall Street. He wanted to be like that. Right. And I remember one time we all go out for drinks, he's like, everybody get the fuck up. Get the fuck up. We're going out for drinks. It's Friday. We're going to go out.

We're going to fucking relax. And he was, you know, he's insane. Yeah. Jeremy Piven from PCU. Yeah. Go to sleep. Go to sleep. And so we go to a bar across the street and I sit with him.

And at this time I'm in full hippy phase. I have like a six inch long fucking like goatee. My hair is really long. I had like, I was just like all high. Like just like all the time. All high. 100% high. And he bought us a case.

Like shots. We're doing shots. He said he's just like, gets two shots. And he's like, yeah. And you know, it's kind of what, so it brought you into this thing. And he's like, all my friends died in 9-11. Great. And just took the shot.

I'm just in the cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. I want to be a sketch comedian. But no, these guys like, imagine that. Because you know how many times in your life have you, I mean straight up, I remember when I was working in an office and be like, man, I want to go down that street. And I want to see that building in fucking flames. Right? I want to come in.

I will do anything to not work today. Fantasy, yes. And it's like that shit was real. Yeah. That happens. Just make sure it stays a fantasy. Yeah. And to remind you real quick how many people were at the World Trade Center over the entire

complex, buildings one through seven, over a quarter of a million people were at the World Trade Center every single day. I can't believe that, you know, it's the people, there were many heroes that day. Yeah. We'll cover a couple of them. Yeah. And when the plane hit, when the first plane hit, jet fuel shot down at least one elevator shaft.

This gigantic fireball shot down an elevator shaft. It caused explosions on the 77th and 22nd floor as well as at the street level on the Westside lobby. It was so large that 18 people were burned by this fireball and only 11 of them survived. God, I don't want to be the seven that lived. I saw in the 9-11 museum they had on display a mask that one of these guys wore for eight years because his face had to be constantly moisturized. I'm just going to say this, okay, if you lose the face, if you're in a burn thing and you

lose your whole face. Get into radio. Get into radio. Number one is great because, I mean, I've got to be weird showing like this all the time. I don't want to mean to be late. Do you not mean that? Be mean. But get like a Cobra Commander helmet and be a supervillain.

Yeah. You know. So the flame goes down the entire elevator shaft. The debris from the initial crash caused absolute chaos on the ground. Cars were crashing into each other and were being set on fire. You see the pictures of the aftermath, their entire blocks where there are cars that are just shells. Yeah.

Like they had the tires to burn down, the windows to bust it out, and they're just absolute shells because you've got to realize that, you know, when that plane goes through, there's a ton of debris being literally tons of debris being flown onto the street. It's true war footage. They went, the plane hit the building at over 500 miles per hour. That's what they're saying. They were like, a guy would say he saw one of the witnesses on 102 minutes was watching it from his roof.

He was just out on his roof and he saw it happen and he was like, this plane was just tearing ass. Like it was really moving. And so what happened, it hits the windows and so it's a moving explosion. Like it hits. It instantly explodes, but the momentum of it carries it so it shoots out the other side. It's crazy. It's just like, it's a huge explosion.

That documentary captured people like you mentioned earlier, Henry, about how you almost thought it was, because it is so insane. It was almost like an action movie vibe and in Wisconsin too, you're so disconnected. But even people watching it from, you know, 15 blocks, 20 blocks away, they almost had a disconnect too when they saw it at first. It wasn't, I wouldn't say laughter by any means, but it was like, what, what happened? Yeah. What's going on?

Holy shit. Yeah. It's just being like, holy shit. Are they filming a movie in Wall Street? What's happening? Yeah. Or it was a huge accident. You assume it's a huge accident and it's more just being like, holy shit.

Look at that. It's crazy. I've never seen that before, you know? Yeah. And I really did, I watched raw news footage from three, the first two hours I watched the raw news footage from three separate stations. I watched the CNN one, which kind of proved that CNN has always been terrible. I watched the ABC one, Charlie Gibson is a wonderful journalist.

But the best one that I watched was the local New York City NBC affiliate, because you get from that, you get the eyewitnesses right on the ground. Oh, it's crazy. You get New Yorkers calling in immediately and just saying, I saw this, and between, after the first plane hit, between the first and the second plane, everybody's just sort of bewildered. Right. They're not really, you know, no one is even mentioning the word terrorism.

No one wants, because it's starting to be like that, but you can kind of feel it itching in the back of everyone's brain. Well it's because this is before we've been fucking indoctrinated. Now we're indoctrinated to look for terrorism. Well, we're going to get into terrorism and how that's created unlimited war, because there's no borders and things like that. Absolutely. But the idea is that now it's a word we think about every fucking day.

And like you mentioned with 9-11, you know, I hadn't actually really thought about it as a brand, but it is a swoosh to some degree. It is the Nike swoosh when you think 9-11. Oh, we got it. We got buttons sold. But I want to, we'll talk about that next episode. But again, what we talked about with Columbine, these are, this is this place where those eyewitnesses were first starting to talk to the newspapers and something, and then to

the news stations, that's where a lot of conspiracies got born immediately. Right. Yeah. Because they were all in a panic. I mean, you know, it's pretty crazy. These, as firefighters were going up into the buildings, reporters were running towards these, the smoke as well, but with a camera and a microphone, putting it in people's faces who were covered in soot as if they just got out of chimneys, being a chimneys to be like,

what's going on? What you thinking? And it's like, what do you think? Are you rehearsing to be Santa Claus later? Well, the local NBC affiliate, the one that I watched on the ground reporters were fantastic. They were getting information while still being sensitive, people wanting to talk, and we'll listen later because I will warn you later, we will be hearing some footage both from on the ground and from inside the building.

The whole point of this is to make it as real as humanly possible. This is real. This happened. Like this is a, this was not an action movie, and it is so far removed now that this, that's what this is. This is actually real. So because of the angle of the impact of the plane, all the stairwells and all of the elevators from the 92nd floor up were rendered completely unusable.

It trapped 1,344 people above and none of them would survive, not a single one would get out. So the people in the towers, both above, both the blow and in the second tower knew nothing. This was pre ubiquitous internet. Because they felt it up, of course they felt it up above, they felt the tower sway. They felt the tower move and then snap back into position. But the people below it, because of the way these buildings are built, you know, they're built to sort of like move with the wind and stuff like that, they did not feel it.

