Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JUST JOSH: The Unlearned Lesson of 9/11

Transcript

JUST JOSH: The Unlearned Lesson of 9/11 · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans.
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:08
  I'm standing at the feet of the World Trade Center in the summer before September 11th.
• 0:16
  There's this sort of a, you know, an open air courtyard that was at the feet of the towers.
• 0:22
  They were so huge.
• 0:23
  I mean, they were so massive.
• 0:26
  Just walking around one of them.
• 0:27
  I mean, it's like the size of a city block.
• 0:30
  So there's a whole paved courtyard area where people are bustling up out of the subway and going into the World Trade Towers.
• 0:37
  I was there with my friend, Joel.
• 0:40
  We were college kids.
• 0:41
  And on a university break, we found an airfare to New York that was only $1,000 Australian dollars, like $700 US dollars.
• 0:49
  So we were like, let's do it.
• 0:51
  we got upgraded on the way.
• 0:52
  Man, this was back in those days.
• 0:54
  You could get upgraded on a trans-Pacific flight just by being a couple of handsome young kids.
• 1:02
  So anyway, we're in New York and we go and see the World Trade Towns and we're looking up at them.
• 1:07
  And they're so tall.
• 1:09
  I mean, they are just so tall.
• 1:12
  That sounds like a silly thing to say.
• 1:13
  They were the tallest buildings in the world at one stage.
• 1:17
  But there's sort of, you know, that kind of sense of vertigo or giddiness or dizziness that you get when you sort of lose perspective and there's just the blue sky behind it and this enormous thing going off into the distance, reaching up to the...
• 1:29
  up to the heavens.
• 1:31
  And so Joel, my buddy, gets down in the middle of his courtyard full of bustling bankers and people scurrying past, and he lies down on the paving stones and looks up at these two towers.
• 1:47
  And I thought, that's a good idea.
• 1:49
  And I lay down next to him and we lay there for three or four minutes, just looking at the clouds pass by behind these two total masterpieces of human engineering.
• 2:05
  And one of the finance guys who was walking past on his way to the World Trade Tower,
• 2:13
  saw us and smiled and he lies down a few meters away from us, does the same thing and lies there and looks up at the towers and he gets up and dusts off his suit and he says, huh, I've been coming and going every single day and I never thought to look up and appreciate that.
• 2:38
  And he thanks us and he walks off into the towers
• 2:44
  And that was the summer and we got back and we were actually, I was editing a video that we took of our short film that we were making, a kind of short comedy film about our various shenanigans on our trip around the States on the evening of September 11th, 2001.
• 3:04
  I was living with my parents still.
• 3:08
  it wasn't lame, merely living with my parents.
• 3:10
  It's not like I'd moved out and moved back in.
• 3:12
  That's normal outside of the States, okay?
• 3:14
  When you go to college, you stay with your parents because you're not living on campus.
• 3:17
  Don't judge.
• 3:18
  And my parents were out to dinner with some friends, and I was watching TV, and it was about 10 p.m., and I got a text from my brother saying, are you seeing this shit?
• 3:31
  And I changed the channel, and...
• 3:34
  That was after the second plane had already hit.
• 3:37
  And by the time my parents got home, my mom still says she remembers walking in and I didn't even have to say anything.
• 3:43
  I just looked at them and her face dropped and she saw how white my face was.
• 3:47
  And she said, oh my God, what's happened?
• 3:49
  Just by looking at my face.
• 3:52
  Yeah.
• 3:56
  If you're listening to this on the run or you're busy doing other things or you're only paying it half an ear, it might just be worth leaving this one for a moment when you can sort of follow the thread.
• 4:08
  Because I think there are some important things to think about a quarter of a century on from September 11th and I'll do my best to string them together.
• 4:18
  But it's probably not the sort of thing that you want to listen to three minutes of while you're making the kids breakfast.
• 4:23
  I won't go into anything gruesome or anything that kids can't hear, but I just mean there's a lot to take away from that day.
• 4:34
  And it's likely that a lot of the retrospectives that we see will not do as good a job as we might of contextualizing it and learning from history.
• 4:49
  is handled maybe better than the last quarter of a century since that day was.
• 4:56
  I can't go on before.
• 4:57
  I just want to wax lyrical about the engineering feat of those towers again.
• 5:02
  They were the most impressive human-built thing that I've ever seen, I think.
• 5:06
  I mean, the only other time I've felt like that is in Dubai, looking at the Burj al-Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world.
• 5:12
  But there was something about how imposing and stubborn and...
• 5:16
  brutalist they were, sort of unapologetically free from any frivolity or any prettiness, like just two enormous slabs declaring themselves.
• 5:33
  I was trying to articulate because part of what I want to do today is help people who were born, I guess, since the mid-80s to understand what the before times were like.
• 5:45
  I was trying to imagine in a pre-9-11 world how weird 9-11 was.
• 5:52
  Weird is the wrong word, but...
• 5:53
  I often wonder about this, like when you're at the tail end of history, in other words, when you are at the most recent moment that has ever yet existed, which is to say all the time,
• 6:07
  you contextualize history as a sequence of events that have happened, obviously, and therefore it's quite hard to put yourself in the mindset of a world in which that had never happened and wasn't possible.
• 6:20
  I sometimes think about this with respect to, I don't know, the Holocaust or the Norman conquests or the Viking invasions or the colonialism or whatever.
• 6:33
  In the world in which you are, there are things that are completely inconceivable that do actually take place.
• 6:42
  And on the other side of them, you're able to look back as if history was always going to go that way and things turned out and life carried on.
• 6:51
  But at the time that it happened, it wasn't at all obvious that that would be the case.
• 6:56
  I can't even imagine what the equivalent of the World Trade Towers was.
• 7:00
  coming down would be today, because we live in a world in which such a thing has happened and is therefore part of the tapestry of history.
• 7:12
  I suppose the closest things might be something like the Westminster Houses of Parliament and Big Ben all being blown up or the Eiffel Tower collapsing under a massive truck bomb or the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge or something.
• 7:25
  But
• 7:28
  The power of those buildings as icons of American dynamism and dominance and fearlessness...
• 7:40
  were more meaningful than any of those objects.
• 7:45
  And as I say, we now live in a world in which such things are able to be imagined.
• 7:49
  And that was not the world of September 10th, 2001.
• 7:55
  The other thing that's just worth noting for people who might not quite have come of age before that event was that...
• 8:02
  It was immediately apparent what was going on.
• 8:04
  Like sometimes you hear people say, oh, there was total confusion about why this had happened or we didn't understand why it had happened.
• 8:10
  That may be true for normies.
• 8:12
  But on the night of September 11th, I remember texting another friend saying, I sure wouldn't want to be in the mountains of Afghanistan right now.
• 8:22
  Um, you know, this was, uh, it was a known threat, even if our imaginations couldn't encompass the possibility of them actually being successful, uh, at what they wanted to pull off.
• 8:34
  Um, it was a weird time.
• 8:38
  And in a moment, I'll play some clips from late night TV shows of that week of Letterman and Jon Stewart.
• 8:48
  And you can hear in their voices, um,
• 8:52
  an inability to know how to respond to the calamity of that horror.
• 8:59
  It was a world where there really had not been terrorism in the West.
• 9:04
  I mean, we now live in a world where Australia went through the trauma of the Bali attacks in 2002.
• 9:11
  Spain had the Madrid attacks in 2004.
• 9:14
  There was the London 7-7 bombings in 2005.
• 9:17
  There was Paris's cataclysmic 2015 with Charlie Hebdo in January and the Bataclan and Stade de France attack in November.
• 9:27
  There was the Bastille Day attack in 2016 in Nice, that truck attack.
• 9:31
  There was the Berlin Christmas attack of the markets in 2016.
• 9:36
  There was the Manchester Arena bombing of the Ariana Grande concert in 2017.
• 9:39
  You know, it's almost hard to, those are just off the top of my head that I jotted down.
• 9:45
  It's hard to remember the, I guess, regularity with which these things have plagued us since.
• 9:51
  But prior to that,
• 9:53
  Terrorism was something that some fringe group did in order to extract a concession.
• 10:01
  It was something that Palestinians would hijack a plane in order to try to get something that they wanted out of it.
• 10:09
  There were occasional, obviously, horrible things like the Munich Olympics where the Israeli team was slaughtered.
• 10:14
  But pretty much with the exception of Jews, when it came to Western countries, the
• 10:21
  The concept of spectacular cinematic mega-terrorism simply in order to go to the West into a clash of civilizations and drive Western armies out of the lands of Islam, that was the stuff of movies.
• 10:36
  That was not on anybody's normal everyday radar.
• 10:43
  And the kind of living through a movie sensation of it was...
• 10:50
  I suppose the only recent thing that comes remotely close would be COVID, where in the very early days of COVID, just as everything was shutting down and borders were closing and lockdowns were being imposed, there was a strange sense of living in a hybrid in between non-reality, this kind of liminal state between the actual world as you knew it and this new something that was emerging today.
• 11:15
  You know, you might have a dentist appointment in two weeks and it's still in your calendar.
• 11:20
  Or, you know, there are train timetables that still apply supposedly in three days time.
• 11:25
  But you know that you're not going to be at the dentist and everybody knows that that train is not going to be running.
• 11:29
  You can go online and you can book an airplane ticket for next month.
• 11:33
  But is that plane going to be flying?
• 11:35
  Is anyone going to be flying again?
• 11:37
  How many waves of this thing is there going to be, whether it's a pandemic or a terrorist attack?
• 11:42
  You're in this topsy-turvy upside down through the looking glass Mad Hatter's universe of like you just don't – all of the things that you had expected were going to unfold over the next few weeks and months are off the table.
• 11:57
  So what is on the table?
• 11:59
  And in the wake of September 11th, what was on the table in a very real way was the possibility that this kind of thing was a new normal.
• 12:09
  that this was just going to happen a lot regularly.
• 12:12
  I mean, it was so unexpected and out of the blue that it really didn't seem more crazy to imagine that Western cities would blow up and be destroyed every year or every few months.
• 12:33
  That was as real a possibility.
• 12:34
  That was a more plausible possibility on September 12th
• 12:39
  than the idea of September 11th happening had been on September 10th.
• 12:44
  You know, the old reality was shattered and a new reality was in its place and nobody knew what that new reality was.
• 12:52
  I'm aware, of course, that I'm saying all this as an outsider.
• 12:55
  I didn't live in New York yet.
• 12:56
  It was some years before I moved to New York City.
• 12:59
  And so I don't want any of this kind of hoity-toity, highfalutin like Monday morning quarterback analysis to be misconstrued as a lack of empathy for people who...
• 13:09
  experienced that day themselves or who lost people on that day.
• 13:14
  I just don't want to spend a lot of time saying the same maudlin things that you can find on other outlets.
• 13:20
  And I want to sort of get straight into the meat of it, so to speak.
• 13:26
  Yeah.
• 13:27
  So there had been intermittent bits of terrorism here and there.
• 13:33
  Libya had blown up the Pan Am plane over Scotland, a flight from Heathrow to JFK, in retaliation for the US bombing of Libya two years earlier.
• 13:43
  And as I said, Palestinians had hijacked planes.
• 13:47
  And there'd been Bin Laden attacks.
• 13:49
  I mean, Bin Laden had attacked the US military in the form of the USS Cole, which was a
• 13:54
  A US ship when it was docked at Yemen and some suicide bombers blew it up and there'd been the embassy bombings in 1998 in Africa where in Kenya and Tanzania, the US embassies were blown up.
• 14:13
  But these were obviously sort of ideological attacks on the projection of US military power and diplomatic power abroad.
• 14:23
  They weren't on the homeland, so to speak.
• 14:26
  Which is not to say that there weren't warning signs that people who knew better should have known about.
• 14:33
  America had a new administration.
• 14:36
  It was coming off the 1990s.
• 14:38
  I mean, the 90s in hindsight, man.
• 14:42
  Talk about an era where we were sleepwalking towards things that we could not possibly fathom.
• 14:52
  Again, if you were born later than the mid 80s,
• 14:56
  then you've only known really a post 9-11 world.
• 15:00
  But let me tell you, I'm just old enough to, and just nerdy enough that when I was in my early to mid-teens, I was already politically pretty engaged to...
• 15:11
  recall a world where, you know, I mean, literally the most popular sitcom on television, Seinfeld, was a show explicitly about nothing.
• 15:20
  You know, the most important scandal of the 1990s was that the president got a blowjob in the Oval Office
• 15:28
  from an intern.
• 15:29
  He's out there playing the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show.
• 15:34
  And meanwhile, all of the signals are flashing red in counterterrorism that some big shit is being mobilized.
• 15:44
  And we were still sort of just stuck in an imaginative mindset in which the Soviet Union had been the big problem and now that had gone away, so let's all party.
• 15:56
  Yeah.
• 15:59
  So in 95, unbeknownst to us, while we were all getting blowjobs in the office and playing the saxophone on late night television, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, one of the notorious masterminds of 9-11, and his nephew, Ramzi Youssef.
• 16:15
  had this plan called the Bajinka plot, and they were going to blow up a dozen planes over the Pacific Ocean.
• 16:25
  And Yusuf, the nephew of KSM, said, what if instead of just blowing them up,
• 16:31
  We hijack them and crash them into things, or at least crash one of them into the CIA headquarters.
• 16:40
  And KSM loved this plan.
• 16:42
  So he took it to Osama bin Laden in 1996.
• 16:47
  the following year.
• 16:48
  And he said, how about the idea of using aircraft as missiles?
• 16:53
  You select aircraft that are on routes that are quite long, so they're going to be full of fuel.
• 16:59
  And it's a bomb.
• 17:00
  I mean, the whole thing is just a big bunch of incredibly flammable aviation gas.
• 17:05
  And so you just plow it into something and watch it explode with suicide hijackers.
• 17:13
  It's a suicide bombing, but we don't even have to make the bomb.
• 17:17
  And it's a big bomb.
• 17:19
  And bin Laden loves this idea.
• 17:22
  And he greenlights the operation in 1998 or early 1999.
