Latest / Do Hard Things™ with Siegfried Tiegs / "Why Him and Not You?" The Untold Stories of 9/11

Transcript

"Why Him and Not You?" The Untold Stories of 9/11 · Do Hard Things™ with Siegfried Tiegs

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right, welcome back everybody to the Do Hard Things Podcast.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Stigfree JTs.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: My friends call me Stig, keynote speaker, high performance coach, wrote the Amazon bestseller Life on Office.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: And welcome back to another episode of the Do Hard Things Podcast.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm excited to have Chris Meek and David Gerecki here with us in studio.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And let me give you a quick intro and then we'll uh we'll dive into today's episode.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: On the morning of September 11th, 2001, Chris Meek was on the 19th floor at Goldman Sachs.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then less than half a mile from the World Trade Center, he heard a tremendous noise and it was the first plane crashing into the building.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: He ran down the stairs.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: He was across the street at the American Stock Exchange Exchange when the North Tower came down.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he watched his first responders ran toward it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he spent the year since trying to give back.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: In 2009, a Marine Sergeant Major wrote him asking for socks and baby wipes for his troops in Afghanistan.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that letter ultimately became the organization known as Soldier Strong.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Today, they put robotic exoskeletons in VA hospitals so paralyzed veterans can stand up and walk again.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Last year he founded the 9-11 Legacy Foundation.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And their mission is to make sure that the next generation knows what happened that day.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And with him, I'm excited to have Dave Jerecki.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Dave's been writing since 1999.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's helped shape more than over 30 books, 30 published books.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And his job is to sit across from people and get the real story out of them, help them share their story.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so together they wrote Keeping Our Nation's Promised, 9-11 and the Stories That Still Shape Us, which just came out on September 8th.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: So we just encourage all viewers to go go check it out as we know that 9-11 is near and dear to our heart here in the Do Hard Things Nation.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, Dave, welcome to the Do Our Things Podcast.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having us.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Chris, let's uh let's just kind of dive in.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the first things that we talk about when we bring up 9-11 is like, where were you?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: What were you doing?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So take me to that morning.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what were you doing when you when you heard that crash and what was going on?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, like I said, I was on a conference call with my boss who was based in Chicago at the time, and our office building at the time, for those who who know Lower Manhattan, was southward facing over Trinity Church looking down Broadway.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I raised that because it was called the Canyon of Heroes, or is called the Canyon of Heroes, and that's where they have ticker tape parades for astronauts, residents, World Series, Super Bowl, et cetera.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: And heard this big bang that sounded like a big garbage truck in a pothole.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then a few minutes later, a colleague of mine looked out the window and said, I didn't know we were having a ticker tape parade today.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And we were seeing all this confetti flying around, but then we realized it was on fire.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so didn't know what was going on.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: Immediately turned to the time weights in B.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Sean in the office.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And because of the time delay between TV and real-time events, we could hear the second plane hitting the tower before we could see it on TV.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so at that point we knew obviously something was wrong.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I ran across the street, as you mentioned, the American Stock Exchange, where I had 27 traders and clerks on the floor.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: What was going through your mind?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like what, you know, when you heard the noise and you just kind of saw the chaos, like what were you thinking?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like what were the emotions that you were feeling?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had no idea, you know, obviously what the hell was going on.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Before I went into the exchange, I stopped and paused and looked up at the Twin Towers, and you see these, you know, two gaping holes.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, you also mentioned the first responders rushing in, but then my other tearing memory from that day is seeing people jumping from the Twin Towers because that was the best option that they had.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so here we are 25 years later, and that's still something that I talk about, you know, whenever we discussed 9-11.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then again, went into the exchange, and they were not letting people leave the exchange because they said that they were safer in here than being outside.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: You mentioned the first tower collapsed, and we thought the exchange was going to collapse because it was directly across the street uh south of the Twin Towers, and then ultimately found an escape door that was open.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Part of that had seen the Pentagon get hit on TV.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's when we knew, like, okay, we're at war.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so just knowing what the escape, or I'm sorry, the back of back streets of Lower Manhattan.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: You couldn't see more than six feet in front of you from the dust, from the tower collapsing.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we were hearing fire jets uh fly overhead and had no idea whose they were.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so there were four of us together that left and said, okay, take a left and go down Grant Grand Street, hit the Staten On Ferry, take another left and hug the FDR, which is the highway that goes up the east side of Manhattan.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, you know, if something happens, jump into the East River and take cover.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So how long were you like on site?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like how did you stay and help?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Did you were you directed to get out of there as quickly as possible?
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like what were your their proceedings?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so directed to get out because once the SEC and the Federal Reserve said that the markets would not be open that day, then it was obviously, you know, best to get out of the exchange.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: But I was back downtown, it was either September 13th or 14th, I forget the day.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: I was the only person at the firm that had clearance to get through security because I had to go rebuild the exchange.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: We got transferred to the New York Stock Exchange to get the markets up and running the following week.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Dave, what about you?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: What were you doing that day?