Like it happened, some power went out and like, but no one actually heard the crash. They didn't feel the whole building shake. Yeah. And the people calling emergency services, which were pretty much the only people that, and even emergency services didn't really know what was going on. But I also watched this other documentary called Inside the Towers, where it's a lot of people that were in there that got out. And this one woman said that she called up emergency services.

And emergency services was telling them like, you're in the first tower, yes, Port Authority. Port Authority is the, I guess the organization that managed the World Trade Center, the engineers, the blue collar guys. They're like, yes, Port Authority is saying that you should evacuate right now. Yeah, go to use the stairwell and then you go out to the stairwell and it's, and there's nothing there. Yeah. What do you do?

But they, but they were being told by the emergency services to get out of there. But some of the companies came over their PA and said, please stay at your desks. Please stay at your desks. Do not evacuate. Right. Do not evacuate. So pretty soon afterwards, like I said, Port Authority starts evacuating the North Tower. They're telling the people in the South Tower to stay put.

Which was at the time, the best idea. That's what they should have done. Yeah, because they thought it was an accident. Because they thought it was an accident because if you get everybody in both towers, if you get them all out on the street, the firefighters and the EMTs, they're going to have a lot harder time getting in to the North Tower to put out the fire, to rescue people. So they told everyone in the South Tower, all right, stay put. And there were people trying to get out.

They wouldn't even let people in the second tower out of the building. They had security guards down at the bottom of the stairs, barring the exit and saying, like, please return to your offices. Please return to your offices. And thinking that this was all an accident, emergency services, they get there within minutes and the very first group of firefighters who showed up, they had a feeling. Like there was one guy who survived from this and they all looked at each other. They said, you know, there's a good chance we're not going to make it out of this.

Oh, yeah. You look up this huge building, you basically watch it because it's like normal, normal, normal, normal. And then those floors of just pure flame. And then the people you're supposed to save. That's how brave. I mean, of course, it's like, I know that there was sort of like a little bit of a period after 2001 where it's like America's, the firefighters were America's superheroes.

And they were very, you know, of course, like almost cultish, cultish, you know, but with this, this event specifically, of course, it's just shown to me like, these are just civil servants, these are people that are just paid to do their, it's a job. Firefighters don't write tickets when you have to go into the, you know, into the grocery store really quick. They don't give you a fine if you're drinking a beer on the street, but I'm also going to say, save people's lives, but they were all out of police officers that also lost their lives on this.

And it's like, now we're in this sort of weird situation and a weird relationship with, with authority in America right now, accordingly, you know, with like, what's going on with the, how police officers are trained and how they're acting and it's important to remember that they are men and they, there's a lot of men, women and they are, they're humans and they're sacrificing stuff for yourself. We'll get into that in future episodes in 93, they militarized the police because of the war on drugs. Obviously, after 2001, the war on terrorism, the police got remilitarized and that's why

we're having situations that we're having right now. That's when they started giving them tanks. Right. Exactly. Even Stevens Point, Wisconsin, for example, my hometown, my little brother just called me. They got a brand new tank. It happened in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

I think somebody stole a jar of smuckers like all last year. They just, they just fill in it with like, they're just filling it with brats. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. It's just, it's a good cooker. It's a good cooker for July 4th because basically these police forces, if they don't spend the money, then they, then they get their fend, funding cuts or they're like, we want millions of dollars next year.

Let's buy a tank. Yeah. Exactly. So out of that first group, they all acknowledged they're probably not going to get out of their life, they all shook each other's hands, went up the stairs, only one of those guys survived. This is when it starts getting really intense, the jumpers. The jumpers start about 15 minutes after the first plane hit and people on the ground, they said that the bodies hitting the ground sounded like sacks of cement.

Like it was such a deep thud. And the myth that a lot of people have about jumpers from buildings, the myth that a lot of people have is that, you know, you lose consciousness before you hit the ground. That is not true. They weren't traveling fast enough. Yeah. These bodies, they were traveling at a speed of about 150 miles per hour, which is enough to cause instant death, but not enough to cause them to lose consciousness.

Because it cuts them, I remember when you watched a lot of the people in the street footage of the tower, as they were going up the World Trade Center, like you could see people waving shirts above the attack line, above the fire line, where people waving shirts in the top and they were kind of all kind of chained together, they were smashing out the windows. Which was a bad idea, which was both a good idea and a bad idea. It was a good idea for them because the heat is moving upwards, cooking them, but the thing is the oxygen came rushing in from the broken windows, feeding the flames underneath them. I literally was watching 102 minutes and one of the people recording the building was like,

oh look, it's paper, look, paper's coming out of the building. And then someone's like, wait a second, I think that that's a person. It was falling too fast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they were like, caught it. And then they were like, oh my god, that's a person, and they freak. And I had to close my laptop, I'm like, I almost like threw it across the room. It was, it's kind of crazy because it's just one of those things, the reason why to bring

it up is it just show like, those are the moments of real claustrophobic panic that happened that make, that's what's real about this. Whatever 9-11 was used for afterwards, in terms like politically and on a global scale is one thing, but this is the micro fucking tragedy, is this kind of shit. This is the humans. Like, you got to remember that these were all humans. So at 850, President Bush, of course, we've all seen the famous footage, he's listening to a group of kids reading a book called The Pet Goat in Sarasota, Florida.

Very ironic name, by the way. Very much so. He's told... Baphomet, if you want to get into that. Oh, it's not Baphomet. He wasn't teaching the children about Satan. That's part three. The world's most dangerous book.

We'll talk about it. Yes, we will. So he's told that the second plane is hit, and he knew on the way to the elementary school, he had already been told that the first plane had been hit. And he said that he had watched video footage which would have been completely impossible because it wasn't released until that afternoon, actual video footage of the first plane. Yeah, well, he's not the most eloquent person, yeah. So he waits a full seven minutes before making a move.

I mean, he wanted to hear how the book ended. Yeah, that's a good point. And then afterwards, he disappeared for most of the day, and we'll talk on the next one about what personally my belief. Where did he go? 9-11. What was he doing? Dick Cheney was the president on 9-11.

Dick Cheney was the president. Absolutely. I mean, and then he did have to catch up on episodes of According to Jim. Oh, yeah. That's kind of... Love it. So in later interviews with President Bush about the day of September 11th, a lot of his responses, you can tell, at least when he's talking about when he saw the footage,

what his first reactions were, it seemed scripted. It seems like someone has told him, like, okay, this is what you say, or at least this is what he's prepared for himself. Of course. This is what... Because he's not a very good off-the-cuff speaker, so he's like, this isn't important. No, and you cannot fucking bungle up today, George. Exactly.