• 17:29
  So Al Gore loses the 2000 election by a few hundred votes in Florida.
• 17:37
  George W. Bush takes office and his staff are all populated by people who are real hawks and who wanted the United States to topple Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War in 1991.
• 17:52
  And they're champing at the bit to come in and be the big boys and put their big boots on.
• 17:58
  And they're not going to be getting any blowjobs in the Oval Office.
• 18:01
  No siree, Bob.
• 18:04
  Not for Rumsfeld or Cheney.
• 18:06
  And so they come in and they're not very interested in this idea of there being like super empowered individuals who are going to inflict terror.
• 18:13
  They regard this as essentially a criminal problem.
• 18:17
  This is a problem for law enforcement.
• 18:18
  It's not a problem for the US government.
• 18:20
  We've got bigger fish to fry.
• 18:21
  We've got...
• 18:22
  You know, they were raised in a mindset of states being, you know, nation states being the relevant unit that you have to think about in geopolitics.
• 18:33
  And these were smart guys.
• 18:34
  I mean, you know, I don't mean to poo-poo them.
• 18:36
  Everyone has the blind spots that they have as a result of the world that they grew up in.
• 18:40
  And these guys grew up in a Cold War world.
• 18:43
  Yeah.
• 18:45
  But the professionals who were in charge of keeping an eye on things were a lot more worried than the Bush administration was.
• 18:52
  And 36 days before September 11th, 36 days, the title of the president's daily brief was...
• 19:03
  which is prepared by the CIA and delivered to the US president, George W. Bush.
• 19:09
  The title was Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.
• 19:15
  Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.
• 19:19
  They carry on with business as usual.
• 19:22
  Two weeks before 9-11, on the 22nd of August, 2001,
• 19:29
  the leading counterterrorism expert at the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the leading counterterrorism expert at the nation's top federal law enforcement agency, resigns in frustration with the Bush administration's bureaucratic obstruction of counterterrorism investigations.
• 19:52
  His name is John O'Neill.
• 19:54
  He goes off and the next day, this is still two weeks before 9-11, he gets a new job.
• 20:01
  Instead of being the head of counterterrorism at the FBI, he becomes a chief of security for America's most important office building, the World Trade Center.
• 20:17
  And he goes to work at the World Trade Center
• 20:22
  on his first day, two weeks before 9-11, after resigning in protest, that his warnings were not being heeded about some kind of large-scale, spectacular act of mega-terrorism.
• 20:36
  He gets out of the government and says, I'm done with this.
• 20:40
  I'm just going to do a more simple job of being head of security at a big physical location.
• 20:50
  And...
• 20:52
  On the morning of September 11th, he was there and he ran into the South Tower after it had been hit to help people evacuate, and he died.
• 21:02
  Prior to September 11th, there was a sense among the kinds of policy circles that John O'Neill had been trying to persuade that.
• 21:18
  Western countries were really insulated from the troubles of the world.
• 21:26
  And that had been partly facilitated by the Cold War.
• 21:30
  The existence of the Soviet Union and the United States locked in a kind of equilibrium meant that it wasn't really possible for either of them to get too involved on the other side's turf.
• 21:43
  I mean, when one of them tried to, you ended up with the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s.
• 21:48
  There was essentially a detente between the two.
• 21:52
  And so there was very much a sense that the West and the Middle East were two worlds that would not collide.
• 21:59
  I mean, we could do some meddling, but the directionality would never flow back the other way.
• 22:06
  There was nothing that they could possibly project.
• 22:08
  I mean, who's going to enter the thinking of the Rumsfelds and the Chinese of the world, which regards the only relevant concern as being nation states.
• 22:19
  Who is going to be launching an ICBM from Baghdad?
• 22:23
  They don't have any.
• 22:25
  There have been sanctions on Iraq for Saddam Hussein being in breach of a bazillion United Nations resolutions for quite some time.
• 22:35
  So America was sitting fairly pretty in the 1990s, and it was completely invincible.
• 22:42
  I mean, this is one of the things that I want to really ram home today, which you will hear me bang on about at length.
• 22:50
  The power of power lies more in its non-use than in its deployment.
• 22:59
  The deployment of power reveals its limitations.
• 23:04
  The illusion of power, the non-use of power, allows it to be anything, allows it to loom as large as your enemy's imagination can conjure it up.
• 23:18
  All of our fears, all of our worries, all of our inadequacies can fuel the illusion of American indominability, if we, in this case, are potential adversaries of the United States.
• 23:34
  But the moment that power is actually deployed, the problem is that it becomes a real thing that exists in the world that has holes that can be punched in it.
• 23:44
  And
• 23:48
  The wisdom, I suppose, of the people who prosecuted the initial Gulf War of George W. Bush's father's administration, George H. W. Bush, of Colin Powell and the other people who he surrounded himself with was to do a very limited campaign.
• 24:01
  I mean, the initial Gulf War, what happened was – and this is relevant in terms of bin Laden's story as well –
• 24:08
  What happened was that Iraq, Saddam Hussein, terrible dictator, probably one of the worst guys in the world at the time, he had fought a huge war against Iran.
• 24:17
  The Americans had actually supported Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.
• 24:20
  Photos of Donald Rumsfeld, you know, who was defense secretary, prosecuting the war to topple Saddam Hussein 10, 15 years later, was shaking hands with Saddam Hussein because they wanted...
• 24:34
  You know, Saddam Hussein, they're basically backing Saddam Hussein, at least morally, in Saddam Hussein's war against Iran in the 1980s.
• 24:42
  But then Hussein gets a bit cocky and Iraq invades Kuwait in 1990, potentially on a bit of a misunderstanding.
• 24:51
  There are claims that he has sort of floated the idea with the American ambassador and that like...
• 24:56
  He got the sense from America that Middle Eastern issues are for the Middle East to sort out, and America isn't going to launch some global war in order to protect a tiny little nation like Kuwait.
• 25:11
  Saddam Hussein misjudged.
• 25:12
  George H.W.
• 25:13
  Bush gathered together a patient international coalition, got the appropriate United Nations resolutions, and went in for Operation Desert Storm.
• 25:23
  Now-
• 25:25
  In a world in which the Iraq war has happened and the Afghanistan campaign has happened and the Taliban is back in power and the Iran conflict with Trump is taking place and the Gaza conflict, it will shock you, I hope, to learn that Desert Storm, the initial Gulf War lasted 43 days.
• 25:53
  That was 43 days in total of air warfare.
• 25:58
  The ground assault was over in 100 hours.
• 26:03
  The ground assault was four days of 43 days total.
• 26:08
  And then the whole thing was done and everybody went home.
• 26:13
  Well, not everybody.
• 26:15
  The Saudis wanted the Americans to stay, wanted American military presence to remain in Saudi Arabia.
• 26:21
  They had invited the Americans to come in and send their military to Saudi Arabia during 1990 because they were worried about Saddam Hussein and they wanted American protection.
• 26:33
  This was after Saddam – I think it was right after.
• 26:35
  It was around the time that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
• 26:38
  Yeah.
• 26:39
  And so we'll come back to that as part of Osama bin Laden's beef with Saudi Arabia.
• 26:45
  But the important thing to understand is that at the time, the George H.W.
• 26:50
  Bush administration had the wisdom to do a very, very limited short campaign.
• 26:55
  It was drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
• 26:58
  restore Kuwaiti sovereignty, the world order is restored, the sort of institutional system that we have set up since the Second World War is reinforced, the good guys win, Saddam gets slapped back and that's fine.
• 27:16
  Bush, one, did not do what neoconservative hawks wanted him to do and take the opportunity to continue all the way to Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein.
• 27:26
  largely because of Colin Powell's famous pottery barn rule, which is if you break it, you bought it.
• 27:33
  You own it.
• 27:36
  You're suddenly stuck with who knows what is going to happen.
• 27:40
  And the old form of American power was you use the minimum useful dose
• 27:46
  Use just enough American power to get the job done.
• 27:49
  And if the job is to, you know, it may not have been really to liberate Kuwait.
• 27:55
  The job presumably was to prevent future aggressors from thinking that they can get away with changing the borders of countries that are settled.
• 28:07
  You're not allowed to do that.
• 28:08
  You can't just go and take another country and occupy it and make it part of your country.
• 28:13
  So if that's the rule, then you go in and you do whatever you can as quickly as you possibly can, and then you leave.
• 28:20
  And that retained this imaginary sort of illusory allure of American superpowerdom that endured throughout the 1990s.
• 28:31
  Yeah.
• 28:33
  And that was completely and utterly annihilated in an instant on 9-11.
• 28:41
  That was what really came raining down on everyone's eyes was the sense that,
• 28:49
  This superpower is not able to control the globe at all.
• 28:56
  It isn't even able to control its own cities.
• 29:01
  It's a declaration of war, and it's a declaration of war that can't obviously be responded to in the ways in which the United States excels.
• 29:11
  which is with bombers and doing bombing.
• 29:13
  I mean, it became a punchline later during the Iraq war that Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, would complain in Afghanistan about the lack of targets.
• 29:25
  Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism official, wrote a book in 2004 in which he says that Donald Rumsfeld had complained – and Rumsfeld actually said this in a press conference during the Afghanistan campaign.
• 29:40
  This was before the Iraq war, so after 9-11 but before Iraq when they were in Afghanistan.
• 29:46
  Rumsfeld was asked at a press conference about the lack of targets.
• 29:48
  He said it's a real problem, the lack of targets.
• 29:50
  And Richard Clarke then wrote in his book that Rumsfeld was also saying this behind the scenes, saying, you know, we need to go somewhere where there are better targets.
• 29:58
  What we're good at is blowing up infrastructure and taking out, you know, military hardware.
• 30:06
  Afghanistan doesn't have anything.
• 30:07
  It's a bunch of caves.
• 30:08
  It's a bunch of dudes in the desert training on monkey bars and, you know, firing Kalashnikovs.
• 30:14
  This isn't what we're good at.
• 30:15
  Yeah.
• 30:18
  So The Onion, in fact, had the best headline about this was The Onion released, and this is a satirical newspaper, if you don't know it, released one of its best ever editions on the 20-somethingth of September.
• 30:33
  I mean, it's amazing to think of people trying to get into a room and come up with jokes.
• 30:37
  But their headline, oh, it was September 26th, so I've got it here.
• 30:41
  Their headline, this is two weeks after 9-11, was, U.S. urges bin Laden to form a nation it can attack.
• 30:49
  And, you know, so yes, the impregnability of Western society, Western cities, Western civilization to the things that we were doing in the Middle East was revealed to be just a facade.
• 31:07
  So in that spirit of shock and context, I want to play for you the first show back that David Letterman did, which...
• 31:17
  CBS has scrubbed this episode.
• 31:20
  It used to be on YouTube and it used to be available.
• 31:24
  It is absolutely nowhere.
• 31:25
  You are getting an exclusive here.
• 31:27
  It took me hours of putting on my journalist's hat and my former radio producer's hat to eventually track down a...
• 31:35
  a collection of archives, which are actually just like eight hour stretches of American television that have been recorded on VHS and then uploaded to an archive for posterity.
• 31:46
  So it's actually really cool.
• 31:47
  You can actually watch.
• 31:48
  It's not just the show.
• 31:49
  It's not just a clip of the show.
• 31:51
  You can watch like the five hours leading up to the show.
• 31:54
  Like I'm going to what I'm about to play you is like five hours and 20 minutes and 12 seconds or something into this long stream of American TV from the evening of September 17th.
• 32:04
  2001.
• 32:06
  At the time, Lenin is the most powerful man in broadcasting.
• 32:10
  You know, he's a legend and an icon, and he's based right in New York City.
• 32:14
  He's at 53rd Street and Broadway in the old Ed Sullivan Theatre.
• 32:20
  And the mayor had been encouraging everyone to get back to work and to go on with their lives, even as it was just devastation downtown, smoldering ruins and body parts still burning.
• 32:37
  being found on West Broadway.
• 32:40
  But Letterman decided to follow the mayor's instruction and go back to work.
• 32:46
  And the show did not begin with its usual glitzy music, anything.
• 32:52
  It just began with a waving American flag and then just a shot of the theater and then it faded in on Dave.
• 33:03
  So have a listen to the first few minutes of Letterman that night.
• 33:26
  Thank you very much.
• 33:29
  Welcome to the Late Show.
• 33:32
  This is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked.
• 33:38
  And I need to ask your patience and indulgence here because I want to say a few things.
• 33:44
  And believe me, sadly, I'm not going to be saying anything new.
• 33:48
  And in the past week, others have said what I will be saying here tonight far more eloquently than I'm equipped to do.
• 33:56
  But if we are going to continue to do shows, I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes.
• 34:02
  And so that's what I'm going to do here.
• 34:05
  It's terribly sad here in New York City.
• 34:09
  We've lost 5,000 fellow New Yorkers, and you can feel it.
• 34:14
  You can feel it.
• 34:16
  You can see it.
• 34:17
  It's terribly sad.
• 34:19
  Terribly, terribly sad.
• 34:21
  And watching all of this, I wasn't sure...
• 34:25
  that I should be doing a television show, because for 20 years we've been in the city making fun of everything, making fun of the city, making fun of my hair, making fun of Paul, well...
• 34:39
  So to come to this circumstance that is so desperately sad, and I don't trust my judgment in matters like this, but I'll tell you the reason that I am doing a show and the reason I am back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani.
• 34:54
  Very early on...
• 34:55
  after the attack, and how strange does it sound to invoke that phrase, after the attack.
• 35:02
  Mayor Giuliani encouraged us and here lately implored us to go back to our lives, go on living, continue trying to make New York City the place that it should be.
• 35:14
  And because of him, I'm here tonight.
• 35:19
  And it's very simple.
• 35:20
  There is only one requirement for any of us, and that is to be courageous.
• 35:25
  Because courage, as you might know, defines all other human behavior.
• 35:31
  And I believe, because I've done a little of this myself, pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing.
• 35:40
  I just want to go through this, and again, forgive me if this is more for me than it is for people watching.