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: So I uh well I grew up in Pennsylvania.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, but in 2001, at that point, I was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I was a copywriter at an ad agency.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: And everyone I worked with was from the Midwest.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was the kind of the token east coaster.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, uh so we were an hour behind, right, Central Time, and somewhere between the first and second planes hitting, I was already in the office, and one of the sales people came to my off my came to my office and said, Hey, you're from the East Coast?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And my so being an East Coaster, I had a lot of friends who lived in New York, I had a lot of friends who lived in DC, and I had a lot of friends who lived out in Pittsburgh.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so as the day went on, and seeing all these seeing all these moments happen, both on TV, on the internet, the early, you know, Yahoo news or whatever browser, whatever I was using at the time, that's where my mind was.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: So I was a lot I was like most the majority of Americans where I was watching from a distance, but yet felt compelled in all these different ways, both because of of knowing people who were there, and then just knowing that whatever was happening was both fundamentally life-altering in the moment, and then having a sense that it was you know, how it was gonna roll out at scale, and and there would obviously be a response and what would that look like.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: So that was kind of where my mind went.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know I I watched it from afar.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was at Fort Leonard Wood doing I was in the the uh basic non-commissioned officer course, and we were out training and we were building a bridge.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a combat engineer, and so that was one of the requirements is to build a bridge together.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember that uh certain people that cell phones were going off, like while we're out on training, and we had uh two of the guys that that were in our class, they were from a unit that's assigned near the Pentagon, and that's what they do is building search and rescue.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember when the instructors pulled those two guys aside, like they had to go redeploy quickly to get back to Washington, DC.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, and I and it was just kind of like we just got the word that, hey, uh, a couple uh plane just hit the World Trade Center, and we had to put the bridge back together before we finally got back.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like later in the afternoon, but I remember like gathering around the TV and turning the TV on, and it was it was unbelievable.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: It looked like CGI to me before.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think CGI was a thing, but it just looked like I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember I had like almost like a nervous kind of a laugh, like, ha ha, and I was like, it doesn't make sense.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: My brain couldn't compute what was happening, and then I'm like, and then and then you see the second one, and I'm like, oh my, like, this is horrific.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, I just remember being like just so the initial traumatic shock of of seeing that was just hard to compute.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we're like, we're in the middle of this course, like we gotta get back to our units.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I just remember the preceding days being kind of like chaotic, and and then you know, uh my career trajectory completely changed from that day forward.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, I and it and everyone has a story of like where they were, how they reacted to it, and everyone, it seems like has some type there was some type of second and third order effect, even if you were distanced from it, right?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, Chris, did you know anyone personally that had lost their life or was injured that day?
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thankfully, no, nothing of serious injury.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: Rightly enough, about two weeks later is when my wife and I, at the time we were living on the Upper East Side uh in New York, and we were closing on our first house in Connecticut.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And our first house was part of this much larger cul-de-sac with probably like 80-ish uh homes there.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when we moved there, there were 12 families that had lost somebody in the towers that day.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I just recently watched a video, I think it was newly released, or at least it was new to me.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you mentioned the the the jumpers, and that was probably the most horrific thing.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I still have the image of the falling man, they call it the falling man.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if they've ever identified them.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: But there was video footage of the firefighters in a building, and you could hear the bodies hitting the top.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the most haunting, awful.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It just thinking about it just makes I don't know.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It it it's horrific.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: But 9-11 was obviously a horrific day, but you know we talked about this right before the podcast.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: 9-12 and the days preceding was also some of the most, we saw some of the most courageous acts of heroism as well in our country uniting.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: What did you think about like when you went home that night and what did 9-12 feel like for you?
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh for me, so it took probably about four or five hours for me to get back to my apartment in the city where my you know been married a year at the time, and my wife was there with a colleague of hers.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: She worked for uh AIG at the time, which is also Lower Manhattan.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I knew she was further east away, so she was okay.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, the main cell tower in New York was on top of all the towers, and so there was, you know, the cell service was jammed, you couldn't get through.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so 912 was just really that to your point, you're in shock.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's a surreal, it's it's a bad movie.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I also remember my brother-in-law, her brother at the time was going to law school in Westchester County, uh, but was living in the city, and we got together for dinner at a diner across the street from us on September 12th.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: And second we live on Second Avenue, which goes north to south.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of a sudden, as we're eating dinner, you're just seeing these caravans go by first of bulldozers on flatbeds.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: Then you're seeing generators on flatbeds, then you're seeing spotlights go by on flatbeds.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of a sudden you're realizing like this is a a war zone where they're just going to remove debris.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so just you know, seeing that real time was just, you know, I don't know, just something you it was hard, like you said, it's hard to process.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Dave, what about you?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: What were your thoughts like you know going into that night and then the days preceding 9-12 and beyond?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's interesting because you you mentioned how how quickly how quickly things were shifting, and yet there was a slowness that I remember.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: I you know, I remember the day so I I don't want to am I allowed to curse on your podcast?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Fuck yeah.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: My day was my day was bookended.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: This is a weird bookending, but it was bookended by the phrase pretty fucked up.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: And this is how this is how it went.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_02: The kid, the the young sales guy that came into my office to tell me about the attacks, he left my office by saying pretty fucked up.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: And living in this was a suburb of Milwaukee, so the news that we were listening to, the local AM station I was listening to was a Milwaukee, Wisconsin station.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_02: By the end of the day, by like four o'clock, they were already shifting in the tone of the radio station to price gouging at gasoline pumps.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: And so on my ride home, I had my knee-jerk reaction was to go fill up with gas, and I'm standing at a pump, and again, it's this weird quiet.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: Everything was quiet.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: You could just feel it even a thousand miles away.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm standing there pumping my gas, and some other dude is pumping his gas, and he just looks at me and says, Pretty fucked up.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, well, that that just sums up that sums everything up.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I carried that idea with me, you know, just like how these little this strange book ending.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: But I also remember I want to get back to the softness and the politeness and the all the the sort of rituals we all sort of fell into at that point, you know, lighting candles on Friday.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_02: I remember that.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: I remember obviously like again, like many of us, you know, the quiet in the sky, you know, looking up, knowing that okay, this is the first time in my life that I've that I could say for sure there's not a plane in the sky over this country.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so those things, those things left very visceral memory in me.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: And then I also remember, you know, I'm not, you know, I my my father was military, he was he served in the army, my older brother was navy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: I was not a military person at the time.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: I have a great respect for for military, but I was never it was never something I was gonna follow.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember it was the first time in my life that I felt an impulse where I said, if if there's a draft, I I will go.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: And it caused a riff with me and my my fiance at the time.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: But it was how I felt.