Well, he did a great... We'll get to... I thought he did a good job with the loudspeaker there at the end of the day. Yeah. So he is like, okay, I can't mess this up. I have to have a prepared statement for when people interview me about this. But later on, in that same interview, when he's talking about the aftermath of 9-11, what he had to deal with afterwards, he said something like, this is, I think, one of,

if not the most telling sentence about the entire Bush administration. He said, I never campaigned that I could handle being a wartime president. Of course. But you know, when you bring on Rumsfeld, when you bring on Ashcroft, when you bring on Cheney, you bring the biggest hawks, HW, his father hated these guys, and you told him not to bring them into the administration. Rumsfeld immediately said Saddam had something to do with it, and Bush ran on a campaign of being a compassionate conservative who cared about education.

And then he's the perfect, perfect pawn for 9-11. So at 9.02 a.m., 17 minutes after the first plane hits, Port Authority officially orders the total evacuation of both buildings. That's when someone, again, gets a little itch in the back of their head that says like, okay, something's wrong here. Up to 14,000 people are already evacuating when they make this call, and one minute after they make the call to evacuate both buildings, United 175 crashes into floors, 75 to 85 of the South Tower, much lower than the first.

And you can see on 102 minutes is that the streets of Manhattan just go insane. Go because they realize, oh, this is terrorism. Right. This is on purpose. The guy that, Jose, that we just hired here, you know, I said earlier that he was 11 when he saw it, him and his, he was there with his older brother, who was a teenager, when the first plane hit, they started walking towards it because it was a curiosity. It was like, oh, let's go, let's go see, let's, let's see what's happening here.

And he said when the second plane hit, they just instinctively started running in the second or opposite direction. People were freaking out, and I'm, I saw it live, I saw the second plane hit live. Yeah. Same here, yeah. And that was insane. That was insane. Yeah.

It was absolutely crazy. In fact, we're going to start playing stuff. Now we're going to play some video clips. This is, this first clip is from the people on the ground. This is real reactions from people. This is a bunch of, this is just NYU students uptown. Dad, what is that falling? Oh my God, don't be a person.

Where? Oh my God. Where? That right there? What are those big heavy things falling at a rate that a piece of paper would not fall? Oh my God. No way. No, now it's getting a little bit bigger and bigger.

Like that, you know, and you see that? Yeah, I see it. I see it. I mean, who's to say it's not like a chair? Please be a chair. Please be a chair. Regardless, it's going to be so dangerous at that, that base. Obviously.

Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. What? Oh my God. It's terrorism.

Guys, what do we do? Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help. Help.

Help. So you can definitely tell the mood changes. Yeah. The mood changes from this kind of detached. Right. Like, you know, maybe it's chairs or something like that. Like it's just sort of, you know, and it's like, oh man, it's got to be so dangerous. Like it goes from, because you talk to a lot of, or you talk to a lot of people and a lot

of people on the street too, and a lot of people in these videos, they're just like, oh my God, like. Look at those people. Look at those people. Truly empathetic. Truly. Looking at these people. I feel like that's a true, to be honest, a measure of New Yorker's character.

Because one thing that we got is like, there is a sense of Schrodinger's road. Schrodinger's road. Schrodinger's road. Schrodinger's road. In New York, right? Where it's like, you know, like seeing somebody else's misery a little bit, because we're all kind of miserable. But there's also that other thing of like a great sort of like commiseration of like,

you could imagine yourself having gone all the way into work, you know, an hour commute all the way into work. And then this, this shit happens where it's like, even because at that point it's just an accident. Right. And you imagine yourself like up there, New Yorkers are like, have a lot of beautiful kind of energy. There's a good spirit here where it's like, you see that a lot with this footage or people

being concerned for people in the towers and not talking shit. Yeah. And then. Yeah. I mean, New Yorkers are some of the nicest people in the world because they don't fake kindness. When they're nice to you, you know, they mean it. That's for sure.

That's why I love the city so much. Like we, we all saw this on, or I mean, at least I did, I know Marcus, far removed. I mean, New York deals with things, New York dealt with this. I mean, it's crazy to think about, we can watch it and we know the ramifications in a theoretical level, but to be there is a whole other story. And again, how do you feel about this guys? Right? Do you feel that 9-11 and the coverage of 9-11, right?

Because they were saying before it's like, they really were trying to get the facts right. They weren't trying to jump on it. They were filling the air with noise. Right? They were covering, they were trying to cover it as much as possible. But do you really feel like we are looking at that before 9-11 and the day of 9-11, working at, we're looking at the last bits of non-staged news reading that has happened since. I feel like the tone of how things are covered and the way, when we talk about 9-11 as a

brand has been so pervasive over the last like 15 years that we can't even see the force for the trees. Yeah, I think that 9-11 was, and we'll listen right now to the ABC News, like them actually with the footage on their screen. I think it is the last instance of honest journalism that has ever happened, attached to journalism that wasn't about, that wasn't just about outrage. Like you think, you would think Sandy Hook, there would be some sort of emotional attachment to that.

No, immediately branded. Immediately branded and immediately in the media used as a football, a political football that this is, oh, this can be used to argue my point, this can be used to argue my point. What they have done is taken our emotions from us. We're going to talk about this in conspiracy as well. What they've done, I think a part of it is this, where it's like all of a sudden, it's like how they covered the shootings that happened yesterday of the camera woman and the reporter when the camera man and the reporter that were shot, and the way they immediately sort

of flipped it, and they took his footage, and it was like they almost made it better the way they like, they took it off his Facebook page, and they showed the first person footage of him fucking shooting those people, which is horrific, and no one should watch it. And they took that, and then they immediately ripped it down, like it was like, and they almost like kind of coyly presented how they took it down. We have, since this day, we have been, we've been watching nothing but theater on television. Yeah, well of course, television news is never going to be accurately describing the events because they're all paid for by companies like Northrop Brumman, and you know, major manufacturers

of weapons. And again, who benefits from 9-Eleven? We want to get into that, and we'll get into that, you know. We're going to get into that in future episodes, of course. Quibonum. Quibonum! Damn it, dog meat. You're getting too real.

Let's listen to this. This whole episode's a little too real. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Here we are. It does not appear that there's any kind of an effort up there yet, now remember, oh my God.

Oh my God. That looks like a second plane. I just can't see a plane go in. That just exploded. We just saw another plane coming in from the side. You did. That was out of the blue by my view. Yes, and that's the second explosion.