• 35:46
  I'm sorry, but...
• 35:49
  I have to go through this.
• 35:52
  The reason we were attacked, the reason these people are dead, these people are missing and dead, and they weren't doing anything wrong.
• 35:59
  They were living their lives.
• 36:00
  They were going to work.
• 36:01
  They were traveling.
• 36:02
  They were doing what they normally do.
• 36:04
  As I understand it, and my understanding of this is vague at best, another smaller group of people stole some airplanes and crashed them into buildings and were told that they were zealots fueled by religious fervor, religious fervor.
• 36:19
  And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you?
• 36:23
  Will that make any goddamn sense?
• 36:29
  I'll tell you about a thing that happened last night.
• 36:33
  There's a town in Montana by the name of Choteau.
• 36:37
  It's about 100 miles south of the Canadian border.
• 36:39
  And I know a little something about this town.
• 36:41
  And it's 1,600 people, 1,600 people.
• 36:44
  And it's an ag business community, which means farming and ranching.
• 36:51
  And Montana's been in the middle of a drought for, I don't know, three years.
• 36:56
  And if you've got no rain, you can't grow anything.
• 36:58
  And if you can't grow anything, you can't farm.
• 36:59
  And if you can't grow anything, you can't ranch because the cattle don't have anything to eat.
• 37:03
  And that's the way life is in this small town, 1,600 people.
• 37:06
  Last night at the high school auditorium in Choteau, Montana, they had a rally.
• 37:12
  Home of the Bulldogs, by the way.
• 37:15
  They had a rally for New York City.
• 37:18
  And not just a rally for New York City, but a rally to raise money.
• 37:22
  To raise money for New York City.
• 37:23
  And if that doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the spirit of the United States, then I can't help you.
• 37:31
  I'm sorry.
• 37:53
  And I have one more thing to say, and then thank God Regis is here, so we have something to make fun of.
• 38:05
  If you didn't believe it before, and it's easy to understand how you might have been skeptical on this point, if you didn't believe it before, you can absolutely believe it now.
• 38:19
  New York City is the greatest city in the world.
• 38:43
  We're going to try and feel our way through this, and we'll just see how it goes, take it a day at a time.
• 38:49
  We're lucky enough tonight to have two fantastic representatives of this town, Dan Rather and Regis Philbin, and we'll be right back.
• 38:59
  So that was Dave.
• 39:02
  You can thank my journalistic powers of investigation and prowess to have surfaced that.
• 39:10
  I'm sure we'll get hit by a copyright letter from CBS, but hey, I don't care.
• 39:17
  And he was the first comedy show to come back on the air.
• 39:22
  And one of the interesting things about watching all the archival footage of the broadcast leading up to his show is, of course, the whole thing is just relentless round-the-clock news about the Bush administration mobilizing and calling up reservists.
• 39:37
  I mean, it's just the whole thing.
• 39:39
  Everything has been thrown out the window.
• 39:42
  Everyone's winging it, including himself.
• 39:44
  And the idea of doing comedy reminds me that on the night of September 12th, which was the first full day of 9-11 coverage here in Australia, because it happened very late at night on September 11th here,
• 40:02
  I was scheduled to do improv comedy at Sydney University where I was a college student and I was in the improv troupe.
• 40:13
  And so people came out and we did it, obviously.
• 40:18
  We're a long way away, so it's hardly akin to New York.
• 40:22
  But nonetheless, I decided that it would be fun for me to wear my...
• 40:28
  t-shirt that I had got in New York recently, which said, New York fucking city on it.
• 40:35
  And so I showed up backstage and the head of the improv troupe, a very, very talented, multi-award winning Australian actor, writer and improviser named Rob Carlton, who's gone on to become a great friend and mentor.
• 40:50
  He looked at me and he was like, his face just fell.
• 40:53
  He was like, you're not seriously planning on wearing it on stage.
• 40:55
  And I was like, it's a show of solidarity.
• 40:58
  This is how aspie I am.
• 40:59
  This is how like spectrumy I am.
• 41:01
  I'm like, why would anyone be possibly be offended by this?
• 41:04
  This is, I'm trying to, I'm defending, I'm giving the most New York.
• 41:07
  This is the way New York would want me to respond to everything that's going on in New York right now with a New York fucking city t-shirt.
• 41:14
  And he was like, great, fine, nice sentiment.
• 41:17
  And you know what's gonna happen every single time you try to do a gag out there?
• 41:22
  You know what's gonna happen to people's minds when they've come out to try to get their minds off whatever craziness is going on in the world?
• 41:29
  They're just reminding them of it every single time they look at your t-shirt.
• 41:32
  Like this does not serve the show.
• 41:34
  And so it turns out he was right.
• 41:36
  I mean, this might be the only time in my life that I have not had supremely good judgment.
• 41:44
  That is kind of my thing, not having supremely good judgment, but telling the truth.
• 41:48
  Anyway, I took the T-shirt off and he lent me another.
• 41:53
  The other person who was based in New York who was very popular at the time was Jon Stewart.
• 41:59
  And so everyone basically followed Letterman's lead.
• 42:02
  He was the god and he had come back.
• 42:04
  And if Letterman says it was time, then it's time.
• 42:07
  So in short order, the other shows, Conan O'Brien.
• 42:10
  And I mean, man, it gave you a real sense.
• 42:13
  It was a real lesson for me as a budding broadcaster wannabe about how to –
• 42:22
  be authentic and heartfelt and free from artifice because you watch that Letterman clip and he's really not trying to do anything apart from, as he says, hear himself speak and create, I guess, bring a new normal into being by pretending to be courageous, as he says, which he's right, often is the same thing as courage itself.
• 42:49
  And I won't bore you by playing you Jay Leno's first Tonight Show back, but it's just a lot of terribly sad, terribly, terribly sad.
• 42:59
  The great first responders, thoughts go out to all the brave men and women, and it's a real tragedy.
• 43:08
  yeah fatuous bullshit anyway um john stewart is uh you know another great broadcaster so let's have a listen to his um uh first show back good evening and uh welcome to the daily show uh we are back uh this is our first show since uh the tragedy in new york city and uh uh
• 43:34
  There's no other way really to start the show than to ask you at home the question that we asked the audience here tonight, and that we've asked everybody that we know here in New York since September 11th, and that is, are you okay?
• 43:49
  And we pray that you are and that your family is.
• 43:55
  I'm sorry to do this to you.
• 43:59
  It's another entertainment show beginning with
• 44:04
  an overwrought speech of a shaken host and uh... television is nothing if not redundant so i apologize for that it's something that unfortunately we do for ourselves so that we can drain whatever abscess is in our hearts and move on to uh...
• 44:28
  to the business of making you laugh, which we haven't been able to do very effectively lately.
• 44:36
  Everyone's checked in already.
• 44:37
  I know we're late.
• 44:38
  I'm sure we're getting in right under the wire before the cast of Survivor offers their insight into what to do in these situations.
• 44:50
  They said to get back to work.
• 44:52
  And, uh,
• 44:55
  there were no jobs available for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying which I gladly would have taken I so I so I come back here and tonight's show is not I say regular show we we look through the ball we found some clips that we thought might make you smile which is really what's necessary I think the
• 45:23
  right about now and a lot of folks have asked me what are you gonna do when you get back what are you gonna say I mean that geez what a terrible thing to have to do and and I don't see it as a burden at all I I see it as a privilege and I just I see it as a privilege and everyone here does see it that way and
• 45:51
  the show in general we feel like is a privilege just even even the idea that we can sit in the back of the country and and make wisecracks which is really what we do we sit in the back and we throw spitballs and uh... but never forgetting the fact that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that that is that is a country that allows for open satire and i know that sounds basic
• 46:20
  And it sounds as though it goes without saying, but that's really what this whole situation is about.
• 46:27
  It's the difference between closed and open.
• 46:30
  It's the difference between free and burdened.
• 46:37
  And we don't take that for granted here by any stretch of the imagination.
• 46:40
  And our show has changed.
• 46:43
  I don't doubt that.
• 46:44
  What it's become, I don't know.
• 46:49
  sublimitable is not a punchline anymore.
• 46:53
  One day it will become that again, and, and, Lord willing, it'll become that again, because it means that we have ridden out the storm.
• 47:01
  But the main reason that I wanted to speak tonight is not to tell you what this show's gonna be, not to tell you about all the incredibly brave people that are here in New York and in Washington and around the country,
• 47:21
  But we've had an unenduring pain here, an unendurable pain.
• 47:29
  And I just, I wanted to tell you why I grieve.
• 47:38
  But why I don't despair.
• 47:52
  Luckily we can edit this.
• 47:58
  One of my first memories is of Martin Luther King being shot.
• 48:03
  I was five.
• 48:06
  And if you wonder if this feeling will pass,
• 48:14
  When I was five and he was shot, here's what I remember about it.
• 48:18
  I was in a school in Trenton, and they shut the lights off, and we got to sit under our desks.
• 48:24
  And we thought that was really cool.
• 48:26
  And they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there was rioting.
• 48:32
  But we didn't know that.
• 48:33
  We just thought, my God, we get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese.
• 48:40
  And that's what I remember about it.
• 48:44
  And that was a tremendous test of this country's fabric and... and this country's had many tests before that and after that.
• 48:53
  And... the reason I don't despair is because this attack happened.
• 49:04
  It's not a dream.
• 49:08
  But the aftermath of it... the recovery...
• 49:13
  is a dream realized.
• 49:17
  And that is Martin Luther King's dream.
• 49:24
  Whatever barriers we've put up are gone, even if it's just momentary.
• 49:31
  And... we're judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character.
• 49:42
  And...
• 49:46
  You know, all this talk about these guys are criminal masterminds.
• 49:50
  They've gotten together and they've... their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill.
• 49:56
  It's a lie.
• 49:59
  Any fool can blow something up.
• 50:02
  Any fool can destroy.
• 50:04
  But to see these guys, these firefighters, these policemen, and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding,
• 50:16
  That is extraordinary.
• 50:22
  And that's why we've already won.
• 50:24
  They can't, it's light.
• 50:28
  It's democracy.
• 50:30
  We've already won.
• 50:31
  They can't shut that down.
• 50:39
  They live in chaos.
• 50:42
  And chaos, it can't sustain itself.
• 50:45
  It never could.
• 50:48
  It's too easy and it's too unsatisfying.
• 50:53
  The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center.
• 51:13
  And now it's gone and they attacked it.
• 51:16
  this symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone.
• 51:30
  But you know what the view is now?
• 51:32
  The Statue of Liberty.
• 51:38
  The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty.
• 51:46
  You can't beat that.
• 51:49
  So we're going to take a break, and I'm going to stop slobbering on myself and the desk.
• 51:54
  And we're going to get back to this.
• 51:58
  And it's going to be fun and funny, and it's going to be the same as it was.
• 52:03
  And I thank you.
• 52:05
  We'll be right back.
• 52:09
  So that's a shaken Jon Stewart on the set of The Daily Show in New York.
• 52:15
  And what you can't hear, although you will have seen it if you're watching the video of this on YouTube or Substack or Spotify, is that across the bottom of the screen, while he's giving this heartfelt speech, I mean, I thought it was a bit when I watched back at it.
• 52:32
  But no, there's a crawl that comes across the bottom of the screen about a minute into his show where...
• 52:38
  which scrolls across the bottom of the screen saying, in light of recent national events, Comedy Central urges you to contact, I'm reading it live now, so I apologize for the slowness, to contact the American Red Cross.
• 52:52
  Call 1-800-HELP-NOW for information about making a financial donation.
• 53:00
  1-800-GIVE-LIFE for information on blood donation or log on to www.redcross.org to find out what else you can do to help.
• 53:17
  And that's scrolling across the bottom of the screen while Jon Stewart is speaking.
• 53:22
  Anyway, so topsy-turvy times.
• 53:25
  You get the picture.
• 53:28
  Pretty soon conspiracy theories started.
• 53:30
  I'm not going to go into a big conspiracy theory thing now.
• 53:36
  The melting point of steel is higher temperature than aviation fuel can ever generate.
• 53:42
  So how could the steel in the buildings have buckled
• 53:46
  And engineers would come out and say, well, you don't need the steel to melt into liquid.
• 53:51
  You just need the steel to not be able to hold up all of the floors that are above it.
• 53:56
  And once one floor pancakes, then it sends the other floors tumbling down.
• 54:01
  Or, you know, the conspiracy theorists would go on about Building 7.
• 54:06
  Building 7 wasn't even hit by a plane.
• 54:07
  And Building 7 collapsed later on in the night.
• 54:11
  It was a controlled demolition.
• 54:14
  and engineers say the structure is hit by a sufficiently large mass of projectiles from neighboring structures, then it can be destabilized and it can take hours for the whole thing to...
• 54:27
  Anyway, if you're interested in any of that, if you're 9-11 truther curious in any way, and there are a lot of really, really well-done conspiracies about 9-11 online, so it's quite easy to get sucked in by them,
• 54:43
  Popular Mechanics, a great magazine in the United States, put together in 2005, devoted an entire publication to going to engineers and putting to them all of the conspiracy theories about 9-11, just in terms of the actual logistics of the day, like how did it all happen and what do you make of all of these criticisms?
• 55:07
  And that is a brilliant piece of work.
• 55:09
  It debunks every single major conspiracy theory, not like so much the political ones or, you know, like Israel was behind it or something, but all of the conspiracy theories about the day itself.
• 55:19
  Like, oh, where, you know, why didn't we see the, wasn't there security footage of the plane that hit the Pentagon or something?
• 55:24
  It was probably a bomb.
• 55:26
  They published that as a book which was called Debunking 9-11 Myths, Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts.
• 55:32
  Suffice it to say, you will never hear an engineer peddling their conspiracy theories.
• 55:38
  All of these anomalies, these supposed anomalies about the official story of 9-11 in terms of whether or not it was planes or whether they were missiles or whether or not.
• 55:47
  Like these are never concerns that engineers have.
• 55:51
  These are concerns that people who don't know anything about engineering have.