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I do remember this kind of this strange sense of patriotism that I had never felt personally in my lifetime, and that I felt like everyone had a was feeling that.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of I I think about like Pearl Harbor, right?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: In the sense of the nation uniting, you know, because we I think I think, you know, I I talk about this often, like we have this sense of divisiveness, but it's always kind of been that way in our country in some way, shape, or form.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: But there are these events that happen where we can channel that divisiveness and come together and channel it somewhere else.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's incre I think it's what makes us incredibly powerful, a force to be reckoned with.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that when we turn it to each other, that's where it gets a little, we can be, I mean, we're feeling that today.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: But that that sense of unity, and doesn't matter what walk of life you're from, like we're we're gonna go get them.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I just remember, like, we're okay, like revenge is coming.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I just remember, you know, George Bush step stepping on that top of the rubble with the megaphone.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, it was like probably one of the most patriotic moments that I can remember where we were like gonna go get them, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize how, but the years preceding, I didn't know it was incredible.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I thought it was gonna be kind of quick, and we we later find out it's not, right?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's there's still lingering effects of of that.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: But to to go to your book, so keeping our nation's promise, 9-11, and their stories that still shape us.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us a little bit about the the book, the interviews, like what can the reader expect when they pick up this book?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead, Dave.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: So you know, one of the things it's it's interesting the way that we're talking now, and then what the book is really how the book was framed.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: So Chris and I were very focused on making sure that it wasn't a retelling of the day.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: Although everyone's telling their story, so there is aspect of that.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the one of the prevailing emotional responses we've heard from people is that the book is hopeful.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: We've heard that the book is nostalgic, which, you know, it's mostly set in 2001, but it's also set in 2012.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: There's some stories that are really focused on the capturing of bin Laden.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's stuff from, you know, one of my favorite pieces was got a chance.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I grew up a I told I I don't want Chris to talk about the Cowboys, but he's muted.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm an Eagles fan, so I'll slide that in.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I got, you know, we had the chance to interview Herm Edwards, who was the coach of the Jets at the time, but had been he was the defensive young defensive back in 1978, returned the the miracle at the Meadowlands, which in my family was like a family story that I grew up hearing about because my dad is a Giants fan.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: My uncle was an Eagles fan, and my dad lost a five dollar bet on you know Joe Pissarczyk's fumble.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: But it was it was uh Herm who who returned the fumble for the touchdown.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so I wanted I was like, well, this is a one once in a lifetime opportunity to start that story at that moment.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So that story starts in 1978.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a lot of time jumping around.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: We had we got to talk to people who were very close to the sort of the Bush inner circle.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Eric Draper, who is the who was the White House photographer for eight years, one of my favorite interviews, you know.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_02: What I loved about that interview and these other interviews that we had is people really went out of their way to talk to us in moments that weren't really convenient for them.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like Eric Eric had a small window and he was only able to talk to us on his cell phone in his car.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: And he's like, you know, we s we recorded him for 50 minutes just talking to us.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_02: He must have had like must have been cramping in his shoulders, but he was he was eager to tell us his story.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: Talking to two of the pilots that went up in the air that day to try to intercept Flight 93, Mark Saskell and Heather Penny, who were uh Air National Guard, you know, they were prepared to end their lives by ramming into commercial jet airliner because they were unarmed.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_02: They had come back from a training mission uh, you know, the weekend before in in Nevada.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_02: So there are these moments where you hear these stories and you just didn't know these things were going on.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_02: And it was fascinating.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: It was at times it was grueling, I think, on Chris and I, and I'll let you know Chris speak to this.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: He had to kind of send me off on vacation to get away from the book.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_02: And every time it did feel grueling, I also was easy to remember that whatever I'm going through as an interviewer and a writer pales in comparison to what these folks went through in the moment.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_02: But Chris, feel free to piggyback.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and apologies, as you can see, if anyone who's watching my office overlooks Metro North here in the tri-state area, so it was going on me while I am track went by my office.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: But but you know, Dave's talking about sending away on vacation, and you know, we we draft a chapter, and then okay, we'd both kind of review it.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember the chapter on Chris Brahman, who was at the Pentagon and was responsible for pulling out over 60 bodies that he personally tagged from those who lost their lives that day.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so reading his story, you know, listening to him say that he was responsible for pulling out one-third of those victims, you know, what does that mean to him?
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: How do you live with that?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, survivors don't move on.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so I remember texting Dave after that, and I'm like, that's the most difficult chapter I've ever read of anything.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Yeah, I totally agree.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was moments like that that were a little bit of, I'll say a gut check, for lack of a better phrase.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then one of the things that Dave then mentioned is that some people didn't really talk about 9-11 until they interviewed with us.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Just because of something that was very personal in them, something they didn't want to talk about.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: I remember Colonel Marilyn Wills was one of them.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so her interview wasn't was incredible.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, she talks about how she was in a meeting that day, and for whatever reason, the meeting ran about five or six minutes over, and somebody was sitting in her chair at her desk and her desk got hit.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if her meeting hadn't gone over, that would have been her.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: And there was, and she talks about being in a meeting about like, yep, he didn't make it, he did, she didn't make it, and then tells a story about how one of the victim spouses said, Well, why you?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Or why my husband, why not you?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I can't imagine having to live with that.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, survivor's guilt, I think in itself is bad enough.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: But to have a victim's spouse specifically call you out and say, why him and not you, I couldn't imagine going through life with that.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: So to hear a perspective like that, I think was also very interesting in a different angle that this book takes.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So those are just two stories that specifically stick out to me.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and Chris, I'm glad you brought that up.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: I think Chris's exact phrase when he read that Brahmin story was, I I need a scotch after that.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, Yeah, I I I agree.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: One of the more powerful stories for me, well, there's two of them that I've highlighted previously.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_02: One is when we spoke with Allison Crowther, who was the mother of Wells Remy Crowther.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: Wells is known as the man in the red bandana.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Alison hearing her story, she's told her story a lot, but it was still as a mother waiting for your son, who's my age at the time, she's still it's still something that she carries.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: And she's carried it with so much dignity and grace for 25 years.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then the last story of the book was a very intentional slotting.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's the Dowdell brothers, Patrick and James, whose father was was killed as a he was a you know uh on the on the FDNY.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_02: And they were younger than I was at the time.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: They were probably, I don't know, eighteen and twenty or seventeen and nineteen.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, they they they basically forced their didn't force their way, but they they made it so they would be allowed at the pile because they wanted to they wanted to be the ones that found them.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: And those stories that's where the book gets very specific at times.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: We really uh we tried to dig into these little moments where people are talking about very intimate details.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Family dinners, handwriting, notebooks.