You could see the plane come in just from the right-hand side of the screen. So this looks like it is some sort of a concerted. And that's one thing that you also hear in the newsroom, is you hear them when it hits, you hear the, oh my God, like everybody just stopping and staring. And then after about 10 seconds, they gather themselves, and they're like, oh, we have a job to do. No, we have to report it as accurately as humanly possible, but also then you get to people on the street, and what's the first thing they said?

It's like you watch it too, in 102 minutes, when that second plane hits, and they're all, you know, you just gotta be like, it's immediately someone's just like, Osama bin Laden. Like they just start saying that shit, and they're like, and then, or the miserable. In the Times Square footage that they have, yeah, it's people like, oh, Osama bin Laden. Yeah, because we knew, of course they knew because Osama bin Laden. We've been setting him up for a long time, if we want to say, if we're looking to cast a villain, we were making it, but we didn't know we didn't set him up, we just chose not to murder him.

So he was also, like he was a part of the 1993 bombings, and he had also been a part of the USS Cole bombing from two years earlier. Clinton should have killed Osama bin Laden. He's our Kristoff Waltz from back in the day, the permanent villain. Yeah, I think the media, I think they were just frankly too shocked to get stuff wrong. They are so careful to not get anything wrong on this, and I think, yeah, it was the death knell of good journalism. Charlie Rosa's still out there.

Yeah, everyone loves Charlie Rosa. So 32 minutes after that, Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, the forgotten attack, killing 59 on the plane and 125 military and civilian personnel inside the building. On the side of the Pentagon that happened to be under construction, that was also built to withstand a missile attack. Very interesting how it hit it on a very specific side. If you want to talk also about the weird maneuver it made, almost like a military jet pilot, the way it made when it swooped around.

Next episode. Yeah. So, it's hard. Yeah, I know. It's hard. I get upset. I know. I've been getting a little upset the last couple of days.

So ground crews, they had only found out 10 minutes earlier that Flight 77 had been hijacked. And it's at this point that planes were only grounded in the New York City area. Okay, think about this. There were three planes that had so far flown into targets. There were 4,000 planes still in the air. They could attack literally anywhere in the United States. They did not know where the next attack was coming from. And that is when the FAA grounded all flights, which took two hours to get all of these.

To get all of these flights in the ground, which is both terrifying and impressive all at the same time. Because it was still two hours where there were flights in the air. You mean tell me I'm not going to see Maiden at fucking Lollapalooza? That's not right, man. Real victims all across the country. So when firefighters finally arrived at the top levels, they found that all of the water lines had been cut.

There was no water up there. The sprinkler systems in the office also completely cut. This combined with the heat of an office fire, which office fires are notoriously the hottest of all building fires because paper. So much paper. And you think all these financial institutions, this is 2001, this was back when they had trees of paper, entire floors just files, just paper. And that burns hot.

You could all be held in an iPad today. Yeah, exactly. And the temperature up there with the, of course, the jet fuel, the paper, which was burning much hotter than the actual jet fuel. So this is a 911 call from the 83rd floor in Tower 2. And this is definitely, this is pretty intense. We're going to play a couple parts from it, the beginning and the end. So we have the water traces, so I want to have difficulty breathing the 83rd floor.

Okay, ma'am, how you doing? Is it, are they going to be able to get somebody up here? Well, of course, ma'am. We're coming up to you. Well, there's no one here yet, and the floor is completely engulfed or on the floor, and we can't breathe. And it's very, very, very hot. So very, is it all the lights the lowest?

The lights are on, but it's very hot. Ma'am, ma'am. It's very hot. We're all there on the other side of Liberty. And it's very, very hot. Are the lights, is it the turn of lights off? Do you want to turn the lights off? No!

No, the lights are off! Okay, good. Now, everybody stay calm. You want a good talk? It's also like for these people that they're calling, it's above their pay grade, you know, so they're used to like somebody getting stabbed in the subway or you know. But their jobs are to be reasonable. Their jobs are to, in the face of emergency is to be, you have to be held together, you

have to be able to- In a situation like this, you just sort of want to not tell them that they're about to die, I guess? No, you have to be a voice of rationality. I mean, that's exactly what this part of the call is about. Listen, listen, the call is in, I'm documenting, I'm going to let those, hold on a second please. I'm going to die, aren't I? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, say it.

I'm going to die. Man, man, man, say your prayers. I'm going to die. We're going to think positive because you've got to help each other get off the floor. I'm dying. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. You're doing a good job, man. You're doing a good job.

It's so hot. I'm burning up. That is a person doing their fucking job and doing it well. Yes. The operators, I don't think they get credit for giving people comfort in the last moments. And I don't think they got enough credit as far as the PTSD that the event caused. You're literally listening into the last breath of a human being's life that you have no idea who they are.

I mean, at some point, if I was that woman on that phone call, I would like to know who I was just speaking to. Oh, I bet that is. That is closure. I mean, it's so traumatic. It's very traumatic. They found out her name was Melissa. So since there was no water lines for these firefighters to use up there, their primary

job became to bust out doors because the impact of the jet hitting, both of the jets hitting was so powerful, the towers shifted enough to jam most of the doors in their frames, making it impossible to open them up without the aid of an axe. And that's why a lot of people, especially near the areas of impact below the impact, all the doors were jammed. They were stuck in their offices. They could not get out. There were a few people who were able to find little pieces of drywall.

If they could punch through. That they could punch through. There was one group of guys that were stuck in an elevator. They dug through drywall and busted out a wall and came out in the bathroom because that was just the, but that was rare. Most of these people were stuck and that's why so many firefighters died because that's what they were doing. They were trying to make their way because they didn't, because again, we had all been

under the idea that these towers were supposed to be able to stand even if they got hit by a fucking plane. Did we hear that sound like over and over again? They were made in 1901 and no plane existed. I mean, they were built in 1972. 1972, no plane existed. No, we were just, I'm just saying that's what they went in with that belief system, that they're not going to fall.

It's just a fire. Well, no, the Port Authority guys, the engineers, these two guys, let's see, are Frank DeMartini and Pablo Lopez, who ended up saving about 50 people. That was their primary concern. They thought like, we have to go check on the structural integrity of this building. They weren't confident at all. I know, but firefighters don't know because they're used to, they're using just office fires.

They consider this like a fire, right? Yes, a plane hit it. But then, you know, also you look at this big, huge building and you think, oh, that's not going anywhere. Yeah. You know? And so they're up there just being like, we got to get through this until we can get the lines up here to, because the helicopters were already starting their way up to try

to blast a fire water, like you hit it with hoses from the side. And it's, you know, that's one of those things. You trust the building. Yeah. You trust the building to stand. You know, like you think that this is going to, this is the worst it can get. Yeah. One group of survivors, this to me is amazing.