• 55:57
  So that's just a place to go.
• 55:59
  Popular Mechanics, the March issue of 2005.
• 56:04
  You heard Letterman there say that these people were motivated by religious zealotry and it became a theme in our understanding of what had happened that day that they hate us for our freedoms.
• 56:19
  And that's worth addressing head on about the why of all this.
• 56:26
  If we want the...
• 56:28
  next 25 years to be more productive than the last 25.
• 56:31
  It probably helps to understand our adversaries and understand the flaws in our own responses, our own cognitive biases, the fictions that we tell ourselves about other people's motivations.
• 56:42
  So excuse me while I give a hopefully entertaining little primer on Saudi Arabia and bin Laden.
• 56:52
  So Saudi Arabia is a funny country.
• 56:55
  Not so much ha-ha funny, although they did have the Riyadh Comedy Festival, so they got that going for them.
• 57:00
  But they basically have this deal in Saudi Arabia between the royal family, the House of Saud, and the religious crazies that they will allow each of those groups to govern each of their respective spheres and they won't get in each other's way.
• 57:18
  This came about in 1744,
• 57:21
  Don't worry, I did have to look that date up.
• 57:23
  I'm not as much, I'm not that encyclopedic.
• 57:26
  1744, Muhammad ibn Saud allied with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, hence Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia.
• 57:36
  Mr. Saud and Mr. Wahhab team up.
• 57:40
  Wahhab is a puritanical Islamic reformer.
• 57:43
  And they make a theocratic compact, essentially.
• 57:46
  They create the ideological foundation of the Saudi state.
• 57:50
  And they say Wahhabism, which is this strand of Islam, is going to be the state religion.
• 57:58
  and the Saud family will be the political rulers.
• 58:01
  We will handle politics.
• 58:03
  You handle faith.
• 58:05
  We don't step on each other's toes.
• 58:07
  That's going to be the deal, and that deal from 1744 essentially exists to this day.
• 58:12
  Now, Saudi Arabia didn't exist in its current form back then.
• 58:15
  What happens is 1902...
• 58:20
  Abdulaziz al Saud, a descendant of the original Mr. Saud, he reconquers and rebuilds the Saudi state.
• 58:30
  He takes Riyadh, an important city.
• 58:35
  He takes almost the entire Arabian Peninsula.
• 58:39
  He takes Mecca and Medina from the Hashemites.
• 58:43
  He takes the oil-rich eastern regions from Turkey and Iran, then obviously the Ottomans and the Persians as they were then known.
• 58:52
  And he takes the rest of it from various tribal and regional territories and he cobbles it all together into Saudi Arabia.
• 59:00
  It doesn't yet become an official state, but it is his...
• 59:03
  domain.
• 59:04
  And he still maintains this deal with the religious nut jobs.
• 59:08
  The 1920s and 1930s, he suppresses the fundamentalist warriors militarily because they threaten his authority.
• 59:17
  The Wahhabis are like, well, maybe we should dabble in politics as well as just religion.
• 59:22
  And he
• 59:23
  takes them on, fights them, I mean literally, not just metaphorically, literally fights them, and he thereby reinstates and reaffirms this pattern, that Wahhabism is the official ideology, but the House of Saud, which is the royal family, holds a political monopoly.
• 59:41
  And modern Saudi Arabia is formally proclaimed as a kingdom in 1932.
• 59:46
  So fast forward to the 1970s and 1980s, it's the oil era.
• 59:51
  Petro dollars are coming out the wazoo and it enables the royal family, the House of Saud, to placate the religious side of the equation by pouring a huge amount of money into funding mosques and madrasses and Wahhabi missionary activity, not just in Saudi Arabia, but all over the world.
• 1:00:13
  I mean, you can go to, you know, you can go to mosques in Indonesia on the other side of the world from Saudi Arabia and you'll find Wahhabi, you know, Saudi funded Wahhabi texts.
• 1:00:24
  When I was, this is quite recent stuff, actually, you know, when I was in my teens and I was backpacking around.
• 1:00:30
  Indonesia, it was quite rare to see any conservative dress, conservative Muslim dress.
• 1:00:37
  Women seemed relatively liberated in Indonesia.
• 1:00:40
  Now it's much more common to see overt indications of piety, of religious piety.
• 1:00:48
  That has many reasons, of course, but one of it is that a lot of money has flowed from the past 20 years into Indonesia.
• 1:00:55
  Wahhabi education, thanks to the Saudi royal family wanting to do a favour to the Wahhabi religious leaders.
• 1:01:05
  Indeed, just while I'm thinking about travel, it is amazing when you break out of our bubble and you go travelling in other parts of the world, because after 9-11, I was in India
• 1:01:15
  And just backpacking around with some friends, again, as a college kid.
• 1:01:20
  And we went into a little shop.
• 1:01:21
  And in this store, the shopkeeper had a picture of bin Laden looking very beneficent and kind of glowing with like an angelic messianic demeanor on one side of his store.
• 1:01:35
  And on the other side of his store, he had a photo of George W. Bush looking rather buffoonish with the Twin Towers behind him exploding in flames.
• 1:01:47
  And he looked at me look at them and smiled and grinned somewhat apologetically or embarrassingly but defiantly.
• 1:02:00
  And I went over to the picture of bin Laden and I wagged my finger at it and I said, bad man, bad man.
• 1:02:06
  And the shopkeeper scowled at me.
• 1:02:09
  And then I went over to the picture of George W. Bush and I wagged my finger at it and said, bad man, bad man.
• 1:02:16
  And the shopkeeper burst into laughter and smiled and came over and was very nice and offered us tea.
• 1:02:24
  Wow.
• 1:02:26
  I guess even back then I was trying to do my both sides thing of trying to win people over and not let them fall into one camp or another.
• 1:02:36
  You do what you got to do.
• 1:02:38
  So anyway, back to Saudi Arabia.
• 1:02:40
  1979 happens.
• 1:02:42
  There's a crisis.
• 1:02:43
  Fundamentalist extremists seize the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
• 1:02:47
  And the House of Saud, the royal family, decides it needs to prove its Islamic credentials by imposing more religious conservatism domestically.
• 1:02:57
  And that is the sort of turning point at which Saudi Arabia becomes a truly religiously fundamentalist country.
• 1:03:03
  And it's not because the political class believe that.
• 1:03:06
  It's not because the royal family believe that.
• 1:03:07
  It's because the royal family are trying to placate fundamentalist extremists and keep that balance in place.
• 1:03:15
  So Iraq then invades Kuwait in 1990.
• 1:03:21
  And as I mentioned earlier, the Saudis are afraid of Saddam Hussein.
• 1:03:26
  And they ask the United States to send troops.
• 1:03:30
  Now, those troops have never left.
• 1:03:32
  And this is a major, major sticking point for the Wahhabis and for especially the dissenting fundamentalist sections of Saudi religious thought, such as young Osama bin Laden.
• 1:03:50
  To say that they hate us for our freedoms or that they're purely motivated by religious zealotry is to overlook the main things that they talk about when they're talking about why they hate us.
• 1:03:58
  And having U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia is a biggie.
• 1:04:01
  It doesn't mean we shouldn't, by the way, but it's just worth understanding the price that one pays.
• 1:04:06
  So who is Osama bin Laden?
• 1:04:06
  Osama bin Laden.
• 1:04:09
  He's born in 1957.
• 1:04:12
  He's born in Saudi Arabia.
• 1:04:13
  His parents are not Saudis.
• 1:04:15
  His dad is almost 50 by the time he has Osama bin Laden.
• 1:04:19
  He only lives until Osama is about 10 and the two men barely know each other.
• 1:04:25
  So Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's dad, super interesting story.
• 1:04:29
  He's born as a poor, uneducated kid in Yemen around 1908.
• 1:04:34
  I don't know exactly the date, but thereabouts.
• 1:04:38
  And as a kid, and Yemen is on the same, you know, the Arabian Peninsula is the bottom of the Arabian Peninsula.
• 1:04:43
  So it's sort of the, if you think back to what I was just saying about Saudi Arabia sort of coming into existence in the, between 1902 and 1932, you know, I'm sure there were no like, you know, border check
• 1:04:57
  or whatever between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
• 1:04:59
  It's all just Arabia.
• 1:05:01
  And so he's born in what is now Yemen.
• 1:05:03
  And he and his brother, when they're kids, they wander up the coast into what becomes Saudi Arabia.
• 1:05:08
  And Muhammad, this is Osama bin Laden's dad, becomes a bricklayer.
• 1:05:14
  As I said, poor, uneducated, enormously full of savvy and extremely shrewd, gets good as a bricklayer and starts a construction company.
• 1:05:23
  And the construction company is good enough to...
• 1:05:25
  that Abdulaziz Al Saud, who we mentioned earlier, who was the guy who resurrected and reconquered the Saudi Arabia of 1744 and brought it into existence in the early 1900s, this is about the same time he sees this kid, this Muhammad, I mean, he's not a kid anymore, he's in his early 20s by this stage, bin Laden's dad.
• 1:05:45
  So Al Saud, the king, for want of a better word, sees this kid and is like, well, you're fantastic, let's work with your construction company.
• 1:05:55
  And Mohammed bin Laden is savvy enough and shrewd enough and plays the political game well enough that he's able to really play to this old king's desires.
• 1:06:08
  I mean, he starts to go to any public event where the king is and make intelligent remarks and flatter the king.
• 1:06:15
  He decides to build a ramp.
• 1:06:20
  at the palace in Jeddah so that the aging king can move easily between the floors in his car.
• 1:06:31
  And by the 1940s, Mohammed bin Laden is a multimillionaire, and he's the official builder of the royal family in Saudi Arabia.
• 1:06:42
  They basically give him carte blanche to do any projects that the royals want to do.
• 1:06:46
  He builds the palace for the future king,
• 1:06:50
  and he has exclusive rights to build all of the mosques and the other religious building construction in Saudi Arabia and several other countries.
• 1:06:58
  His family, he now, in other words, not his parents, but the family that he spawns, becomes the richest family in Saudi Arabia apart from the royals, the number one richest non-royal family in the entire kingdom.
• 1:07:12
  He leads a fairly simple and devout life.
• 1:07:14
  Mohammed bin Laden.
• 1:07:16
  He is a strict father.
• 1:07:18
  He demands that his children observe proper religious and moral code.
• 1:07:25
  The only extravagance that he allows himself is that he would fly by private helicopter to pray at Mecca and Medina and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem in the same day.
• 1:07:38
  That's his little treat to himself.
• 1:07:40
  That's like when you get the pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream in front of Netflix and you just eat the whole thing in one go.
• 1:07:46
  He's not going to do that.
• 1:07:47
  He's too devout, but he will take the chopper for a prayer ride to hit all three big mosques in a single day.
• 1:07:58
  Now, another part of a little wrinkle of his devoutness is that he ends up with 22 wives.
• 1:08:07
  Not at the same time.
• 1:08:09
  Not at the same time.
• 1:08:10
  What are you implying?
• 1:08:11
  He's a lovely guy.
• 1:08:12
  He doesn't have 22 wives.
• 1:08:14
  He gets married 22 times.
• 1:08:17
  The way he does it is that he has three wives who remain mostly the same and
• 1:08:22
  And then the fourth spot just keeps rotating because under Islam, or at least under his version of Islam, polygamy is permitted.
• 1:08:30
  You're allowed to have four wives.
• 1:08:32
  So he has his basic three that mostly unchanged.
• 1:08:35
  I like the mostly.
• 1:08:36
  I didn't interrogate what the mostly means too much.
• 1:08:39
  Mostly three.
• 1:08:40
  And then the other one is just on a flywheel, constantly coming and going.
• 1:08:46
  So he has a lot of kids.
• 1:08:50
  There's some uncertainty about how many kids Mohammed bin Laden has, but the best estimate is 52, 52 children.
• 1:09:01
  His 17th and the only child of his 22nd, sorry, of the wife, of the 10th wife, his 10th wife, is Osama.
• 1:09:14
  So Osama has 51 brothers and sisters, but he's the only child of his mother, who is a Syrian woman, who his dad has married.
• 1:09:17
  And because she's not very, she's not Wahhabi, she's not Saudi, she's, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she,
• 1:09:31
  preferred to wear like Chanel trousers than religious getup.
• 1:09:35
  So she's known as the slave wife, the slave wife.
• 1:09:39
  That's nice.
• 1:09:40
  And Osama and her are basically raised by her new – she goes off and gets remarried once the – you know, once Mohammed bin Laden has dumped her for another wife and
• 1:09:53
  She goes off and gets remarried to one of Mohammed bin Laden's employees, and it's that employee and her and their three children with whom Osama grows up.
• 1:10:03
  Osama sees his dad a few times and has apparently only one one-on-one meeting with him in his life, and then his dad dies in a plane crash when Osama's 10 years old.
• 1:10:16
  He was apparently, you want to guess where Mohammed bin Laden was going when Osama was 10 years old and he died in a plane crash?
• 1:10:25
  He was going, apparently, to get married to his 23rd wife.
• 1:10:31
  But sadly, on his way to the wedding, he died in a plane crash.
• 1:10:38
  Osama inherits a fortune, richest family in the kingdom, in a very rich kingdom, apart from the royal family.
• 1:10:48
  By most accounts, he inherits $50 to $60 million at the time.
• 1:10:52
  That's in 1960s dollars, which equates to about half a billion dollars today.
• 1:10:57
  I mean, imagine, think of how rich this company was.
• 1:11:00
  There's 20...
• 1:11:02
  How many kids?
• 1:11:02
  No, 52 kids, 22 wives.
• 1:11:04
  I'm getting my numbers confused.
• 1:11:06
  52 kids.
• 1:11:07
  And bin Laden ends up with $400 to $500 million.
• 1:11:12
  And the company still exists.
• 1:11:14
  Saudi bin Laden group.
• 1:11:17
  is now almost 100 years old, founded by Osama's dad.
• 1:11:22
  It owns more than 500 companies.
• 1:11:23
  It has offices in Beirut, in Cairo, in Jordan, in Dubai, all across Saudi Arabia.