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: Jack Rancollis is another story that comes to mind where his wife Lauren died on flight ninety-three.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, she was she left a voicemail.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: She got two voicemails in, one before she got on the board.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: She and it's a it's a it's a intense story to read because you discover that she caught an earlier flight to get back to the West Coast, and that happened to be flight ninety-three.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_02: She was not scheduled to be on flight ninety-three, and she was carrying a child.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's these like these moments where it just gets really human.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: And and to the point where Chris and I we really wanted to move away from the abstractions of nine eleven.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you say the number twenty nine seventy seven, it's a big number, huge buildings.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: But what does it mean at the individual level?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: What does it mean about a voice on a phone or a notebook or you know the the countertop in in the kitchen of the Del Dell family residence.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: Those things is what we really tried to get granular to remind people that this was a human exp this was a human moment, not just just not just numbers and and twenty five years later and a once a year we commemorate it.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: We want it to be something that people feel in a in more of an ongoing way.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: How how many people did you interview for the book?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Close to sixty Yeah we so there's there are thirty eight profiles total.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_02: We a number of those profiles have two voices in them.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: So there's I think forty three or forty four people in the book.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: There was another at least close to ten that are sitting in the in in the queue for some stuff we're working on next.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah we're somewhere between 55 and 60 give or take but in the book there's 38 but about 43 or 44 voices total.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So just curious like in the building process of the book how did you prepare what was the process like to schedule the interview and and then you know conducting the did you do it in one take?
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Was it so emotional for people that you might have to have a couple different sittings and then how did you guys as you received I mean you're recounting someone's well one of the the worst day and then how did that impact you guys?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what was like the process like yeah you start Dave so the original process we you know we have we're very fortunate again Chris was working with Michael Geyer on the film the documentary film The Hope and Resiliency of 9-11 and Michael had by the time Chris brought me into the project I think there was close to 40 transcripts from the film.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: And the original idea was hey I have these transcripts let's see if we can write a book and I started working with the first three or four I chose Andy Card Michael Day who was part of the boat lift story Roger Ferguson who was the vice chair of the the Federal Reserve that day who had to make a lot of decisions because Alan Greenspan was out of the country.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: I can't remember the fourth right off the top of my head but I felt like I worked on those four or maybe it was Chris Brahman.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: It was somewhere in a different section so we basically it was what can we do with these and so Chris so for the first few weeks it was really me drafting and then Chris and I discussing and then Chris had an idea that he wanted it to focus on three legs.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was leadership resiliency and I believe it was either remembering or legacy.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_02: And after I got into some of the stories I just I felt that we had that legacy and remembering were two separate legs and we should have four.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: So then that the book started to gain a macro structure around those four topics leadership resiliency legacy remembering and then then we opened it up from there was like hey let's go after these types of people for this section so then we really open up conversations we went and connected with the architects the memorial sites a number of the memorial sites we we reach out to every the three national memorial sites we wound up speaking with the folks who were behind the Flight 93 memorial site and the 911 memorial site in Manhattan and then we also talked to the executive director of the Pentagon Memorial site so we did you know because we wanted to we wanted as much as equal representation as possible and then you know we just kept filling things out from there.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: We would bounce a name off people or off each other.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_02: We we went we went after we tried to connect with media folks sports folks artists writers we wanted to be a more as close to a mosaic as possible.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't want it to lean in one political direction or another and we didn't want it to be the same story over and over even though obviously every one of these stories are individual and unique.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_02: We wanted it to be from as many walks of life as as we could get that was kind of how it it started to fold and then in terms of to your question about the interviews between Michael Geyer's original transcripts and then our first kind of new interviews we were on a s it was a slow pace up until about May of twenty five and then things just erupted.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think word got out so and so told so and so and before I think June July August I think we conducted close to sixteen interviews and that's when it was that's when I had to take a break.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I did find second wind by getting away and talking to young folks talking to some some Gen Zers who were could not get enough of this idea.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me more about the book.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that was invigorating for me because I felt like you know we're Gen X and I feel that it's a very Gen X investigation but to hear from millennial and and Gen Z folks who were really interested it it recharged me.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_02: So that's kind of how I I kind of came back after a little bit of a the fatigue of all those interviews in midsummer.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's gotta be good to know that the younger generation has taken they're taking notes you know and and taking interest in what had happened because I think they see just how big of an impact like when you talk about it like there's an energy and a feeling and I I think it maybe it intrigues them.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: They want to know more about it because they can they can feel it.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_02: But that's good you know yeah I'll tell you a little like I'll I I'll say this one thing and then I want to I'll then turn it over to Chris but I had this moment where you know you go looking for a sign from the universe that you're doing the right thing and then you know you don't know if you're crazy or not.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_02: I was at a I was at I I find a lot I often tell stories for that to start with the phrase I was at a bar but I was at a bar in Pittsburgh and I'm with some friends and my friend's nephew who is 22 and he he had his iPhone on the bar top and the image the screen the the the the screen image on his phone was Andy Card leaning into George W.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_02: Bush's ear and I was like whatever I'm doing is is is the right thing because why why else would this kid have that image on his phone?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: I never knew that I mean yeah it was it was a wild synchronicity that I took as keep going take a deep breath and then get back to work.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: That segues away that seg segues to a question that I had because you you had interviewed Ambassador Nicholas Burns was there anything from the White House or anything from his perspective that I don't know that maybe maybe he said something that maybe have surprised you about that day that many maybe many Americans don't know about well he was just incredible first of all an an amazing American an amazing patriot he served I lost track I think it's four or five administrations both sides of the aisle and he was about two weeks on the job as ambassador to NATO and there's something called Article V that NATO has.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: And when when NATO was first created basically every member country has to vote yes or no for this there has to be a unanimous vote for something to happen.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what Article V states is basically if one NATO country is attacked all the others will support it if they go to war.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so he had some concern at that point because there were issues correct me Dave I think it was with Greece and Turkey there may have been some political things happening or whatever they were and he didn't know if he was going to get a con uh unanimous vote.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And before he got there he was talking about the phone call he had with Condolisa Rice and he said well I need you know approval from the president for this and she goes I'm speaking on behalf of the president go ahead and ask for Article 5 to be in the vote.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: And you know so it's passed unanimously so the entire NATO national call was on board and when he made the call back to the Condoleezza Rice she said it's good to have friends in the world.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning that they all supported them everyone's back in the United States because when this was put in place, this is back post-World War II, you know leading to the Cold War and so really the idea was the United States was going to come to the rescue of Western Europe against Russia.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the ironic part about that the ambassador talks about is there was a complete role reversal and we were asking for NATO to come and support us.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which in today's world is even more ironic given the current administration's I'll say RIF with the NATO nations.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Dave correct me if I missed anything there.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: No that was that was my memory as well it was that Article 5 piece that and the irony that when it was baked in to the Charter that was the assumption was it would be Europe asking the US to fulfill that but it turned out that the first time it was ever declared it was the opp it was the other way around yeah that's an interesting point.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Huh what um is there was there one interview in particular that just really moved you compared to others?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean obviously these are all you know people's worst days but did you have an interview that you really really like I don't know that really moved you more than the others?