One group of survivors, they busted through these doors that had actually been blocked from the smoke because some of the doors were actually airtight enough where smoke wasn't coming through the doors. They busted open the door. There's an inferno behind them. There's just smoke. They're all covered in soot. And they found a secretary at her desk on the phone with her boss going over his appointments

for the next week. God damn. Like just not. And they come in and she's like, there's something happening. There's something going. I need to go. I need to go. And he's yelling at her.

Like just yelling. No, no. She's like, no. I got to see Brian next week. I'm going to get croissants with Brian. Yeah. But that's also like, it's too separate. I mean, it's like this denial.

Right. And you also see that people on the ground. You see footage. Like I remember this, this image really sticks out in my head. A woman on, because there's paper everywhere. Like there's that, they got, everyone keeps talking about like it was like a ticker tape parade. Because as they said, that was the first time they saw it.

When the paper first happened, there was a guy in the office talking about paper blowing past. And he's just like, oh, some kind of parade happened. And I wonder what, what, what, you know, what we're celebrating. Yeah. They're making jokes like, oh, Yankees won a World Series again. It's just, that's what people thought. And there's a woman on the street that is just picking up paper off of the ground and

calmly shuffling it. And just, just broken, just broken, just not in disbelief. It's doing something. Fight or flight or just try to stay busy. You know, I literally distract your mind in any way possible. Oh yeah. What are you going to do? Terrorism comes.

I immediately snap into secretary mode. Yeah. I mean, literally there is no fight. Yeah. What are you fighting against? Right. Yeah. So 22 minutes after the Pentagon, the South Tower, the second one to be hit falls first.

And in both video and picture, you can see, it's amazing to watch this. You can see the corner of this building. You can see it slowly buckle in. And you see it at the point where it buckles. The top of the tower falls over to the side and then comes down like that. Like it is, it is the most action movie, unreal, it's the most unreal thing I've ever seen in my life. I mean, honestly, when I watched the Avengers movie, every one of those Marvel films, they

trash Manhattan. Yeah. And it does make me think like, as you live, when you live in New York, you start to realize that those aren't buildings. Those are like, there's a bunch of people in there and I'm like, I don't know if the Avengers are very good. Yeah. I think I just kind of don't even want them in the city anymore.

They just try. How many thousands has the Hulk murdered? Oh, just so many. And it's like, I know you killed like one really bad guy, but then you killed so many good people. Yeah. I just, but I do that regularly, walking down the street, I'm in Manhattan and I look up and like, they'll be, because of seeing this footage over and over again, I can just

see a building blowout. Yeah. It was unimaginable. Again, though, keep in mind, unimaginable before this, what this would actually look like. Yeah. And I've been sitting in the, and it's such a surreal experience. I've been sitting in this office out and we're out in Queens, but you can see the man.

I can walk out of the door right now and I can see the entire Manhattan skyline. Yeah. You can see the freedom tower, the whole thing. Yeah. I can, I can see absolutely everything. And after a scenario, especially watching 102 and listening to it, how loud it is. And going out there, it's, you are amazed at how quiet it is out there. And you just feel that same sort of feeling that they probably felt that day on that just

beautiful morning, it's like it's just so quiet and so still and it is eerie. And you have a laser sharp focus, like you are aware of everything around you because you were in it. You're here. Like you can look and you can see that is where it happened over there. Yeah. I can go to, I was down there, like, well, yeah, 9-Eleven Museum. You're in it.

Like you were actually in it. The 9-Eleven Museum is built in what they call the bathtub, which is where, it was the six floors below the tower, where the slurry wall. Marcus, I think you're just denying the fact that we got a brand new shiny tower that we're all supposed to look at instead. It's actually very beautiful. It's a nice tower. It's a beautiful one.

Yeah. Especially when you stand at the foot of it and look straight up, like it is, it is a beautiful tower. So let's, let's hear, like, speaking of, speaking of which and being down there. This is a footage, this is a news footage from NBC4. This is a reporter talking to a woman on the street and while he's talking to her, the first tower falls. Okay, two blocks away from where the whole thing happened and this entire area has been

cordoned off and people that have been working in nearby buildings have been told to evacuate. That's what this mass exodus is to my left-hand side. To my right, we have two witnesses and as we speak with you two, we're going to pan up and show a shot of what we see from this vantage point. First, Marna Ringel and Marna, you work across the street. Tell me exactly what you saw on the street and as you looked up what you saw because you said you saw the second one. Am I correct?

No, I didn't see the second one. It actually was coming out of the building and there was maybe about 30 or 40 people at the bottom of one world financial covered in blood. I did not expect that at all and I worked for Lehman in one right here and a gentleman that I worked with was on the telephone. He said, what was that? I said, you know, he thought it was thunder. I looked over, screamed, it was a bomb because I saw a piece of the building flow down and

I think I scared my entire floor because I can scream pretty loud and it was pretty bad. The second one that you saw people on the road outside of the building, explain that scene. I saw, there's maybe about 30 or 40 people covered with bandages and blood. It looks like a lot of them were either on the floor of one of the exchanges. There's actually, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. We're not sure exactly what happened but it was another explosion on the far side of one

of the buildings from where we're standing, the reverberation and another explosion on the right hand side. Another building has gone. Another building has gone up on the right hand side of the road. People are now running down the street. We're not sure if that was another explosion or if that was advanced debris. Joining me also is Jim Plant. Jim, you're also a witness of what happened.

People do take that, like, you know, he says explosion multiple times. Many of the conspiracy theories people are just like, say it's proof. Very rarely do people utter what actually happened the moment that it occurred. Well, it's like a dream logic. Hindsight is 20-20 for a reason. Yeah, and I mean, there's other footage that does point towards that. We're going to look to, you know, again with building sevens that we'll talk about in the next episode.

There's stuff like that. But this is just the belief again that those buildings just don't fall down. Well, and you saw all of the news footage that I saw, they're all looking at a wide shot, or most of them, this is the only one where there's someone on the ground as it falls. Every other one is looking at a wide shot of the building and none of them even entertain the idea that the building fell. Right.

In 102 minutes, nothing is quite as brutally upsetting as watching that wall of debris come slamming down the street. I'm watching it on the edge of my seat. I'm just next to tears, just imagining just that, because that's Doomsday, right? That's exactly how you kind of pictured it, this fucking wall chaos and you can't stop anything. It's just so strange because you see it and it feels like it's alive. Yeah.