• 1:11:29
  In Egypt, the heart of the Middle East, or at least the cultural heart of the Arab world,
• 1:11:37
  I know that it's not in the Middle East, it's in North Africa, don't write.
• 1:11:40
  In Egypt, Saudi Bin Laden Group is the biggest foreign-owned private equity group in Egypt to this day, with over 40,000 employees.
• 1:11:50
  So Osama's got his hundreds of millions of dollars in today's money.
• 1:11:57
  He goes to fancy universities.
• 1:11:59
  He does an English language course at Oxford University.
• 1:12:02
  If you're watching the video, take a look at this photo of Osama bin Laden.
• 1:12:06
  That's him on the right looking dashing as a teenager in Oxford.
• 1:12:13
  He studies economics and business administration.
• 1:12:15
  Some people say he did a civil engineering degree.
• 1:12:17
  Some people say he did a public administration degree.
• 1:12:20
  His main interest, though, is in Islam and in the Quran and in jihad and in charity work.
• 1:12:28
  An interesting wrinkle is that when special forces eventually raided his hideout in 2011, when Obama was president, and they killed him, they found a letter.
• 1:12:40
  that he wrote to the American people shortly after Obama started his first term in 2009.
• 1:12:48
  This is not the letter that briefly went viral a couple of years ago.
• 1:12:52
  We'll get to that in a second.
• 1:12:53
  This is a letter that was unknown until 2011 in his compound.
• 1:12:58
  And he's quite a fan of President Obama.
• 1:13:02
  He's really into climate action in 2009, is Osama.
• 1:13:10
  And by the way, isn't it incredible that Osama and Obama, I mean, I keep thinking I'm going to make the slip up and use the wrong one, but it is an amazing credit to the American people that shortly after Osama bin Laden destroyed their cities
• 1:13:30
  and the US went to war with Saddam Hussein, they elected a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be president.
• 1:13:43
  I think that's a great credit.
• 1:13:45
  I think it proves something about the American character.
• 1:13:48
  Anyway, so he writes this letter in 2009.
• 1:13:51
  And he calls on Americans to launch, quote, a great revolution for freedom to liberate President Obama from the corporate control of capital and corporate lobbyists so as to enable Obama to make, quote, and I quote Osama here, a rational decision to save humanity from the harmful gases of the world.
• 1:14:13
  that threaten its destiny.
• 1:14:15
  The world should put its efforts, writes Osama bin Laden from his compound in Pakistan, the world should put its efforts into attempting to reduce the release of gases.
• 1:14:28
  This is a struggle between two of the largest cultures on earth and it is in the shadow of catastrophic climate conditions, writes bin Laden.
• 1:14:37
  So you get the sense, like he's a caring guy, okay?
• 1:14:44
  I know this is not the day to be saying that, but he's interested in social activism, shall we say.
• 1:14:51
  He had actually wanted one of his aides, this is bin Laden, to launch a media campaign for the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks that included a call for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
• 1:15:05
  Can you imagine what that would have done for the popularity of climate action?
• 1:15:10
  I think he has to, if Osama bin Laden has any flaws, ladies and gents, and many would say he has none, if he has any flaws, one of them would be he doesn't understand the optics of him prosecuting a particular political message.
• 1:15:31
  So maybe cutting greenhouse gases is a good idea.
• 1:15:34
  Maybe he's not the perfect messenger.
• 1:15:36
  Just saying.
• 1:15:38
  So anyway, back to bin Laden when he's a young kid.
• 1:15:44
  He inherits his hundreds of millions of dollars.
• 1:15:48
  And so that's 1967, I think his dad dies.
• 1:15:52
  1979, after Bin Laden's been to, the younger Bin Laden that is, he's been to university.
• 1:15:56
  He's kicking around.
• 1:15:57
  He's really, really super interested in Islam and super interested in social activism and doing big things and helping the world.
• 1:16:04
  The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan.
• 1:16:07
  Now, Afghanistan is not a place that bin Laden is interested in in particular, but he is very much interested in the idea of repelling a secular, communist, humanist, non-religious imperial force from a place where some decent hardworking Muslims were just trying to go about their thing.
• 1:16:27
  And he's not alone in this because America is also very interested in using Afghanistan as a way to bring down the evil empire.
• 1:16:35
  That is the Soviet Union.
• 1:16:37
  And so they start funneling money to the Mujahideen, the Muslim radicals, essentially the holy warriors in Afghanistan.
• 1:16:48
  And these are not largely local Afghans.
• 1:16:51
  These are people who are flooding in from all over the Muslim world.
• 1:16:53
  And Osama bin Laden sees a terrific opportunity here.
• 1:16:56
  He becomes pivotal in this struggle against the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union starts hemorrhaging money and troops, and it becomes, you know, it's the Soviet Union's Vietnam, essentially.
• 1:17:11
  It makes the Ukraine campaign, you know, from a Russian perspective, look like a cakewalk.
• 1:17:16
  This is a brutal and gruelling ongoing war that drags on and on and on and on throughout the entire 1980s.
• 1:17:25
  Um, and the CIA keeps pumping weapons into Afghanistan to, you know, so all of a sudden the Soviets thought they were going to, you know, be able to beat these guys.
• 1:17:34
  And they've got these, all this American, you know, they're shooting Soviet helicopters out of the sky with shoulder guided missiles that the Soviets never thought that they would be able to get, um, um,
• 1:17:46
  There's a slightly weird movie about this called Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
• 1:17:53
  Tom Hanks playing Senator Charlie Wilson, I think it was a senator, who made this his campaign.
• 1:17:59
  He wanted to fund the rebels in Afghanistan, the holy warriors to repel the Soviet Union, and he successfully managed to do so.
• 1:18:09
  Yeah.
• 1:18:11
  So 1988, bin Laden and a few of his other top guys who've basically succeeded in driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, and they're on a high.
• 1:18:22
  They're like, there's nothing the holy warriors can't do if we've been able to beat – we've just beat a superpower.
• 1:18:29
  I think we're sitting pretty.
• 1:18:32
  They gather in Pakistan, and they have a meeting.
• 1:18:35
  And they decide to become the founders of a pan-Islamist militant organization, which will unite the Muslim world under a supranational Islamic empire.
• 1:18:51
  They want all the Muslim countries to get absorbed into a caliphate, meaning a single giant Muslim mega country, an empire.
• 1:19:04
  And they call this group Al-Qaeda.
• 1:19:08
  And they are Sunni Islamist jihadists who see themselves as the vanguard of a global Islamist revolution.
• 1:19:19
  So that's 1988.
• 1:19:21
  Shortly thereafter, as I mentioned, Iraq invades Kuwait.
• 1:19:26
  Now, when Iraq invades Kuwait, Bin Laden goes to the Saudis.
• 1:19:31
  And he says, I know you're vulnerable.
• 1:19:33
  I know that you don't like Saddam Hussein and you're afraid of him.
• 1:19:38
  Well, guess what?
• 1:19:40
  We just defeated the Soviet Union.
• 1:19:43
  We can defeat Iraq if it tries anything silly.
• 1:19:47
  Let us come back to Saudi Arabia.
• 1:19:49
  We will be your mujahideen.
• 1:19:51
  We will be holy warriors in your land.
• 1:19:53
  And Saddam Hussein's not gonna fuck with us.
• 1:19:57
  And the Saudis, remember, these are his dad's buddies, right?
• 1:20:03
  His dad was incredibly tight with the Saudi royal family.
• 1:20:08
  The Saudi royal family made his dad, what is now in today's dollars, a billionaire.
• 1:20:13
  And this son goes off, goes abroad, does this sort of puritanical messianic charity work, essentially military charity work as Bin Laden sees it, that is of beating the shit out of the Soviet Union and driving them out of Afghanistan.
• 1:20:31
  And then he thinks magnanimously comes back to his dad's former buddies and says, let me protect you.
• 1:20:38
  And what do they say?
• 1:20:39
  Fuck off.
• 1:20:41
  We're getting the Americans in.
• 1:20:43
  The Americans into Saudi Arabia, the holiest place in all of Islam, home to Mecca, home to Medina.
• 1:20:54
  Bin Laden cannot believe it.
• 1:20:57
  His dad's friends, the Saudi royal family, who are in an alliance with Wahhabi extremists who share the same strain of the same religion, the same basic cosmic worldview as bin Laden does, they are rebuffing him, rejecting his offer of security with his army, and they are inviting infidel, Jew-supporting, imperialist...
• 1:21:27
  Americans into Saudi Arabia for protection.
• 1:21:33
  Bin Laden is furious, would be a mild way of putting it.
• 1:21:37
  He decides then and there that his beef is not only with the Soviets and, of course, the United States, but now with Saudi Arabia itself.
• 1:21:50
  And the fact that U.S. troops don't leave Saudi Arabia
• 1:21:54
  Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War, after Desert Storm, that they stay there and become a permanent presence maintaining security in the holiest region for Islam,
• 1:22:05
  While the Jew state, he's very obsessed with Israel as well.
• 1:22:09
  And bear in mind, this is a long time before Gaza.
• 1:22:12
  It's a long time before Netanyahu.
• 1:22:14
  But you read his manifestos and it's a lot about how terrible it is that Jews are in the Middle East.
• 1:22:22
  So the idea of infidel armies being on holy land really gets his goat.
• 1:22:29
  And Israel.
• 1:22:30
  This is where the logic of terrorism sort of comes in.
• 1:22:33
  He cannot see a difference between a huge country imposing itself on people who do not want it there
• 1:22:47
  defiling a holy religion, and being quite cavalier about collateral damage in conflicts all over the place, and on the other hand, the intentional targeting of civilians.
• 1:23:02
  He just doesn't think there is a moral distinction there.
• 1:23:06
  And to be perfectly honest, it is tricky, right?
• 1:23:13
  I mean...
• 1:23:15
  There's a reason why bin Laden's manifesto went viral a few years ago.
• 1:23:20
  I don't know if you caught this, but in 2023, here's a piece from the Washington Post, November 16th, 2023, why Osama bin Laden's letter to America went viral 21 years later.
• 1:23:32
  It writes, TikTok is no stranger to quirky trends from beauty tips about calamine lotion to obsessions with the Roman Empire.
• 1:23:40
  But this week, much darker content is trending.
• 1:23:44
  A letter from the Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was published more than 20 years ago, well before his death.
• 1:23:50
  The long letter, published just over a year after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, includes bin Laden's grievances against Western involvement in Muslim countries.
• 1:24:02
  quote from a TikToker.
• 1:24:05
  This is a video that got 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours.
• 1:24:10
  So I just read a letter to America and I will never look at life the same.
• 1:24:14
  I will never look at this country the same, the TikToker said.
• 1:24:18
  Another person said they were, quote, trying to go back to life as normal after realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9-11, and terrorism was a lie.
• 1:24:29
  Another popular TikToker wrote that the experience of reading the Osama bin Laden text in college changed my entire perspective on the American government.
• 1:24:39
  Anyway, because this went viral on TikTok and the hashtag, I think it was a summer letter or something, was trending, the Guardian newspaper withdrew the letter from online.
• 1:24:52
  They pulled it.
• 1:24:53
  It had been online for decades.
• 1:24:54
  You know, this article, nobody was reading this article.
• 1:24:56
  It was just like embedded in an article in the Guardian.
• 1:24:59
  And suddenly it was getting a bazillion different hits that had been there since 2002 and in 2023,
• 1:25:04
  The Guardian yanked it because it was being shared, this letter, among Islamist extremists in Britain.
• 1:25:12
  And the government was warning that further al-Qaeda attacks in the UK are inevitable.
• 1:25:18
  And so the Guardian didn't announce why, but they suddenly just pulled the letter.
• 1:25:23
  And obviously, a lot of social media users found that suspicious.
• 1:25:28
  They thought it was censorship.
• 1:25:30
  And this sort of comes down to the core conundrum of free speech in situations like this, whereas if you're going to remove something, you have to explain why.
• 1:25:41
  You can't just remove it for no apparent reason, with no justification.
• 1:25:45
  And secondly, and more importantly, free speech ought to mean that the kids on TikTok, whose eyes are being opened by Osama bin Laden's view of the world,
• 1:25:58
  should not find it eye-opening.
• 1:26:01
  They should have been taught about it.
• 1:26:04
  They don't have to read the letter.
• 1:26:05
  You don't even have to attribute it to Bin Laden.
• 1:26:07
  But the crazy thing is, the letter itself is not a batshit crazy defense of terrorism.
• 1:26:16
  The letter itself is a clear articulation of a set of demands and requests that are being made of the American people by Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
• 1:26:27
  And,
• 1:26:29
  You don't have to agree with any of it, but the idea that you would be unaware of it in 2023, that you would continue to be clueless about the actual complexion of the grievances that caused 9-11 is irresponsible.
• 1:26:49
  It's irresponsible on all of our part that we're not...
• 1:26:54
  just clearer headed and better informed about what people who hate us think.
• 1:27:02
  It's like not to bring everything back to wokeness and cancel culture and the coddling of the American mind, but in order to understand your opponents, you do need to understand their arguments.
• 1:27:14
  And in order to understand your own arguments and your own position in the world, you need to understand the best critiques.
• 1:27:20
  It's not good enough to just say they hate us for our freedoms.
• 1:27:24
  They're just religious zealots, and then carry on with your day because if they don't think that they hate you for your freedoms...
• 1:27:30
  They may think they're religious zealots, but if they don't think that they can be so easily dismissed, they won't be.
• 1:27:38
  And the same applies to our understanding of the far right, and the same applies to our understanding of the democratic socialists of America, and the same applies to our understanding of the Iranians, and the same applies to our understanding of Putin, and the same applies to our understanding of the Israelis, and the same applies to our understanding of the Palestinians, and on and on and on.
• 1:27:53
  China, everything.
• 1:27:56
  We are remarkably incurious.
• 1:27:59
  because it feels more comfortable inside our bubbles to maintain the delusion that everybody else is mistaken and we care about things that only sane people would care about.