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah I had one that that Dave mentioned uh earlier the the Dowdell brothers James and Patrick yeah they're about a year and a half apart their father was I believe the second highest ranking uh FTW firefighter lost that day and the older brother Patrick was a freshman at Anal College which is just north of New York City in Westchester County and the year prior he had been trying to get into West Point but didn't get accepted and the younger brother James it was his birthday I think that Sunday the ninth and so Patrick came home from college they went back to Brooklyn where they they lived and had a birthday celebration and you know Dave referenced the table and the father Kevin had this spiral notebook out for Patrick that you know he's mapping out what to do to reapply to get into West Point.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: So long story short their father passes as Dave mentioned they were down there just knowing other firefighters they work their way into the pile to try and find their father so they could be the ones to find him but then what happens is Patrick applies to West Point he gets in he's the first graduating class of West Point post-9-11 and then James becomes FTI firefighter and is now in their father's firehouse as a lieutenant.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so to me that that is just the ultimate American service story.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah wow that's incredible yeah that I think that story I was saying is a very intentional decision to have that as the last story.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know that story starts on on May one May 2 2012 because they were you know they were sell they they went down to celebrate you know they went to the you know the ground zero a night that they captured that you know bin Laden was killed but I think it ev it evokes a lot of what Chris was hoping when he first pitched the idea to me which was how did people turn the events of 9-11 into this positive trajectory in their lives because again Patrick was Patrick had already you know he hadn't gotten in and James was a senior in high school or a junior in high school and you know 17, 19 year old boys and growing up in the the early two thousands there's there's a lot of ways to there's a lot of other paths to take and a lot of other ways to get lost and I think they found such meaning in in what had happened and that galvanized them.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then I mentioned Alison Crowther's piece earlier that was quite moving for me working with the direct uh the Jack Rancollis transcript that Michael Geyer had captured that was quite moving for me I mentioned the Gen X thing earlier and talking to Heather Penny and Alison Black and some of the other folks who were in my that age cohort was also it was moving in a different way because I got to see myself a little closer in their shoes and tried to imagine okay what would I do or what would I have done if I was 24 25 years old and and I was asked to do the things that they were asked to do and how how would I have responded so it it takes you into an opportunity to play that little game with yourself.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would say it was interesting you know I was in the army when 9-11 happened and then just seeing the influx of new troops coming in because it was a different you know a lot of people we were we were peacetime army for the most part and so a lot of people were there for college money or they're there to do a couple years you know I guess my skill training I mean people wanted adventure and the sense of patriotism but it was completely different after 9-11.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was people like we are we we we got really good qual I mean I just noticed the the quality of recruits and the motivation was different because we were posturing for war and there's that sense of patriotism like the energy um the just the culture of the army that I was in just really shifted and it was it was it was quite remarkable at that time.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got a lot of friends that yeah they came in because of 9-11.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: They may not have served had it not been 9-11 and I had the opportunity to serve with them.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: So interesting how that that that event has changed people's trajectories and their life choices and and and those things.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now Chris you had received a letter from a star major who asked you for some socks and baby wipes and that ended up you know turning into the creation of exoskeletons.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: So can you tell us about what what moved you about that letter and how what was the pathway to you know that organization at certain suits it goes back to to 9-11 and you mentioned earlier in the show you're just seeing those first responders rushing towards burning buildings while thousands of us are going the opposite way and you know knew that I had to do something to give back at some point, but obviously in that moment had no idea what that would look like.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: And a friend and mentor of mine who was a retired Marine had received that letter and gave me a copy of it and said hey Chris you know it basically said that they're not living on bases, they're in jeeps and foxholes, can you please send tombstocks because they hike all day and throw the old ones away and baby wipes for personal hygiene and that's how they would take a shower.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: So he just said to me, Chris, I know you're involved with a few things, maybe you can do some care packages.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: So long story short, reached out to some local businesses and schools and churches and things like that where I live in Connecticut I ended up shipping about 12 or 1500 pounds our first shipment because people really gravitate towards this was the heart of you know the the war in terms of you know 70809.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: And got picked up by a radio station in New York City that has 40 markets and 8 million listeners.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: That was Grand The Morning Show.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so all of a sudden people are sending tube stocks and baby wipes from Maine to Hollywood to Florida, which in theory is great but when you live in the Northeast in February and your garage is full of tube stocks and baby wipes and your wife can't park in the garage, you're not her favorite person at that moment.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: But we ended up sending about 75,000 pounds of stuff to the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 2012 as the troops started to come home we were looking to wind down because there wasn't a need anymore.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then another friend of mine said hey Chris you know there's a pretty significant gap in the post of MGI bill maybe you could do something there.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So clearly my friends think I need a hobby at all times, in other words I just don't know what to do with myself.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I did some research and found it there there were some pretty big holes in that and I thought well if somebody's willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and raise their right hand to protect this nation from all enemies foreign and domestic they should be able to go to whatever college they want to.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: It should be based on how much aid they're going to get based on their time of service.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: So we created a couple of different scholarship funds to help veterans returning to civilian life but still in public service uh specifically the the Wall School of Foreign Service at Georgetown for public for foreign affairs and then the the Maxwell School of Syracuse which is my alma mater but it's the top public administration school in the country.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: So to help us make that transition from you know care packages and tube stocks to education we came up with the the Mission State with Health Service members take their next steps forward.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the idea there was tube stocks in the battlefield for steps and now steps in job training education.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_01: So did that for about six or eight months and got some endowed scholarships and raising money for scholarships is not easy because it's kind of you know people don't see a lot of value there.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously you're gonna change somebody's life but they don't see the real tangible piece of it.