It is like a living entity coming after you. There's a certain shot. It's so bizarre. There's a certain shot of a woman that's in a building and she's got her camera looking out onto the street and you hear this noise coming like just like this and then it looks like a monster. Yeah. It just goes and all the dust and debris falls in and again, the the pure saddest, most

intense, real, found footage horror film that's ever happened and the monster is it's a smoke monster almost from like the film or television show Lost. And it's legitimately a wall of cancer. Yeah. Oh my god. It's what we're going to find out later. Oh yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So sad. They said that it was so that there was a guy that told a story that said that he was literally reaching into his mouth and pulling out piles like just this gunk. Well, you watch the dude, there's like that. I mean, it was also 102 minutes. You see this police officer who's walking around. He's got I forgot.

He's got some sort of helmet cam or something. He takes off the helmet and you just see him and it's just water shooting out of a wall and he's just like scrambling at his face and he's just watching himself with like and then the other New Yorker knows you don't wash yourself with random water. No, no, no. As you see in Manhattan. Usually it's not water. Yeah.

Yeah. And so he's just splashing it all over his face. It's fucking just brutal. Yeah. And remember that the first tower to fall was the second one to be hit because it hit much lower than the first one. So over in the North Tower and I want to say again, two blocks away, New York City blocks, I walk one block in 20 seconds.

So they are very, very close. These are not. These are not the Mississippi block. This is a New York City block. They're very close. Especially in the financial district. Oh, yeah. So the North Tower, remember, there is still 1000 over 1000 people trapped above the fire

that is impossible to escape. Now, do you think that these people are still alive or do you think smoke inhalation is? Oh, no, I know there are people still alive because there were people stacked four to five high hanging out of the windows. This is when the majority of falls begin. There's one person tells of a story. It's actually this. This is actually put up on the wall, but then I love a museum has a jumper room where it

has a little. It has a plaque that says morning extremely graphic content and you walk into this little room and it's just showing five pictures on a loop of the people falling, specifically the falling man photo, which is very beautiful picture, which causes such a huge controversy, especially the controversy afterwards of where like there was a paper in Pennsylvania that published an actual picture like publish that picture gigantic on the back and it caused such an outrage and I think and this is what is a fascinating to me and I and I think really shows the disconnect that people had about this day is the news media showed the towers

falling over and over and over again for weeks. You just saw him fall. You saw him fall five times a day. Well, and like we were talking about earlier, then it became it did become used for more desensitizing. But we were talking about but what I'm but what I'm saying is that the but the images of the falling people were taboo. You couldn't.

Right. You would not. People just didn't want it to pretend that they didn't exist because it's it's like Joseph Stalin said that famous quote one day or a million deaths is a statistic. One death is a tragedy. Now, the other thing too is again, I mean, this is just to put this out there conspiracy thought to is that I think it is important that all of this footage exists. Yeah.

Right. I think we're supposed to be able to see this stuff and know that it happened. Know that it's real. Watch them. See the falling people. That's how you know it's real. That's how you know. It's a real event.

You watch it. But then you're going to also see again how that imagery is then twisted and they use it. It's about optics. They use them to set up something for themselves to get to get something out of it. And those people, the reason why they're afraid of people, it's the same thing with what happened when we were fighting in Afghanistan and in Iraq, what would they do is they don't want to show pictures of the fucking caskets that our soldiers are in because that would

make it far too fucking real. Or any of the combat footage like they did in Vietnam where they showed actual dying soldiers on the news every night. They love keeping in a hologram because the pictures of those towers falling, if you just show them on loop without fucking zooming in on them, those look like a goddamn action movie and it makes you fucking pumped to go do something about it. Oh yeah. It's like when you watch the people just falling, you start putting your dad in there, you start

putting your brothers in there, your cousin, you start putting those people's faces on those people and that, you know, our government loves our hologram fucking reality. Yeah. Like they want to keep it alive. I mean it's anger versus sorrow. You watch the towers fall, you feel anger. You see the people fall and you feel sorrow. Two very different emotions that are used for two very different things.

Sorrow can be a very, I guess, personal emotion, a very private emotion, but anger is shared and that is useful for their own reasons. Yeah, exactly. So you're looking up at the first towers falling, people are holding onto each other across the dividers to balance themselves. They're leaning out of windows. They are a hundred floors up. Imagine looking down.

They are a hundred floors up. They are looking down. There is, they are in a literal chimney. The smoke is just has enveloped the entire structure and they are looking down from a hundred floors up. You saw one group of five, they're stacked on each other. One group of five either all decided to go together or just one person slipped and pulled all the rest of them down.

People saw, like, and you kind of think, watching this footage, just like, how many people jump? Like, I think if you ask most people, like, okay, how many people do you think jump from the top of the World Trade Center? A lot of people are probably saying, like, I don't know, 10, 20? It was over 200 that jumped. You will never know exactly how many. Because the jump, you know, I don't want to get too grisly with that, but, you know, I'd rather jump, fly for a second instead of being cooked like a goddamn turkey in my

office. You know what I mean? Yeah. Where I hated to be every day. Yeah. Tough to say. Tough to say. So these buildings, they're filled with black smoke that most of the office workers,

they had no idea what to do, where to go. These buildings were an acre in area. They were 70% the size of a football field. This next tidbit's really interesting. Yeah. The only dude who was, the only people that were prepared were the employees of Morgan Stanley because their director of security, this guy named Rick Rascorla, saw, he was known as the man who saw it coming.

Who must have been a pain in the ass up until the day. Huge pain in the ass. Because this guy, he was convinced, because he was convinced like he knew, okay, the first building, and he had this buddy that was also kind of a security director, and he asked me, he's like, okay, so what do you think? They're going to do it again? The guy's like, absolutely. Of course they're going to do it again.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. They're going to be fucking stinking talking. You don't think they're going to come first? You don't think they're going to want to take all fucking freedom? Yeah. And they're like, are you calm down, fucking Rick?

Yeah. Yeah. And so they're like, how are they going to do it? They're like, oh, they're going to come. They're going to come by plane. So he forced Morgan Stanley employees for years to do fire drills. He would time employees and bitch him out if they were too slow. And about Columbine, this is what he said about Columbine.

The police were sitting outside while kids are inside getting killed. They should have put themselves between the perpetrators and the victims. That was abject cowardice. We were younger. We could have flown to Colorado, got in that building, and then in that chip before the law did. Yeah. This is how confident this guy was in his ability.