• 1:28:10
  And you'd have to be batshit crazy not to care about the things that we care about or to regard us as hypocrites for claiming to care about them.
• 1:28:20
  So let's go to the letter, shall we?
• 1:28:25
  Is it a little off color to read Osama bin Laden's manifesto on the 25th anniversary of 9-11?
• 1:28:36
  I mean, I hope it is understood that this is done in a spirit of generosity, understanding, comedy, sensitivity, and not as a pointless provocation.
• 1:28:50
  You know, it's not too soon, 25 years on.
• 1:28:56
  I think we're strong enough that we can seek to understand what happened a quarter of a century ago.
• 1:29:04
  This was published on the 24th of November, 2002.
• 1:29:08
  So a little over a year after the attack.
• 1:29:12
  I'm not going to read all of it.
• 1:29:13
  It's long, but I'll give you the shape of it.
• 1:29:15
  In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.
• 1:29:19
  He goes on to say that there are two questions that he hears Americans asking a lot.
• 1:29:26
  American media as you would be question one why are we fighting and opposing you this is in his voice right why is Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda fighting and opposing the Americans question two what are we calling you to do and what do we want from you he says as for the first question why are we fighting and opposing you one because you attacked us and continue to attack us
• 1:29:54
  A, 1A, this is all under the attack category.
• 1:29:57
  You attacked us in Palestine.
• 1:29:59
  And then he has a subcategory.
• 1:30:00
  He's very diligent.
• 1:30:01
  I mean, he writes this like an essay.
• 1:30:03
  So question one, part A, you attacked us in Palestine.
• 1:30:08
  Point one about Palestine, he writes, the British handed over Palestine with your help and support to the Jews.
• 1:30:14
  The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes.
• 1:30:17
  Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay the price and pay for it heavily.
• 1:30:22
  Okay.
• 1:30:23
  I'm leaving out little bits here, but I'm not leaving out anything that's salient.
• 1:30:28
  Point two on Palestine.
• 1:30:31
  He basically makes the argument that the Jews have no right to be in that neck of the woods because Muslims already believe in Moses as a prophet.
• 1:30:41
  So he says, if the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, meaning the Jews...
• 1:30:47
  then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
• 1:30:50
  When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islam, the religion of all the prophets, peace be upon them.
• 1:31:02
  Interesting that he notes there that Muslims were the colonizers of Palestine.
• 1:31:09
  He doesn't gloss over that in a way that many modern-day progressive anti-Zionists would, where the only colonizers in that region are the Israelis and the Zionists.
• 1:31:24
  And, of course, as Osama bin Laden knew, as anyone who knows the history of the region knows, it was not always Muslim region.
• 1:31:35
  It was Ottoman for a long time.
• 1:31:38
  Anyway, we don't need to rehash all that.
• 1:31:40
  But it's just interesting that he doesn't make any – doesn't mean words about it when the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans.
• 1:31:50
  So, yes, so they did their colonialism and he thinks it should have stayed that way.
• 1:31:54
  Point three, under Palestine, the blood pouring out of Palestine must be avenged.
• 1:32:00
  Point B, about how the United States has attacked them and continues to attack them, you attacked us in Somalia.
• 1:32:08
  You supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya.
• 1:32:12
  I'm not sure how they did that, but there you go.
• 1:32:15
  The Indian oppression against us in Kashmir and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
• 1:32:21
  Point C of why we attack al-Qaeda and continue to.
• 1:32:26
  Under your supervision, consent, and orders, the governments of our countries, which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis.
• 1:32:35
  Sub point one, these governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic shahiyah, using violence and lies to do so.
• 1:32:42
  Two, these governments give us a taste of humiliation and place us in a large prison of fear and subdue.
• 1:32:49
  Point three, these governments steal our ummah's wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.
• 1:32:54
  Point four, these governments have surrendered to the Jews and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
• 1:33:03
  Point five, the removal of these governments is an obligation upon us and a necessary step to free the ummah, to make the sharia the supreme law and to regain Palestine.
• 1:33:14
  And our fight against these governments is not separate from our fight against you.
• 1:33:19
  So that's important.
• 1:33:20
  His manifesto, his letter to the American people, a year after 9-11, it doesn't start with your freedoms suck.
• 1:33:29
  It starts with why are we fighting and opposing you?
• 1:33:32
  Because you attacked us.
• 1:33:33
  How did you attack us?
• 1:33:35
  You took Palestine for the Jews.
• 1:33:37
  You supported a whole bunch of other things like Somalia and Chechnya and Kashmir and Lebanon.
• 1:33:43
  And importantly here, you prop up puppet regimes in our neck of the woods, in Arabia.
• 1:33:51
  And he's talking specifically, obviously, about the Saudi government.
• 1:33:55
  And you prevent us from having Sharia law in our own lands.
• 1:33:59
  D, you steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats.
• 1:34:03
  E, your forces occupy our countries.
• 1:34:05
  You spread your military bases throughout them to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
• 1:34:12
  F, you have starved the Muslims of Iraq where children die every day.
• 1:34:16
  It's a wonder that more than one and a half million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions and you didn't show concern.
• 1:34:22
  Yet when 3,000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.
• 1:34:29
  G, you've supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital.
• 1:34:33
  The Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
• 1:34:37
  The Israelis weren't planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and in the intervening quarter of a century have not destroyed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, but it's a common talking point among anti-Zionists and, well, not Western anti-Zionists, Arabian anti-Zionists.
• 1:34:52
  The Iraq thing is interesting.
• 1:34:53
  He actually name checks the sanctions on Iraq, which were controversial at the time under the Clinton administration.
• 1:35:00
  I mean, Madeleine Albright, who was the Secretary of State for the United States in the Clinton administration,
• 1:35:06
  had a disastrous comment that she never lived down, where she was asked about the million children, Iraqi children, who were estimated to have died of starvation as a result of sanctions on Iraq.
• 1:35:21
  And she said something to the effect of, it's a price we're willing to pay, which...
• 1:35:29
  You know, out of context, or maybe even in context, sounds callous.
• 1:35:35
  It's a price we're willing to pay.
• 1:35:36
  Well, you're not paying it, lady.
• 1:35:38
  Nonetheless, sanctions are one step short of war, and war would have killed children as well.
• 1:35:43
  So when you're trying to deal with a completely unmanageable psychopathic tyrant like Saddam Hussein, I suppose there are prices that somebody has to pay, and such is life.
• 1:35:56
  Point two, this is point two on why bin Laden writes that he thinks that the West is the one that has started this conflict and attacked him first.
• 1:36:07
  The oppressed have a right to return the aggression.
• 1:36:10
  Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, then we'll leave her to live in security and peace?
• 1:36:17
  No.
• 1:36:18
  Point three, you may then dispute that all of the above does not justify aggression against civilians for crimes they did not commit and offences in which they did not partake.
• 1:36:29
  So now we're getting to the real nub of things, right, which is his worldview as he's this isolated, exiled military leader without a country trying to do something truly audacious, which is bring back a fundamentalist Islamic super state.
• 1:36:52
  And the only way he can see of doing that is by having civilians in his crosshairs.
• 1:37:00
  So he directly addresses the argument about civilian casualties and collateral damage.
• 1:37:04
  You may then dispute that all of this doesn't justify aggression against civilians.
• 1:37:08
  His first point, A.
• 1:37:11
  This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom.
• 1:37:16
  Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will.
• 1:37:22
  a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies.
• 1:37:26
  Thus, the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the policies of their government.
• 1:37:33
  B, the American people are the ones who pay the taxes, which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq.
• 1:37:52
  See.
• 1:37:54
  Also, the American army is part of the American people.
• 1:37:57
  It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
• 1:38:01
  I wish he was going so well, wasn't he?
• 1:38:04
  He was going so well, and then he can't resist slipping the Jews in.
• 1:38:08
  It just doesn't sound...
• 1:38:09
  I mean, to me, I mean, I'm a Jew, but to me, he somewhat undermines what is a conceivably, if you squint really hard and sort of think about it as like a moral philosophy student and not as a human being...
• 1:38:23
  It can be perceived as being a logical argument about metaethics, right?
• 1:38:29
  Like you say you're a free country.
• 1:38:32
  You say that your people get to choose who rules them.
• 1:38:35
  And then you say that we shouldn't, that those people are not complicit in the decisions of that freely elected government, that those people who provide their taxes to do all the things that I object to are not fair game in this war.
• 1:38:51
  You know, it's not ideal.
• 1:38:54
  It's not a kind of Kantian logic that I would want everyone to apply morally across the board.
• 1:39:00
  But you can kind of see where he's coming from until he gets to the bloody Jews.
• 1:39:05
  But hey, in many circles, that would probably be making a slam dunk argument.
• 1:39:10
  The fact that he's saying Americans are helping the Jews fight against Muslims.
• 1:39:16
  And then his last point is, he has a few other points that are a little bit arcane.
• 1:39:21
  Allah, the almighty legislated the permission to take revenge.
• 1:39:24
  So he ends this section by saying...
• 1:39:27
  We are morally and religiously permitted to do this.
• 1:39:31
  Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns.
• 1:39:36
  Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy.
• 1:39:41
  And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
• 1:39:47
  Question two.
• 1:39:48
  That was the first half of his letter.
• 1:39:52
  Question two, as for the second question that we want to answer, what are we calling you to and what do we want from you?
• 1:40:01
  One, the first thing we're calling you to is Islam.
• 1:40:04
  A.
• 1:40:08
  The religion of the unification of God and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:40:11
  He goes on about Islam this, Islam that, and of the discarding of all of the opinions which contradict with the religion he sent down to his prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
• 1:40:19
  It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights and defending the oppressed and the persecuted, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:40:27
  B, it is the religion whose book, the Quran, will remain preserved and unchanged.
• 1:40:31
  The Quran is the miracle until the day of judgment.
• 1:40:34
  And then he goes on to shit a bit on other religions.
• 1:40:36
  He says their books are going to burn in fires and the Quran will still be perfect.
• 1:40:41
  Two, this is the list of things that he is calling on Americans to do, right?
• 1:40:47
  So number one is...
• 1:40:48
  convert to Islam.
• 1:40:49
  Number two is the second thing we call you to is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality, and debauchery that has spread among you.
• 1:40:59
  A, we call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity, to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and trading with interest.
• 1:41:13
  Okay.
• 1:41:14
  meaning like charging interest on loans, usury, which is forbidden under Islam.
• 1:41:21
  B, it is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind.
• 1:41:28
  B, one, you are the nation who, rather than ruling by the sharia of Allah in its constitution and laws, choose to invent your own laws.
• 1:41:39
  He goes on about how silly it is to try to make up your own laws when you've already got perfect laws handed down from the creator of the universe.
• 1:41:45
  Two, you are the nation that permits usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions.
• 1:41:50
  So he goes on, he says that you build your economy and your investments on the basis of charging interest.
• 1:41:55
  As a result of this, he writes, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they've taken control of your media and now control all aspects of your life, making you their servants.
• 1:42:10
  Okay.
• 1:42:11
  I mean, it's not that different.
• 1:42:12
  Like, I do hear this.
• 1:42:14
  Like, I hear it.
• 1:42:15
  It's not that crazy.
• 1:42:16
  I can see why the TikTokers were going for it.
• 1:42:18
  You know, Hasan Piker, Tucker Carlson.
• 1:42:21
  It's not, you know, Candace Owens.
• 1:42:23
  I'm not saying that they would ever do violence.
• 1:42:25
  I'm just saying worldview-wise, Jews controlling the economy, controlling the media.
• 1:42:32
  There's a lot of the same gripes is what I'm saying.
• 1:42:35
  Three, Bin Laden goes on to write, third reason why America is the worst civilization in the history of mankind.
• 1:42:41
  You are the nation that permits the production, trading, and usage of intoxicants.
• 1:42:45
  You also permit drugs and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.
• 1:42:53
  He's got a point.
• 1:42:54
  Four, you are the nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom.
• 1:43:01
  You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honor nor your laws object.
• 1:43:12
  I think incest is, I don't think incest is, isn't incest more widespread in the Muslim world than in America?
• 1:43:22
  Don't cancel me for that.
• 1:43:23
  Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval Office?
• 1:43:28
  Bin Laden's writing this.
• 1:43:29
  He's actually writing this.
• 1:43:31
  After that, you did not even bring him to account.
• 1:43:34
  Other than that, he, quote, made a mistake, unquote, after which everything else passed with no punishment.
• 1:43:39
  Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
• 1:43:46
  I mean, yes.
• 1:43:48
  Talk about pot calling the kettle black.
• 1:43:50
  9-11, bro, is worse than the blowjob in the office.
• 1:43:54
  I literally said so at the beginning of the podcast.
• 1:43:57
  Were you not listening, Osama?
• 1:43:58
  Yes.
• 1:43:59
  Five, you are a nation that permits gambling in all its forms.
• 1:44:02
  The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
• 1:44:07
  This is a thing that Osama bin Laden became well-versed in because he was no stranger to making money from...
• 1:44:15
  extortion rackets from gambling on investments.
• 1:44:18
  There were all kinds of extraordinary deals that went down on September 10th.
• 1:44:23
  Airline stocks were shorted by mysterious buyers who knew about it.
• 1:44:28
  He was good at running criminal enterprise.
• 1:44:31
  Even drugs, the opium, there was a lot going on that
• 1:44:37
  Bin Laden had his fingers in, so a little bit of hypocrisy here again, but I'm sure that he justified it on the basis of the fact that there was a greater good to be achieved when his Islamic caliphate came into existence.
• 1:44:50
  Six, you are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them.
• 1:44:58
  You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins.
• 1:45:05
  You then rant that you support the liberation of women.
• 1:45:09
  Look, America might be hypocritical about its treatment of women.
• 1:45:15
  I don't think that a fundamentalist Wahhabi Sunni Muslim who wants Sharia law can really...
• 1:45:26
  It's not his strongest.
• 1:45:28
  Let's just say it's not his strongest argument to say that the exploitation of women is worse in the West.