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: But then came across an article in the magazine about this company outside San Francisco that makes these exoskeleton devices which for those who don't know what it is, it's it's a wearable robot that enables a paralyzed person to stand and walk again.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so I thought well how cool would it be to use that literal sense of next steps forward and help a paralyzed veteran stand up and walk across the room.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's something we've been funding and donating since 2013 was our first one.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Each device costs$150,000.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the the technology is not the point yet where they can wear it all day.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you and I go into the gym with a with a personal trainer for 45 minutes to an hour and a half and so they just are they able to walk around the the VA facility with a physical therapist it does things like increase muscle density, bone density, reduces urinary tract infection.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: But then the real wild card for this for me was that we gave a donation to the Denver VA one year and they said Chris in addition to physical therapy we'd like to do a mental health study using your your device I thought well a mental health study on what?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: And they said quite simply for somebody to be eye level with the world again.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you know I'm 6'3, Dave 6'3, that's something we take for granted and we got some early results back from that that study that said you know I'm the tallest 5'7 giant standing on top of a mountain right now you know I don't feel like a six year old child looking at someone's belt buckle and looking up at them.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so seeing that as an as an additional positive effect made even more rewarding.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah how many suits have been procured we have donated 31 devices and then in addition to that because of that study uh we started researching veteran mental health which led to PTSD which led to veteran suicide and came across technology developed from the University of Southern California it's VR technology that helps veterans with PTSD.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a brave mind is that what's going on exactly yep and so what that has is there are 14 different scenarios in Iraq and Afghanistan where the veteran will put on the VR headset and there's a microphone there as well where they're talking to their therapist and you can set it so like okay I'm in a Humvee driving down the road were you the gunner were you the driver were you the backseat right?
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was 10 o'clock in the morning it was a little sandy that day it was windy there's a palm tree over here so you can put all those different pieces back and the idea there is it takes that veteran back to that specific trigger point it's called immersive therapy and so they can talk through exactly what's happening at that point in time to enable them to recover and hopefully eventually heal.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: And you think about stigma with PTSD, certainly stigma in the military and first responders and they call it a video game that heals given the current generation being a gaming generation it's significantly reduced that stigma and it's been clinically proven to reduce the number of treatments by 50 percent and there's an 80 75 to 85 percent retention rate of of those veterans continuing the the therapy sessions.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Wow that's that's fantastic.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing the the the technological advances in that space because obviously the veteran community first responder I mean the PTSD and the the trauma from you know these it's pretty significant and pronounced and I and I can't even I mean the level of hope that you would give someone that would be fully paralyzed to get to eye level again.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: I like that that that I can't imagine how good it must make them feel given the circumstances that they're in.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah our first recipient was Army Sergeant Dan Rose who was paralyzed when his Humvee drove her about a 900 pound IED in Afghanistan.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: And for me that was very personal because when that happened it was my daughter's my middle daughter's her fifth birthday.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: So he's getting getting Medec, the Kandahar and then Germany while I'm here in Connecticut having ice cream cake you know and and balloons and so having that connection was something special but then you know he had a hard time getting reintroduced into society when he came back is just struggling obviously with everything as anybody would given what you went through.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now he's a multi-medalist you know Paralympian they've got two year old daughter now with his wife he's married and so seeing stories like that along the way just sort of you know gives us the drive to keep you know looking for that next story.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: During our run, I mean we had the our local mental health awareness chapter was there and they had 44 combat boots representing the number of veteran suicide each day.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I'm doing this work is because I hit a low point of severe depression suicide ideation and had to fight and work through that.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think is the difference between those that have hope to continue to move forward despite the trauma versus those that may just not find that level of hope and ultimately tap out?
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say two things.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: One is your support system you know who's around you who can you lean on but I think more importantly than that is your willingness to realize it, to notice it and to talk about it.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: You know, don't bury it, don't swallow it.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're not the only person going through this.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Dave knows, you know, I it took me 17 years to go back to ground zero and I've worked my entire career within blocks of ground zero and I self-diagnosed myself in 2018 with PTSD.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you know it's it's nothing wrong with it.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: It happens to the best of them and you went through a lot so just be a you know be open with what you're going through.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: I listened to a podcast until long ago they're talking about PTSD there can be a delayed onset with PTSD because you are so busy with life kids you just stay busy you're young you're going to the gym but at later stages in life when things begin to slow down the PTSD symptoms can kind of they come bubbling up and that's the highest rate of suicide you're seeing now in that older age population between you know primarily Vietnam but also the other ones because to your point they've got more time on their hands it's more time to relive everything you went through and you've lost a little bit of that sense of purpose because you've you've hung your badge and your boots up type of thing.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah and Sig if I I'd like to if I could answer that all So I want to bring it back to the book a little bit because one of the one of the more intense pieces to work on was by about Port Authority officer Will Jimeno.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_02: Will Jimeno's story has been featured previously as he was, he and John Sergeant John McLaughlin were the two Port Authority officers who were buried in the rubble and and pulled out.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: And in 2007, Oliver Stone's movie World Trade Center featured that it was their story, is at the heart of that movie.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: So Will's in the book.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_02: And Will was saved after by strangers after, I think, 13 hours of digging him out, or he had been buried in the rubble for 13 hours.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: And Will attempted suicide later.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_02: And this is in the this, you know, this is this is a known, he's very open about his story, and this is part of the story, the profile in the book.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_02: And the and this has lived with me since working on that story is something he can't the final straw for him, where he finally switched out of it, was he realized that if he killed himself, what would that mean for the people who almost died trying to save him?