He's like, oh, fuck man, if I was 20 years younger, I would have gotten on a plane. I would have killed them kids. I would have killed them. I would have killed them. I would have killed them. I would have killed them motherfuckers. And this is how successful he was. And this, without this man, the body count would have been so much higher.

He successfully evacuated 2,687 Morgan Stanley employees from the World Trade Center complex. And the last time they saw him, he was on the 10th floor of the South Tower heading up. So the guys had pain in the ass in your office? That guy who's always talking about regulations and shit like that, sometimes he could save your life. Yeah, absolutely. So as New York is unfolding, passengers on Flight 93, they're on their way to the capital.

Flight 93, it's on its way to the capital building in DC. It's 40 minutes behind the other three. And they're getting word on the ground that the other two planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center. And as the story goes, they fought back, and I think, I'm pretty sure that although Dick Cheney, he definitely authorized the shooting down of Flight 93, but the black box recording, which is public knowledge, you can hear from the cockpit, it points more towards the terrorist crashing the plane rather than letting the passengers take control.

Because you hear this fight behind the door, and you hear the guy Ziyad Jorahri. He's saying, like, hold the door, hold the door, hold the door. And they're about to get through. And he just starts screaming, Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar. And he screams it seven times on the way to the ground. And it crashes in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, whether it was shot down or not, 20 minutes away from DC. Well, if it was shot down, I would have no problem with the government doing it.

Yeah. I mean, they had to do it. Absolutely not. You have to do it. It's a missile at this point. It's fucked up. And I also got to kind of think, it's like, if they did shoot it down, in that time after it, like, we needed something, like just some sort of, I don't know, some sort of like

fighting back type of thing. Oh, yeah, of course. It's like, it just sucks that we had to kill how many innocent people in order to do it. It's had fucked up. It's had horrible, rock and hard place scenario where it's like, they can't let him hit the Capitol building. Yeah. You know, like, it's not because the president is more fucking precious than anybody else,

but because of the symbolism, you look at the symbolism of what the World Trade Center falling down does, both psychically and politically, if, you know, forces you into a 15 year forever war. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why presidents are always hated, because literally, it's impossible to make a good decision. You just have to choose the lesser of two evils.

Yeah, lesser of two evils. So a little after, a little less than 30 minutes after the South Tower collapses, the North Tower goes down as well. And so now you've got a debris cloud that is two entire buildings. And one witness on the ground, he described the cloud as, he said, quote, almost solid. There's not even sound. Like they say, like after it fell, that there wasn't even sound traveling through this field. And one witness, and this is just terrifying, one witness that the only thing he could see

was the flickering light of burning paper. That was crazy. This is that. And this here is footage from a man on the street right after it happened. What happened, it collapsed, the top floors collapsed down, I saw it blow and then ran like hell. Thank God. I'm 69, but I can still run.

By the way, that is just how badass a New Yorker is. Like he's almost laughing. Like I'm 60, I can't believe I can still do this. Yeah, it's like, I can't believe 69. Well, yeah, one thing in 102 minutes showed was this fucking immensely fat man. He's like 300 and he cuts back and he cuts the report and he's like, what are you doing? He's like, I gotta go. I got my friend, Nicky, my friend Nicky's walking down and he's like, yeah, he's like

I gotta see if my friend's okay. Yeah. And like, and he's just like, and he's just, but the thing that gets, you know, I'm an audio guy. The thing that has haunted me the most is I don't know if y'all heard that the sound in the background, that kind of siren sound. What that is, it's called a pass alarm and what that is that if a firefighter is motionless for more than 30 seconds, that goes off.

Oh yeah, so when you listen, when you watch 102 minutes, you hear the sound over and over again and each one of those noises is a dead firefighter. Yeah, this is actually, this is what it, this is a clear, a clear clip. I haven't been able to be in silence for the last week because if it's silent, I hear it. It almost sounds like when you go out to the wilderness and you just hear the, you know, the bugs. The crickets.

Yeah, the crickets. Yeah. That is almost what it sounds like. But yeah, that, that noise, I remember seeing a video of that in like maybe a month after like it was on set back when you had to download videos to watch them. It's I remember seeing that in that noise has haunted me for 14 years. It is, it's horrific and I never want to hear it again. Right.

I never do. And so ERs after, after the second tower fell, ERs all across New York, they're all just prepared for an onslaught of casualties and it never comes. Only 18 people were pulled from the wreckage and the last one they found at 1030 that night, one firefighter, he said, those who got out, got out, those who didn't, died. Right. There was no in between. There had minor injuries that could be treated on the street.

Right. I mean, they said there were about 10,000 injuries that day, but no major ones really. A few. Don't look amazing. There wasn't more. But it was all. What's because what do you got? They got people out.

First of all, they got people out of lower Manhattan. So when the towers fell, like they just, they were out, people were out of there. We're good at that shit. Yeah. We're good at that. And you know what? Also in New York, what I like about us too is that we can fall like it's true. We can really form into sort of a mob mentality.

And we know how to move as a unit because that's what the subway system is. That's how, that's why when you're a pain in the ass in the subway, when you're not from New York and you don't know what you're doing and you're just like a fucking monkey wrench in the whole system and you're like standing in the middle, it's like, that's why people get so fucking mad at you because New York is about cooperation. And coexisting. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's about moving. We all, you got to move at speed. You got to know the rules and you got to look out for other people and you got to, it's about a web. Yeah. New York doesn't get nearly enough credit. When we talk about coexisting, we're not talking about white Wisconsin, everyone's Presbyterian, maybe even the Catholic every now and again.

It is different religions, different races, different heights, different languages. Different languages. Every body is different. Living in apartment buildings. Sitting right next to each other. Yeah. Living in apartment buildings that are not meant to ever be apartment buildings. You can hear everything and everything he does and we all collectively agree to ignore

each other. Right. Exactly. And that is a silent agreement between everyone, it's like, as long as it's like, it's like you get an hour. If you can hear your neighbors argue, they can hear you fuck. That's, oh, absolutely. So the rubble of the World Trade Center towers, it's stacked seven stories high from ground

level. And one of the things that I always, they always wondered, it's like, where did all that go? Why is it not higher? It's because there were six stories below them that all that these collapsed down into. And that is now where the 9-Eleven Museum is. The whole 9-Eleven Museum is underground and it is amazing to see that. So forensic scientists, they worked for months.