• 1:45:36
  Seven, you're a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly.
• 1:45:41
  Giant corporations and establishments are established on this under the name of art, entertainment, tourism, and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
• 1:45:52
  Funnily enough, perhaps he was not aware that prostitution is not legal in most American states, unlike much of Europe and Australia.
• 1:45:59
  Yeah.
• 1:46:01
  Eight, and because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past.
• 1:46:08
  Go ahead and boast to the nations of man that you brought them AIDS as a satanic American invention, he writes.
• 1:46:16
  He goes on and on.
• 1:46:16
  You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history.
• 1:46:21
  He's back on about greenhouse gases here.
• 1:46:22
  Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto Agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
• 1:46:26
  Eight, and because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past.
• 1:46:30
  If you are younger than a certain age, you may not know what he's referring to with the Kyoto Agreement.
• 1:46:35
  Man, he's getting in the weeds here, isn't he?
• 1:46:36
  He's talking about Monica Lewinsky.
• 1:46:38
  He's talking about the Kyoto Agreement.
• 1:46:43
  The Kyoto Accord was an agreement to curb greenhouse gases that were signed in the 90s, I think.
• 1:46:49
  And so, yes, America didn't ratify it.
• 1:46:55
  Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people who hold sway in their political parties and fund their election campaigns with their gifts.
• 1:47:02
  Behind them stand the Jews who control your policies, media, and economy.
• 1:47:09
  That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history.
• 1:47:17
  You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.
• 1:47:24
  How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
• 1:47:32
  So there's a lot of interesting...
• 1:47:33
  I think this is actually interesting because he's not saying that he doesn't believe...
• 1:47:39
  I mean, a few of those things he's saying he doesn't believe in freedom because he thinks that it's a misapplication of freedom to say that purely libertine expressions of personal deviance constitute freedom.
• 1:47:51
  His conception of freedom is different.
• 1:47:53
  But even if you granted a Western conception of freedom, his main gripe so far is one of hypocrisy.
• 1:48:01
  that, oh, you say that you're crazy about freedom, well, okay, but what about the freedom for the Japanese people who didn't wanna get nuked?
• 1:48:10
  He's also factually incorrect about a lot of these things.
• 1:48:12
  I mean, he claims in passing that Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war.
• 1:48:17
  There's no evidence of that.
• 1:48:18
  There may have been much more humane ways of bringing the war to an end than dropping the nuclear weapons, but no serious historian believes that Japan was ready to negotiate.
• 1:48:28
  Similarly, American responsibility for Chechnya.
• 1:48:31
  Don't know what that is.
• 1:48:34
  Lastly, let us not forget, this is still the sub list of why America is the worst civilization in history.
• 1:48:41
  Let us not forget one of your major characteristics, and here he gets to the nub of it, your hypocrisy in manners and principles.
• 1:48:49
  All manners, principles, and values have two scales, one for you and one for the others.
• 1:48:59
  He goes on to the next list.
• 1:49:01
  I won't read much more, but he closes this out essentially with his continuing list about things that he's calling on Americans to do after having listed why he thinks they're the worst civilization.
• 1:49:17
  A, the freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for the white race only.
• 1:49:25
  As for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous destructive policies and governments, which you call the American Friends.
• 1:49:34
  Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies.
• 1:49:37
  When the Islamic Party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them and to attack them with tanks and guns to imprison them and torture them.
• 1:49:49
  A new lesson from the American Book of Democracy, he writes.
• 1:49:55
  Again, very Tucker Carlson adjacent.
• 1:49:59
  And again, I'm not making the analogy in order to imply that Tucker is evil in the way that Osama bin Laden is, or is going to tempt people into mass murder or terrorism.
• 1:50:11
  It's simply to say...
• 1:50:12
  There is an anti-colonial, anti-Western worldview.
• 1:50:17
  In fact, I don't have to single out Tucker Carlson.
• 1:50:19
  I could say that left-wing anti-colonial theorists have been banging on about this for a long time.
• 1:50:26
  That is important to understand if we want to understand what they actually hate us for rather than just saying, hate us for our freedom.
• 1:50:35
  He talks about the Islamic party in Algeria, but this was written before the Arab Spring, in which exactly the same thing happened where the Egyptians held an election and voted for the wrong people, the Muslim Brotherhood, and so we allowed the military dictator Sisi to take over.
• 1:50:53
  And this has happened all throughout, especially Latin America, with the CIA toppling Democratic elected governments, Allende in Chile.
• 1:51:04
  And even in Indonesia, another Muslim country, the Sahato regime, a terrible, cruel, brutal dictatorship, had enthusiastic support from Australia and the United States because they weren't Kami's.
• 1:51:17
  B, your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace only applies to those countries which you don't permit to possess such weapons.
• 1:51:26
  As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they're allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security.
• 1:51:32
  Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
• 1:51:40
  So, you know, this is literally an argument that I've heard many times since the start of Trump's Iran campaign.
• 1:51:47
  Why are you going after Iran for trying to get nuclear weapons if you don't care about Israel's nuclear weapons?
• 1:51:52
  To which the same response is, Israel's had nuclear weapons for quite a long time and hasn't used them and shows no intention of using them.
• 1:52:00
  They're purely defensive.
• 1:52:01
  It's quite uncertain what the most deranged and fanatical religious theocracy might do if push came to shove with nuclear weapons.
• 1:52:13
  That doesn't mean that I think that war with Iran is justified on that basis alone, because there are all kinds of other costs that you would have to take into account.
• 1:52:21
  It means that it's not hypocritical to say that some countries get to have them and other countries don't.
• 1:52:28
  C. You, meaning America, are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of international law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone who does the same.
• 1:52:37
  goes on a bit more about Israel.
• 1:52:40
  D, he goes on about war criminals.
• 1:52:41
  He says that, you know, as for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for, you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity, which is true.
• 1:52:51
  America is not a signatory to the International Court of Justice.
• 1:52:54
  D,
• 1:52:55
  However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world.
• 1:52:59
  Those you've killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain ashamed that you will never be able to escape.
• 1:53:05
  It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed.
• 1:53:12
  Bombs were dropped on mosques, causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside.
• 1:53:18
  You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Kunduz.
• 1:53:22
  bombing them in Jangi Fort and killing more than a thousand of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst.
• 1:53:27
  These sound like events that he presumably saw because they're so specific and they were not major events in the context of the overall war.
• 1:53:38
  Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents.
• 1:53:42
  Your planes remain in the Afghan skies looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
• 1:53:48
  I mean...
• 1:53:49
  Fair enough, but fair cracker the whip, Osama.
• 1:53:52
  They weren't there before you did 9-11.
• 1:53:56
  They didn't go over there for a holiday.
• 1:53:58
  The planes aren't there for no reason.
• 1:54:01
  Come on, bro.
• 1:54:03
  You brought the fight.
• 1:54:04
  At least own it.
• 1:54:06
  E, you have claimed to be the vanguards of human rights and your Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any human rights.
• 1:54:14
  However, all these things vanished when the mujahideen hit you and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse.
• 1:54:22
  In America, you captured thousands
• 1:54:23
  Thousands of Muslims and Arabs took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names.
• 1:54:29
  You issued newer, harsher laws.
• 1:54:32
  What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces, you hypocrites, what is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?
• 1:54:45
  Three.
• 1:54:47
  This is the third thing he caused them to do.
• 1:54:49
  That was all just one and two.
• 1:54:51
  One was about why America is the worst civilization in the history of the world.
• 1:54:54
  And then two was about how... God, it's complicated.
• 1:55:00
  I'm just going out.
• 1:55:00
  I have to literally follow.
• 1:55:02
  Two was about stopping the oppression, lies, immorality, and debauchery that has spread amongst them.
• 1:55:09
  Long story short...
• 1:55:12
  The claim that existed prior to 9-11 and a little bit after 9-11 that I would say was most subscribed to in the non-American world was...
• 1:55:27
  was that America is a flawed but basically good country in terms of its foreign policy and its force in the world.
• 1:55:36
  Domestically, of course, fabulous, great constitution, excellent Bill of Rights.
• 1:55:41
  We all love that.
• 1:55:43
  In terms of its impact on other countries, certainly during the fight against communism, there was a sense that enormous corners were cut and lives were ruined in all kinds of coups and meddling, but that on the whole, it was better than not having a force that powerful, and it was probably naive to imagine that there wouldn't be a force equally powerful to replace America if America weren't playing that role.
• 1:56:11
  So...
• 1:56:13
  The charge of hypocrisy didn't really land prior to 9-11.
• 1:56:17
  Then the Iraq war came and Guantanamo came and extraordinary rendition.
• 1:56:25
  And what's amazing to me about this Osama bin Laden letter from a year after 9-11 is he's really granular.
• 1:56:34
  He's talking about specifics here, the Kyoto Protocol about climate change, the Algerian coup, rebuffing democracy as it was freely chosen by Muslims, and name-checking Guantanamo as a historical embarrassment, which it is and was.
• 1:56:54
  Talking about the Patriot Act in terms of issuing newer and harsher laws after 9-11.
• 1:57:00
  Now, it's all a bit bloody rich coming from this guy who instantiated the event that gave rise to all of these things.
• 1:57:05
  But nonetheless, you know, you have to take responsibility for the things that you do, even if an asshole cajole you into doing them.
• 1:57:14
  So the third thing he says is what we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves, and I doubt you will do so, to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.
• 1:57:37
  And he goes on and on about, advise you to stop supporting Israel, to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens, and to cease supporting the Manila government against the Muslims in the southern Philippines.
• 1:57:49
  We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands.
• 1:57:51
  We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
• 1:57:58
  Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support for the corrupt leaders in our countries.
• 1:58:01
  Do not interfere in our politics and our method of education.
• 1:58:04
  Leave us alone or else expect us in New York and Washington.
• 1:58:08
  We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits rather than the policies of subdual theft and occupation.
• 1:58:18
  and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews, because this will end in more disasters for you.
• 1:58:23
  If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for a fight with the Islamic nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil empires like yourself.
• 1:58:32
  This is our message.
• 1:58:32
  The Americans, wrote Bin Laden, do they now know why we fight them, and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious.
• 1:58:45
  So thanks for bearing with me.
• 1:58:48
  I think it's interesting.
• 1:58:50
  It is not about we hate you for your freedom.
• 1:58:52
  It's about, I guess, the logic of terrorism for Al-Qaeda comes from a logic of autonomy, self-reliance, self-defense, and Western hypocrisy.
• 1:59:05
  And in that light...
• 1:59:08
  I do think we have to wrestle when we're considering military engagements with the way that collateral damage looks when you're on the losing side of it.
• 1:59:22
  The trolley problem of, you know, would you flick the switch on the train that's coming down the tracks towards five people if you knew that you could divert it and it would only kill one person?
• 1:59:33
  And most people say yes, but then you say, well, what if you could just kill one person in order to, you know, stop, have the train stop and like literally like slit their throat?
• 1:59:43
  Well, no, most people wouldn't do that.
• 1:59:46
  In original versions of the trolley problem, you're pushing a fat person off a bridge in front of the trolley, but that's never made any sense to me.
• 1:59:53
  How can a fat body stop a train?
• 1:59:55
  It's a terrible, terrible thought experiment.
• 1:59:57
  It doesn't make any sense.
• 1:59:58
  Anyway, first-year philosophy.
• 2:00:02
  If you're, you know, it's very difficult to sort of play in these intellectual spaces about ethics without sounding like you're justifying attacks on civilians.
• 2:00:20
  But just park the question of whether or not this is a good or bad thing to say or a prudent or imprudent thing for me to put out into the world.
• 2:00:29
  The collective guilt argument,
• 2:00:32
  that Bin Laden is making, that Al Qaeda believes in, cannot be dismissed just by saying over and over again, we should never target civilians.
• 2:00:46
  Because our arguments have to make sense, not just in order for us to be intellectually and logically coherent for ourselves, but because we're in an information ecosystem where communication matters and there are a lot of people around the world who we want to win over.
• 2:01:03
  There are a lot of people reading that letter.
• 2:01:05
  There are a lot of people listening to jihadist outlets.
• 2:01:09
  There are a lot of people listening to populist, far-right, Islamophobic outlets.
• 2:01:13
  We have to be engaged in the game of persuasion.
• 2:01:16
  We can't just say, well, this is what we believe because we believe it, and as long as we say it over and over again, people will go away with their pesky arguments against what we believe.
• 2:01:28
  No, you've got to engage.
• 2:01:29
  You've got to go on the field.
• 2:01:31
  Get in the ring, motherfucker.
• 2:01:33
  So how innocent, the logic of war, right?
• 2:01:43
  When George W. Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney decide to go into Iraq, they know that there's a significant chance that a million people will die, which they did by most estimates.
• 2:01:58
  Suppose it's half that, half a million people.
• 2:02:01
  The vast majority of them have nothing to do with Saddam Hussein or the worst excesses of the Ba'ath party.
• 2:02:07
  They know that by flicking that switch, making that decision, they're planning it all out.
• 2:02:12
  It got to the point where they were saying, well, we just have to go in.
• 2:02:16
  Internally, they were saying this.
• 2:02:18
  It came out later.
• 2:02:19
  We have to go in because it's getting too hot.
• 2:02:21
  They were going back to the United Nations and Cheney was saying to Bush, we can't go back to the United Nations.
• 2:02:26
  Do you know how hot it is for the soldiers when they're wearing all of their gear in summer in Iraq?
• 2:02:33
  They're not going to be in peak performance.
• 2:02:35
  We have to go before March, April.
• 2:02:40
  We have to get them in.
• 2:02:42
  If we're going to do it, you just have to do it.
• 2:02:43
  We can't keep pussyfooting around until it's legal.
• 2:02:49
  So they launch an illegal war.
• 2:02:51
  Now, a lot of Americans don't like it when I call it an illegal war because their recollection is that Bush went to Congress and he got authorization for it.
• 2:02:57
  And that's better than what Donald Trump has been doing with Iran, where he didn't even go to Congress.
• 2:03:01
  Yes.
