Latest / The Vault: The Epstein Files / September 11 and the End of the World I Thought I Knew (9/11/26)

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September 11 and the End of the World I Thought I Knew (9/11/26) · The Vault: The Epstein Files

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What's up everyone and welcome back to the program. Whenever
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: we talk about 9-11, it's a deeply personal day for
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: a lot of us. For those of us that were
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: alive and witnessed it happening in real time, nothing was
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: ever going to be the same. So in this episode,
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: I want to talk a little bit about my experience
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: on 9-11. I'll never forget how clear the sky was
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: on September 11th, 2001. I was 21 years old, living
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: in Las Vegas. working at the joint inside the Hard
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Rock Hotel, and convinced that the biggest thing on my
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: horizon was the next concert. The day before the attacks,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: we had loaded 311 into the joint for a multi-day event,
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: and I was fired up about being part of it.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: I loved that world, the noise, the crews, the equipment,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: the controlled chaos of putting on a major show, and
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: the feeling that anything could happen when those lights went down.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I had worked a brutal 16-hour shift, getting everything ready,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: and by the time I finally got home, I was
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: completely spent. When the first plane struck the World Trade Center,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: I was dead asleep. My mother woke me up and
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: told me that a plane had crashed into one of
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: the towers in New York. At first, my mind could
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: not process what she was telling me, and I pictured
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: some little Cessna or some small aircraft accidentally slamming into
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: the building. It sounded awful, certainly, but it still sounded
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: like an accident within minutes. Every assumption I had made
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: about that morning, and about the world I thought I understood,
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: was about to be destroyed. I got out of bed
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: and walked downstairs into my parents' living room, still trying
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: to wake up and understand what was happening on the television. Yo,
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: I can still picture that room as clearly as I
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: can picture almost anything from my life. I remember the television.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I remember my parents. I remember the pillar I was
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: leaning against as the live coverage rolled on from Lower Manhattan.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: and then the second plane came screaming into the other tower.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: In that instant, every bit of uncertainty disappeared. I looked
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: at my mother and father and said the words that
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: millions of Americans were suddenly realizing at almost exactly the
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: same time. We're under attack. There was no need for
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: an expert to explain it, no need for a government announcement,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: and no need to wait for someone behind the podium
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: to give the event a name. We knew. The United
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: States of America was being attacked in real time, right
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: there on television, and nothing in my 21 years of
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: life had prepared me for what that felt like. Almost immediately,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: my thoughts turned to the people I loved. You see,
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: I had family working on Wall Street and others who
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: were down in the city that day, and suddenly New
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: York was not some distant image flickering across a television screen.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: It was personal. Nobody knew how large the attack was,
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Whether more planes were coming, whether bombs had been planted somewhere,
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: or whether other American cities were already being targeted. Every
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: unanswered phone call carried a little bit more terror with it.
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: Every breaking news banner seemed capable of announcing another catastrophe.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: The Pentagon was hit, another plane went down in Pennsylvania,
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: and reports and rumors were moving faster than anyone could
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: possibly sort through them. For those of us watching from
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: thousands of miles away, there was a feeling of helplessness.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: and that's difficult to explain to anyone who didn't experience
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: that morning in real time. Las Vegas suddenly didn't feel
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: safely removed from New York or Washington. Nowhere felt safely
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: removed from anything. The entire country seemed to be holding
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: its breath, waiting to find out where the next blow
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: would land. Before September 11th, I think that a lot
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: of Americans my age carried around a sense of security
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: that we never consciously recognized because we had never been
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: forced to question it. We had grown up watching the
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: United States emerge from the Cold War as the dominant
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: power on Earth. The Soviet Union was gone. Our military
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: seemed untouchable. Our economy dominated the world. And every enemy
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: that stepped into the ring with us seemed to get
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: flattened sooner or later. War was something that happened somewhere else.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Terrorism was something we watched on television from Beirut, Jerusalem, Belfast,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: or some other place that seemed impossibly far removed from
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: everyday American life. We knew intellectually that violence existed, but
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: knowing something intellectually and watching nearly 3,000 people murdered on
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: American soil are two entirely different things. September 11th shattered
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: the idea that geography, military power, or national wealth could
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: somehow make us immune from people determined to kill us.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Suddenly oceans did not seem particularly wide, borders did not
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: seem particularly strong, and the world had felt so enormous
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: on September 10th suddenly felt considerably smaller on September 11th.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: For me personally, the attacks destroyed something even deeper than
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: that sense of national invulnerability. They destroyed the illusion that
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: history was something happening in books, while the rest of
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: us simply went about our lives. History had just exploded
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: into my parents' living room. I watched human beings jump
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: from the World Trade Center because the alternative was burning alive,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: and there was no intellectual abstraction capable of sanitizing that
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: horror I watched firefighters and police officers run towards buildings
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: that everyone else was desperately trying to escape. I watched
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: the towers collapse and understood that thousands of ordinary people
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: had just gone to work that morning and would never