There's this great book that I read called Teasing Secrets from the Dead about a forensic scientist who worked on Waco and 9-Eleven. She was the one that identified David Koresh. And she talked about how these forensics people would work in 12-hour shifts for months, months and months in these tents on around ground zero. Trying to get people closure. Trying to get people closure, identifying, like they was like, okay, I've got a leg. Does anyone else have a leg?

Does anyone else have a leg? It's like, I'm dizzy. Impossible. I mean, they were, I mean, and I think this is impressive. They were able to identify 60% of the victims and most of these people, I mean, and you look at in the museum, they had this thing called a composite, which is about two feet tall, maybe 10 feet around. It is a cut from the wreckage.

And by the way, the museum is just full of wreckage. It's just full of steel, of the beams. And this composite is you see, and it's about six floors. They're all compressed into something that's about three feet tall. Right. And it's also something that made 9-11 really live on very, very long in a tangible sense to New York because when they were building the Freedom Tower, the reason it took so long was because they would find a bone.

They would stop all construction, try to find the DNA with the bone. So it really was a start and stop process. The last body identified was in 2013, just two years ago, a firefighter. It's very real. That's what my cousin did. My cousin was a part of the team. He was the secret service they went to because they brought a lot of the rubble to the dump. They brought Staten Island.

Yeah. Fresh kills. Yeah. And they sifted through it looking for body parts. And we have friends that were first responders. And it's, you know, it was very real, very intense. Yeah. The final.

And then we didn't even bring up ever the people that like faked their death during 9-11. Well, that shit's really interesting too, which we got to go into at some point. Yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah. The people that faked their death. But the woman, the woman who wasn't there that pretended like she was in the towering estate.

Everyone's trying to benefit off of these things. And we'll also have to talk about some gangs up in Harlem, settled all their beefs. It was in Washington Heights. Washington Heights. Yeah. They settled a lot of beefs that night. The cops were a little bit busy. Yeah.

The cops were a little bit busy. And the gangs took advantage of that and it is fascinating. So the final toll, 2,753 civilians, 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, 37 Port Authority officers, 10,000 treated for injuries. That's New York City alone. Pentagon, 125 military personnel and civilians, 24 people aboard the airliner. And in Pennsylvania was 45 passengers. And the last building to fall on September 11th would come at 5.20 p.m. that day.

Building 7, which we will discuss at length in our next episode. The cornerstone of all conspiracy thought. And for good fucking reason as well. Very interesting. Because, you know, again, it's real and there are mysteries at the center of this thing. Of course, there's gonna be that are very fishy. But we'll get into that. Yeah.

We'll get into all the conspiracy theories. The victims and the heroes. And we're, yeah. Unbelievable into the families of the victims and the families of the heroes. You know, thank you. And you know, I have, I've heard some people and I know people being like, they worked in the financial business. You referenced the story of the secretary.

The vast majority of people, they were not the ones that caused the economic collapse. They're they are literally their secretary, their husbands, their wives, they are just trying to work and retire. And there was, I mean, they, they talk about this, this one guy here, family's talking about this guy and they're like, he wanted to be a history teacher. Like he took a job at as a stockbroker because he had all of a sudden he had a family. He's a job. You gotta make money.

You gotta make money. Like he like wanted to put his, you know, kids through school and it's like he was a history buff. Or temp. How many temps died on 9-11? Damn. It's crazy. Just like, just thinking about that, like how many just do, how many temps do we know?

How many people do we know that do temp work? Temps? Actors, Marcus. Can you imagine Nick Turner on the top floor of the 9-11? Oh my goodness. And we didn't even talk about Windows on the World, which they, they lost a stat, it was a restaurant at the top of the trade center. They lost 75, 75 people and they got calls from in there and it just sounds horrifying.

So we're leading up to the anniversary of, you know, of course, and we're going to be doing episodes about 9-11 up until the week of 9-11 to kind of talk about it. This is our tackling of the subject. This week's going to be a little bit kooky or probably, but also to me just as serious because I believe that there are things tied to, they used the events on 9-11 for very specific purposes. I think it's important. There are conspiracies and there are, there are definitely conspiracies.

I wouldn't say it's an inside job, but I'd say that they definitely didn't mind that it happened. Yes. I'm looking at you, Mr. Cheney. But I would say a thing about this and a thing about what happened yesterday with the reporter and the cameraman is that a thing that I've been kind of thinking about since all that kind of happened, I got kind of punched in the gut yesterday watching that footage and watching all this stuff about 9-11 has really kind of torn up my life a little bit.

And I think it's really important that when things are negative and when things are intense like this, I think it's very important to put love and productivity and positivity into the world. I do believe that those kind of vibes are the type of thing that help cure bad shit. Is this you trying to tell people to watch your pretty faces going around? Pretty faces going around. That's what's happening here. Just laugh a little bit.

Just relax and laugh. Yeah. 12-15 and adult swim. But yes. Definitely going to get into the foreign policy ramifications and just, it's so big. But I agree with Henry. Hug somebody that you hate today. Yeah, hug somebody.

Everyone's just like, tell someone that you love them. If you hate somebody, just be like, hey, 9-11. Make love to somebody that you hate. Well, I mean, make sure it's consensual in that situation. That's making love. I also, I want to thank Sammy Coughlin and Megan Fierro Root for their help on research this week. They really helped.

I mean, this is such a gigantic subject. Both this and next week is, God, next week's even bigger. And also, the third week, oh boy, that shit's going to get real weird on that one. Yeah. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the show and supporting the other shows here on CCR Top at Roundtable, Page 7, Sex and Other Human Activities. You know, it's just really, it means a lot.

And follow LPontheleft.tumblr.com, and we just created yesterday on Ed Gein's birthday. So, Heil Gein and happy birthday, Gein. Happy birthday, Gein. Yeah. And put some titties up on that, because Tumblr's got titties, right? Did you allow me to say that? So many tits. Someone was telling me yesterday about a woman fucking didler herself with a handgun.

Well, all right, very interesting. That is great. You can get great tits, though, from what I've been told, it's good tits. Equalizing. And also, follow us on Twitter, at LPontheleft, at Benkisliah, Henry loves you, at Marcus Parks. That's right. And go join the Facebook group, and go buy T-shirts at cavecomedyrao.com slash merch.

Hail Satan, positive action beats the act of prayer. All right. Hail yourselves, everyone. And also, thanks, everyone, for listening to the end of our longest episode ever. Hail me. You know? Yeah, it's it's long. It's got a lot of stuff in it.

Yeah, it's got a lot. Yeah, they're just relations. Yeah, they're just relations. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to cavecomedyradio.com.