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so it also so I just want to add a third piece to that where I think if you are able, if you're in those moments of darkness, if you were able to fan outward and think about the community of people who raised you, supported you, saved you at different times, it's a way to step out of it, I think.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: I have not been in those states at any level similar to what Will had gone through.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_02: But that was a gripping moment, not only to write that, but to to see what he was thinking and to see how he felt.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_02: And that was the thing that got him out of it.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: So I just wanted to add that to the conversation, also.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we as humans, I mean, I talk a lot about motivation, you know, as a performance coach, we'll we'll do more for others than we will ourselves.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that I think that's what really I've got triplet daughters, and it was because of them, that's what encouraged me to fight through it because I was like, I cannot like not be that's not the legacy I'm gonna leave for them.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the darkness was pretty dark, but it was because of them, that's what gave me the strength to seek help and work through it.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, Dave, that's a great point.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and Chris, you mentioned it too.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's isolation, don't isolate yourself, right?
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_00: And be able to talk about it.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think now you mentioned earlier that the the some of the people that you interviewed, they hadn't talked about 9-11 until the interview.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that it was therapeutic for them?
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that they had a breakthrough where they could work through their own trauma because of the interview?
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'd like to believe so.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_02: Chris mentioned Marilyn Wills earlier.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know, she's a very strong woman.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: She was a she was a uh military police, and she, you know, she she was saved in a way because of timing.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_02: And she she crawled out of the building and she helped other people get out of the building.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: She confided in us that it took her so her daughters at the time were 13 and 7.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I think she said it wasn't until her younger daughter was 13.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it took her six years to even tell them what you know what mom had gone through.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_02: And she, you know, she cried during the interview.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: And there was a few other people who shed some very legitimate tears where we had to just pause and wait and stop.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I I've I'm of the mind that anytime that that happens, that's like a wound healing.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: And we're when a when a scar opens up and it weeps.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so I that's what I I'd like to believe, so that on some level anything we did just to have those conversations was helpful to people who were still holding on to those things.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, when we talked here's a another one we talked to Bobby Valentine, who was the manager of the Mets.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, Bobby was in Pittsburgh on on 9-11, and he made it a he made himself a piece of the recovery.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: He ran the the the operations when Chase Stadium became a staging ground for recovery and and and rescue.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, he he had a little bit of a tough time having that conversation.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for him is because he feels that he took he he chose to take things on.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_02: He he embodied a lot of a lot of trauma in that space, and it just it lingers, it it goes on.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, I'd I'd like to believe so.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I just want to add for the Bobby Valentine piece.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Bobby's from the same town I live in in Connecticut, and whenever you see Bobby around town, he's got these two big beautiful dogs.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: He talks about how he had to go for himself to ground zero, and he would bring his dogs down, and the family members who are waiting for any sign of anything about their missing loved ones would go to those dogs and just, you know, dogs always make you smile and you hug them and they lick you and all that stuff.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he was saying how he would have, you know, priests, rabbis, ministers come up to him and say, You've done more in four hours down here than we've done in four days for these families.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so hearing something like that is just an extremely powerful statement to me.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know writing a book was very cathartic for me and my own healing, and uh it's a heck of a process.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's amazing.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned earlier, like how the book kind of takes shape as you begin to write it.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's an amazing just experience to go through that.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: And what a I mean, I just think about just being able to interview all these different people and get their perspective had to be an incredible and rewarding experience for both of you.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, without a doubt.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Dave and I sort of I would say half-heartedly joke, but sort of like pinch each other, like, you know, do you realize who we just interviewed and who we've talked to and hearing their story firsthand and you know, to Dave's pronouns, sometimes they never told that story or maybe just didn't tell that piece of the story that nobody else knows about.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: And to have them trust us to be their voice and their outlet for that to come out was extremely rewarding for me.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I'll say this too, as a professional writer, it it is bittersweet, to be honest, to have this book out because I feel that the work the work of the book was about the work that went into the book.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: And now that it's out there in the world, I just feel like it's a big much to similar to what Chris said earlier at the start of the call, it really it feels like it feels like we're at a beginning phase rather than a culmination or an end phase.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, watching it come together and being being a part of it come together was profound.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_02: But now it's like, okay, what now what?
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_02: What do we do?
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_02: How do we take this forward and how do we how do we bring more stories in?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_02: Because in in the end, we barely scratched the surface of the thousands upon thousands of stories that are out there.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I'd love I'd Chris, if you want to talk a little bit more about some of the stuff that the Legacy Foundation is doing around you know, some of the some new, some of the ongoing things that are also happening around stories development.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so just briefly, as Dave mentioned, yeah, we've put together the first of its kind national curriculum, which is beyond K through 12.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's encompassing to include colleges and universities, civic organizations, corporations, and it's very it's an engaging curriculum.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you know the person teaching that lesson also kind of gets something out of it as well.
• 52:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we're working on that.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: But then also, you know, a big focus for us is you know, there's 100 million Americans who weren't alive when 9-11 happened.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: So they don't know what the phrase never forget means.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and over half of this nation's population is under the age of 10, so with you know, very little or no learned memory from that day.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so the book is part of the whole ongoing legacy of teaching those stories and having those stories go forward.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: And two of the projects we're working on with the Legacy Foundation is the first is that they have been interviewing several designers and architects of some of the major national memorials.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so talk to them in terms of you know, what was it like being chosen for that?