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: come home. Fathers were gone. Mothers were gone. Sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, co-workers, cops, firefighters,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: office workers, restaurant employees, flight crews, and passengers were were
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: suddenly part of history because a group of fanatics decided
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: that their ideology justified mass murder. Whatever innocence I had
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: about the world disappeared with those buildings. I didn't know
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: exactly where the road ahead would lead, but I knew
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: with absolute certainty that I could never look at the
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: world the same way again. Before that morning, I'd been
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: studying entertainment law in college and imagining a completely different
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: future for myself. I wanted to become a big-shot sports agent.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: make deals, represent athletes, and build a life somewhere around
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: the intersection of sports, entertainment, money, and law. It sounded
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: exciting to a 21-year-old kid in Las Vegas. Then September
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: 11th happened, and suddenly those ambitions felt very far away
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: from the questions consuming me. Who were these people who
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: attacked us? What did they believe? Where did this movement
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: come from? Why were young men willing to hijack civilian airplanes,
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: murder thousands of strangers, and and knowingly die in the process.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Those questions grabbed me by the throat, and they didn't
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: let go. Before long, I changed my major to political
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: science with an emphasis on the Near East, because I
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: needed to understand the world that had just forced itself
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: into mine. And that decision opened a door I have
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: never really closed. The deeper I went into the history, politics, religion, colonialism, nationalism, warfare,
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: and ideological movements of the Middle East, the more I
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: realized how little of us understood on September 10th. I
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: began studying the long and complicated relationship between the Muslim
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: world and the West, a history filled with trade, scholarship, coexistence, empire, conquest, warfare, colonialism, resistance, alliances, betrayals,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: and competing visions of political power. I also began studying
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: the much narrower but enormously consequential tradition of modern jihadist movements,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: that had declared the United States and its allies enemies.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: Al-Qaeda had not suddenly materialized out of the desert on
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: September 11th. The ideology behind it had been developing, organizing, recruiting, fighting,
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: and issuing warnings for years. There had already been attacks
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: against American targets, including the 93 World Trade Center bombing,
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: the embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: USS Cole. The warning lights had been blinking. Most Americans
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: simply had not been looking at the dashboard. After September 11th,
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: I couldn't look away. And the more I learned, the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: angrier I became about how profoundly unprepared we had been
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: to understand the threat growing in front of us. The
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: men who attacked us were not comic book villains, and
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: they were not mindless lunatics committing random acts of violence
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: without purpose. They were ideological extremists, operating within a violent
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: jihadist worldview that gave them a framework for identifying enemies
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: justifying mass murder, recruiting followers, and turning death itself into
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: a weapon. Understanding that did not mean accepting their worldview,
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: excusing it, or confusing it with beliefs of every Muslim
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: on earth. It meant taking our enemies seriously enough to
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: learn what they themselves were saying. Bin Laden had declared
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: war on the United States years before September 11th, and
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: al-Qaeda's leadership had repeatedly described America as a principal enemy.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: They meant it. We had treated much of that rhetoric
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: like distant noise from a distant world. September 11th was
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the moment that noise reached the front door. The consequences
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: of that morning have followed my generation ever since. Afghanistan, Iraq,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: the intelligence agencies transformed, the military transformed, airport security transformed,
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: American politics transformed. And an entire generation of young men
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: and women went overseas to fight wars born from the
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: aftermath of those attacks. Some came home wounded. Some came
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: home carrying injuries nobody could see. And some never came
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: home at all. Arguments about those wars, the decisions made
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: by our leaders, the mistakes, the lies, the victories, the failures,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: and the enormous human cost will continue long after all
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: of us are gone. But none of those debates can
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: erase what happened on that Tuesday morning. People went to work,
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: boarded airplanes, sat down at desks, poured coffee, answered phones,
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and kissed their families goodbye. without knowing that hatred conceived
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: thousands of miles away was already moving towards them at
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: hundreds of miles per hour. 25 years later, I can
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: still put myself back in that living room. I can
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: still see the pillar. I can still hear my mother's
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: voice telling me that a plane had hit the World
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Trade Center. I can still remember watching the second aircraft
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: disappear into the tower and knowing before anyone had to
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: tell me that America had entered a new era. The
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: 21-year-old who stood there that morning never got to go
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: back to September 10th. His plans changed. His interests changed.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: His understanding of the world changed. And the comfortable assumptions
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: he had carried through childhood disappeared almost instantly. September 11th
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: taught me that history does not ask permission before it arrives.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: It taught me that enemies do not become less dangerous
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: simply because we'd rather not think about them. Most of all,
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: it taught me that thousands of ordinary people can wake
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: up beneath a perfectly blue American sky, believing they're about
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: to live another ordinary day, only for the world to change,
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: before breakfast. And I think that's one of the parts
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: that still hits me the hardest all these years later.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: How ordinary that morning began. There was no thunderclap in
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: the sky, no warning siren echoing across the country. no
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: sense that we were standing at the edge of a
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: historical abyss. It was just another Tuesday, until it wasn't.
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: I'd gone to sleep thinking about 311, work, school, and
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: all the other nonsense that occupied my 21-year-old mind, and
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I woke up in a different America. By the end
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: of that morning, thousands of families had been ripped apart,
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: lower Manhattan looked like a war zone, and the country
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: had been introduced to an enemy most people barely understood.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: For me, that day became the dividing line between the
• 11:45
  Speaker 1: person I had been and the person I was becoming.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: I wanted to know who had done this, why they
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: had done it, what ideas drove them, who inspired them,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: who funded them, and what other dangers were hiding behind
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: the comfortable assumptions we'd carried for so long. I never
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: again wanted to be caught looking at an enemy as
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: some cartoon-like character on television while he was studying us,
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: planning against us, and waiting for the right moment to strike.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: And September 11th burned that complacency out of me for good.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: So every year when this day comes around, my mind,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: my mind does not first go to geopolitics, military campaigns,
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: intelligence failures, or the endless arguments that came afterward. It
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: goes back to that living room in Las Vegas, to
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: my mother waking me up, to my father standing there,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: to that pillar against my back, and to the second
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: airplane exploding into the South Tower while I watched it
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: happen live. I think about the people who called home
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: from doomed airplanes, and people trapped above the impact zones.
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: the firefighters climbing stairwells while everyone else was running down,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: and the families who spent hours desperately hoping that someone
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: they loved would somehow walk through that door. I think
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: about how many Americans left home that morning after saying
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: something completely ordinary like see you tonight. Never imagining those
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: words would be among the final words their families ever
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: heard from them. And that's why September 11th has never
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: become just another anniversary to me. It's not just a
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: chapter in a textbook. not a montage played once a year,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and not some distant historical marker fading into black and white.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: I was 21 years old when I watched my country
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: lose its innocence, and part of mine went with it.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: 25 years later, I can still see that blue sky,
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: still see that second plane, and still hear myself saying,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: we're under attack. And somewhere in America that morning, thousands
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: of people kissed someone they loved goodbye without knowing they
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: were saying it for the last time. And that's why
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: I remember this day. Because memories carry obligation. And for me,
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: that obligation is to remember the day as it actually felt.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: The confusion, the fear, the rage, the helplessness, the disbelief,
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: and then the horrible realization that there would be no
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: waking up from it. I remember the people who went
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: up those stairs when every instinct in the human body
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: must have been screaming at them to run the other way.
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: I remember the people aboard Flight 93 who learned what
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: was happening elsewhere and decided that whatever came next They
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: weren't going to allow their airplane to become another weapon
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: without a fight. I remember the empty chairs that remained
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: at dinner tables. The bedrooms that stayed untouched. The weddings
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: where a parent was missing. The children who grew up
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: knowing their mothers or fathers, mostly through photographs and stories.
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: Those are the consequences hidden behind a number like 2,977.
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Because numbers can't laugh. Numbers, they don't hug you. They
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: don't have favorite songs. And numbers... don't have someone waiting
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: at home for them. Those were human beings. Those lives
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: were deliberately stolen from them on a beautiful September morning.
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: So when I think back to that 21-year-old kid standing
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: against that pillar in Vegas, watching the second plane hit,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: and saying, we are under attack, there is one thing
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: I wish I could tell him before the towers came
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: down and the world he knew disappeared forever. Remember every
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: second of this, because someday people who are not there
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: will know September 11th is history. But you will always
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: know it as a morning thousands of Americans expected to
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: come home and never did. And that, for me, is
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: where September 11th will always end. Not with the wars
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: that followed, not with politics, not with arguments, not with
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the intelligence reports, and not with the years of history
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: that were written afterward. It ends in that living room,
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: with me standing there at 21 years old, staring at
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: a television, and realizing that the world I thought I
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: knew had just been ripped away in front of me
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: There was a life before that moment, and there has
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: been a life after it, but there is no bridge
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: between the two. The young man who went to sleep
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: after loading in a rock band never really woke up again.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Someone else did. Someone who was more suspicious, more curious,
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: more aware of what evil looks like when it stops
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: being theoretical and comes crashing through the front door. That
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: day changed what I studied, what I cared about, what
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: I paid attention to, and ultimately how I understood the
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: world around me. 25 years later, I'm still carrying that
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: mourning with me, and I suspect I always will. Because
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: some days pass into memory, some days fade into history,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: and some days divide your life forever. And look, no
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: anniversary can make what happens smaller, no speech can make
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: it cleaner, no amount of time can turn it into
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: something less than what it was. September 11th was murder
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: on a scale most Americans had never imagined could reach us.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: And for those of us who watch it unfold in
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: real time, there will always be a part of that
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: morning that never ended. 25 years later, the smoke is gone,
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: the skyline has changed, and the world has moved on.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: But 2,000, but 2,977 people never got that chance. And
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: that is the part that should never, ever be allowed
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: to become history. All the information that goes with this
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: episode can be found in the description box.