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what was it, what did it mean to you knowing that the legacy that your work was going to leave for, you know, hopefully hundreds and hundreds of years.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other one, there's a story that a lot of people don't know about called the boat lift.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that was in the southwest corner of Lower Manhattan, where about 125-ish, you know, private, mostly private, but some standards ferry and things like that, rescued and took over half a million people off of Lower Manhattan to New Jersey and Brooklyn.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: That is the largest maritime rescue in history, larger than Dunkirk.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so we are now working with an author, Jessica DeLong, who's on our board.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: She wrote the book, Saved by the Seawall, which is based on this.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I never knew about it, and I was at Ground Zero.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: I never knew about this until COVID when I saw the movie called Boat Lift with Tom Hanks.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so I highly recommend seeing that movie.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: I get no royalties from it, but I highly recommend watching it.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: But working with Jessica, she's been telling me that you know the members of the maritime community, they don't want to have any credit for anything.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what people don't know, and I didn't realize it, every piece of debris from the pile at ground zero was removed from Manhattan, because Manhattan's an island, was removed via boat.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: So there weren't these dumpsters driving through Manhattan with all this toxic air.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so now, in addition to the first responders, these maritime folks are getting sick as well.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we're doing something called calling all stories, because on that day the Coast Guard did calling all boats, and they asked for all the local boats to go to Governor's Governor's Island and uh outside of Manhattan to go and get people off of Manhattan.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're now starting to interview those mariners who are involved with that that rescue just to keep and memorialize their story so they can go on for future generations.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the fact that that was larger than Dunkirk, I I had never heard that story.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: So figure out the movie, and yeah, that's that's remarkable.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and we had a chance to work with Michael Day, who was the who was a he's part of the Coast Guard.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_02: He was a was it a lieutenant?
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_02: Lieutenant.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_02: Like Yeah, and so he's in he's in the book, and that that story was also it was interesting working with a piece of known yet unknown history, because it was like, oh, this is like this should be people should know about this.
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_02: This should be taught.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_02: This should be this this was a celebratory experience where there obviously no playbook and no coordination, and it was in I was on the fly and it was old school because the communication towers were down.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about grease pens and and you know drawing mapping things out on windows.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: But it it there was no no no casualties reported, no, no accidents on the water, and yeah, 500,000 people moved off the island.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then, as Chris said, for nine months later, the continuation of moving debris was all all took place in the water.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that the biggest part to highlight for that was that this rescue had already started before the Coast Guard could even get there.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were nowhere near, they were hours away.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so this was again, you know, private dinner cruise ships, personal watercrafts, New York waterway taxi, Staten Island Ferry, they just did it.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was just you know, just the innate reaction of anybody in the maritime.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: Patriotic Americans helping other Americans, right, with everything.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's that was remarkable about Dunkirk.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, you know, every every John boat, whatever was that was available, you took it.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: And then there is there's another piece of that is that the uh this was also just you don't think about it, but it makes total sense.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_02: All the the water lines were busted, and so the fires are being put out with seawater, and that seawater is being pumped by these old, you know, retired uh the John J.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_02: Harvey, for instance, was a retired fireboat that was that was recommissioned in the moment to like to start pumping water, like in the days that followed.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, there's a lot of fascinating stories that happen, and like I said earlier, we barely scratch the surface of through these 38 profiles, but there's a lot more, and there's a lot more work that's coming, and and I'm looking forward to being a part of it.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for the work that you're doing.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: Just one, I just want to highlight one more thing about the 9-11 uh legacy foundation.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: From my understanding, there's only 14 states that currently require curriculum about 9-11, correct?
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we're trying to get, you know, the we're trying to uh turn this never forget into re-remember.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the campaign, correct?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Spot on, thank you.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know my daughters, like they don't know.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they know what we know and they they see it, but they don't I I don't I don't know if Missouri teaches it or not.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't yeah, look at it.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Missouri does.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, they're one of the signature states that they do, but what they do is they pass it down to the individual school district and let them choose what they want to teach.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Which that could be, you know, and uh and as your point, we're not we're not we don't even know all of the information of what happened that day, all the heroics, because I didn't know anything about the the the boat evacuations, which is incredible.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, to your point, just scratching the surface and all the amazing things that happened, all the heroics, and it needs to be shared.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so thank you guys uh for for the work that you're doing and and you know you know we remember, right?
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_00: In that in that campaign.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_00: So well, as we we're we're approaching an hour here, so is there any final thoughts or anything that uh I failed to ask that you guys would like to share before we clo call it a day?
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just give two quick plugs.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_02: One, the the book you can learn more at our nationspromise.com, and then the 911legacy.org is is is the bigger the bigger piece, but I would love just for people to check it out and and see if there's something that they want to be involved with, especially with the the Legacy Foundation.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we'll tie that into the show notes.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're listening to this and you want to get plugged in, just go to the show notes there and get uh get connected.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: Chris?
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_01: Just thank you for the opportunity of time for having us.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, gentlemen, I I I appreciate uh I appreciate your work.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, 9-11.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like we we host an annual run, you know, to to honor so it's near and dear to our community.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and once again, I mean, it it shaped the trajectory of my life and so many other people that I know.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: And just thank you for the ongoing work in in supporting you know those that uh that uh were there at 9-11, the the the work with soldiers, all the all the great work that you're doing as far as curriculum and education, and thank you for taking the time to be here on to educate our our community here.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we appreciate it.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you, sir.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right, gentlemen, you guys have a great day.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: For those l listening or watching, go to the show notes if you'd like to know more about the book and get get uh get your hands on a copy of of the book and the resources that we talked about today.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, if you'd like to know more about Chris and Dave, feel free to uh connect directly with them.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: In the meantime, keep doing hard things, and we will see you all in the next episode.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: Keep doing hard things.