• 2:03:02
  George W. Bush went to Congress and he got an authorization for the use of military force in Iraq.
• 2:03:07
  That makes it legal in the American context.
• 2:03:09
  It does not make it legal under international law.
• 2:03:12
  You need the UN to sign off on military action.
• 2:03:16
  And that's something that George H.W.
• 2:03:19
  Bush got for Desert Storm.
• 2:03:23
  I think there was a wrinkle there, actually.
• 2:03:24
  I think they managed to get an abstention.
• 2:03:26
  I'll check that anyway.
• 2:03:26
  But anyway, the point is there had not been such an egregious and flagrant bucking of the international system for a very long time.
• 2:03:37
  And the Bush administration felt that it could because it had the trauma of 9-11.
• 2:03:41
  And there was a general sense of like, we've been letting these dickheads...
• 2:03:46
  in the Middle East, get away with too much for too long.
• 2:03:49
  They think they can push us around.
• 2:03:51
  Hussein is the number one.
• 2:03:55
  Saddam Hussein, the number one guy who's been screwing around with us, thinking he can play little games with us for so long that it doesn't even matter if he had anything to do with 9-11.
• 2:04:05
  It's time to take these guys on, to take the fight to them, to not sit back and let them walk all over us anymore.
• 2:04:11
  It doesn't matter if Saddam Hussein has nothing in common with Osama bin Laden.
• 2:04:15
  We've got to put our foot down in that region.
• 2:04:18
  So they make a decision to, and I think that was the rationale.
• 2:04:22
  I don't think they were under any illusions that there was a serious threat of weapons of mass destruction.
• 2:04:28
  because there was no evidence of them.
• 2:04:29
  And they were persistently concocting rumors of evidence and innuendo, like the whole yellow cake in Niger affair, which came from Cheney's office.
• 2:04:41
  I mean, Scooter Libby actually was criminally sanctioned in court for it.
• 2:04:48
  Anyway, that's all by the by.
• 2:04:49
  The point is, you flick a switch and you know that many hundreds of thousands of innocent people are going to die.
• 2:04:56
  And then in the prosecution of that war, you're very particular about making sure that you don't target civilians.
• 2:05:02
  Okay, so each individual bomb strike is targeted at some kind of military asset.
• 2:05:10
  How is that morally different?
• 2:05:13
  Like, what is the complicity of the civilians who are dying?
• 2:05:16
  I mean, when you are bombing tribal villages in Afghanistan,
• 2:05:26
  I guess there's an assumption that there's going to be collateral damage and you try to minimize it, but it is necessary in order to achieve the greater aims of the war.
• 2:05:36
  And perhaps you sort of think, well, how innocent are villagers in tribal towns in the mountains of Afghanistan anyway, if they're providing food and comfort to al-Qaeda training camps?
• 2:05:51
  But then Bin Laden just turns around and says, how innocent are the financial bankers who worked in the World Trade Towers and how innocent are the military planners who worked in the Pentagon and how innocent are the lawmakers who worked in the Capitol building, which was apparently the target of the fourth plane that didn't make it to Washington.
• 2:06:11
  How innocent are the American voters?
• 2:06:15
  You know, once you start, the point is not to say that targeting civilians is ever morally justified.
• 2:06:19
  I don't think it is.
• 2:06:21
  The point is to say that the onus is on us to be as maximally responsible about civilian casualties during our military campaigns as we can, and not to wave them away as if there's some fundamental, platonic, pure moral distinction between people who regrettably lose their lives during our military campaigns and people who intentionally are killed during terrorist campaigns.
• 2:06:47
  Because to people who are on the sidelines, listening to the Bin Laden argument and listening to the Pentagon's argument,
• 2:06:55
  you want to have an argument that can respond to them and say, listen, it's not just that we regret the loss of life.
• 2:07:02
  It's that we actively, proactively, as hard as we can, try to avoid the loss of life.
• 2:07:09
  And we try to only engage in military combat when it's absolutely essential and when it's likely to generate greater life, greater flourishing in the long term.
• 2:07:21
  The fact that we can't do that plausibly, the fact that we have to just come back to a fairly naive, almost childlike binary between targeting civilians and not targeting civilians, reveals the limitations of our own moral case.
• 2:07:38
  And it's not going to fly with people on the sidelines.
• 2:07:41
  There is a great book about...
• 2:07:43
  This whole period in bin Laden's life and in the evolution of al-Qaeda in the lead up to 9-11 called The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 by the journalist Lawrence Wright.
• 2:07:58
  Totally gripping read about the plot and also the ideological genesis of it.
• 2:08:05
  So all of this stuff, right?
• 2:08:08
  This is 9-11 when it happens, lands in an America that is completely oblivious to everything that I've been talking about.
• 2:08:20
  Completely oblivious.
• 2:08:23
  And they had an excuse for being completely oblivious.
• 2:08:27
  They'd been watching Seinfeld and wondering whether or not the president was going to get impeached for getting a blowjob.
• 2:08:34
  They were busy.
• 2:08:37
  After 9-11, there was no excuse for being oblivious.
• 2:08:46
  I remember getting coffee with a friend of mine who said,
• 2:08:52
  The thing about September 11th is we were in New York.
• 2:08:55
  This is an American, a very successful guy.
• 2:08:59
  He was like, there's all this debate about like, you know, American imperialism, the Middle East and the war in Iraq.
• 2:09:05
  The bottom line is the guys who flew those planes into buildings, they were just assholes.
• 2:09:11
  They were just assholes.
• 2:09:14
  And I thought, well, that's a conversation stopper, isn't it?
• 2:09:21
  I mean, of course they were assholes.
• 2:09:22
  I mean, they were psychopaths.
• 2:09:24
  They were suicidal psychopaths.
• 2:09:28
  But where does it get us to say that they're assholes who hate us for our freedom?
• 2:09:35
  The real tragedy of the fallout from all this was that 9-11 lured the United States into fulfilling several of bin Laden's prophecies, rampaging across the Middle East,
• 2:09:51
  But more importantly, discrediting its own moral standing, its own moral superiority.
• 2:10:00
  Its plausible claim to being a benefactor of the world.
• 2:10:06
  The idea that 9-11 was America's chickens coming home to roost, that America has just always been a hypocrite, doesn't really believe in anything.
• 2:10:16
  I didn't believe that after 9-11.
• 2:10:21
  But our reactions to 9-11 have brought into existence the forms of behavior that the haters of the West were claiming we exhibited prior to 9-11 but didn't, but now do.
• 2:10:40
  Moral hypocrisy, callousness, fecklessness.
• 2:10:46
  I wrote a piece after 9-11 about...
• 2:10:51
  I'll read a bit of it.
• 2:10:53
  Actually, I'll just read it.
• 2:10:56
  And it was in response to the people who I knew who were saying that, who were making the chickens coming home to roost argument.
• 2:11:03
  And I read this piece now with a certain sense of sympathy for how naive I was as a college student who loved America and in particular New York.
• 2:11:16
  I mean, I was obsessed in my teens with Letterman and Woody Allen and Saturday Night Live and knew that I wanted to live there and then subsequently did.
• 2:11:32
  I think this will be good, a close friend said to me over a green salad yesterday.
• 2:11:38
  I wrote this the week after, the week of 9-11.
• 2:11:43
  It's going to bring Americans into the real world and make them more appreciative of what they've got.
• 2:11:47
  End quote.
• 2:11:49
  Some other critics have been slightly more veiled.
• 2:11:52
  Quote, it's tragic and I don't support the attacks.
• 2:11:55
  They protest from their study rooms and lecture halls and collective action group meetings and editorials and barstools.
• 2:12:02
  But, and like when racists say, I'm not racist, but there's always a but.
• 2:12:09
  I can understand why it happened.
• 2:12:10
  American oppression brought this on itself.
• 2:12:16
  I write, Such a rationale may have sounded eminently reasonable to whoever was sitting in seat 14A, or seat 36G, or seat 9J, or to whoever was standing at the urinal in the tower, pondering what emails he'd have to send that morning, or to whoever was inside the lift, as it, along with the building, plummeted 100 floors.
• 2:12:39
  or to whoever's throat was slashed with a box cutter in the cockpit.
• 2:12:45
  Yet we will never be sure whether these people supported the laudable mission of bringing American oppression back on itself because they were torn into pieces before getting the opportunity to consider whether they wanted to be involved.
• 2:12:57
  America's history of safeguarding democracy, prosperity, and freedom is unparalleled.
• 2:13:04
  Its containment of communism in the West, its defeat of Nazism, and its commitment to the protection and spread of liberal democracy throughout Europe, Japan, and Australasia is a commitment to which we all owe our lives, no doubt about it.
• 2:13:19
  Its mistakes should be taken with a grain of salt.
• 2:13:24
  America is particularly and disproportionately reviled throughout much of the world precisely because its enormous power brings far-reaching influence, and far-reaching influence magnifies mistakes.
• 2:13:38
  A country capable of monumental goodness must also be capable of monumental blunders.
• 2:13:44
  We can't have it both ways.
• 2:13:46
  We cannot have a force powerful enough to do enormous good, a force which can demolish the Nazi empire at its height, help broker peace in Northern Ireland, defeat Stalinism and halt brutal genocide using billions of dollars worth of laser-guided missiles, and then expect it to be small and unassuming enough not to leave big, ugly footprints when it missteps, when it deposes South American dictators and too much blood gets spilled.
• 2:14:11
  when it extricates itself from Vietnam and shatters eastern Cambodia, or when its funds flow to the most abusive and reactionary elements in Israel.
• 2:14:21
  America isn't hated because it's peculiarly bad.
• 2:14:24
  America is hated because it's peculiarly visible.
• 2:14:29
  Other Western countries not saddled with the guardianship of such vast power get off more lightly.
• 2:14:34
  When Australia was complicit in the horror of East Timor for decade after bloody decade, or when it tolerated massive destruction of Papua New Guinea's Ok Tedi River system on the part of its proudest local company, or when it pushed for and gained criminally lenient concessions on greenhouse gas emissions, the world didn't hate Australia.
• 2:14:55
  The world didn't notice.
• 2:14:57
  Australia's reach is too small.
• 2:15:00
  Before we cast stones, we should ask ourselves whose footprints we would rather see stomping around the world than America's.
• 2:15:07
  History suggests that power voids tend to get filled.
• 2:15:10
  If America wasn't there, it's highly likely that someone else soon would be.
• 2:15:14
  Who would we prefer?
• 2:15:15
  China?
• 2:15:16
  Russia?
• 2:15:17
  Iraq?
• 2:15:19
  America can be hypocritical in its application of human rights and freedom throughout the world, but it's not as hypocritical as the critics who damn it for acting, yet condemn it for not getting
• 2:15:31
  We take our standards of living for granted and whinge about America's flashy, shallow excess.
• 2:15:37
  But if America hadn't been busting its butt powering the engine of global prosperity for the past hundred years, there is no way that smaller countries like Belgium or Scotland or Australia or France would enjoy anything like the prosperity that they do.
• 2:15:49
  Let's be blunt.
• 2:15:50
  To some extent, we owe the Yanks a living.
• 2:15:54
  We set up web-based activist movements and chain emails condemning American culture for spewing out McDonald's and Exxon, ignoring that America was the country which invented and generated the internet which makes our anti-American movements possible.
• 2:16:10
  As well as spewing out McDonald's and Exxon, America also spews out cutting-edge cancer treatments, manned space stations and life-saving vaccines snapped up by the activists most eager to denounce the country that produced them.
• 2:16:24
  We criticize the US for being a bully who goes around the world shoving his big nose into everyone else's business.
• 2:16:30
  But if there were no bastion of liberal democracy going around shoving his big nose into everyone else's business, then there would have been no big nose to shove into Europe when the National Socialists were goose-stepping down the Champs-Elysees.
• 2:16:42
  America is damned if it does, see Iraq, Afghanistan, and damned if it doesn't, see Rwanda, Darfur.
• 2:16:51
  In the words of Gordon Sinclair, that's a Canadian broadcaster who my readers knew, I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.
• 2:17:03
  Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?
• 2:17:10
  Anyway, that was just a, I mean, I was a university student and that was just me getting some thoughts on the page right after 9-11 for email, a little email list of friends and potential employers probably.
• 2:17:29
  What's interesting is that it already contains the rebuttal to what bin Laden was writing at the same time, which I had never read, but which was sufficiently in the ether that I knew that it was a thing.
• 2:17:42
  The charge of American hypocrisy.
• 2:17:45
  The charge of American malfeasance.
• 2:17:46
  That America drapes itself in the flag of freedom, but installs dictators in countries who'll be friendly to it
• 2:17:57
  that it steamrolls the rights of people all over the world whilst proclaiming that human rights mattered tremendously to it.
• 2:18:11
  Then what happened is that the Iraq War and Guantanamo really did discredit the moral spirit of liberal internationalism.
• 2:18:26
  And then I think the bailouts of the financial crisis really did raise questions about the legitimacy of the American political and economic system.
• 2:18:41
  Giving massive bailouts to banks without making regular people whole and condemning young people to a decade of underperforming growth was a choice.
• 2:18:54
  And it's difficult to respond to the people who are criticizing the elite control over America's political and economic institutions, perhaps with conniving Jews hiding behind that control.
• 2:19:11
  Whether those criticisms are coming from Bin Laden or Tucker Carlson or Hassan Piker or the Democratic Socialists of America or from Donald Trump.
• 2:19:21
  It's more difficult.
• 2:19:25
  when the institutions of American life behave in ways that they have over the past 25 years and when the American people support them.
• 2:19:35
  If Iraq was the first blow to the credibility of the United States in the past quarter century and the financial crisis bailouts were the second blow, then no prizes for guessing what the third and fourth blows are.
• 2:19:46
  They're both Donald Trump, one and two.
• 2:19:53
  And so now the question is, where do we go from here?
• 2:19:58
  What is salvageable?
• 2:20:00
  And also just as a brief aside, how much of history is contingent and how much is ordained?
• 2:20:12
  You know, that day came out of the blue.
• 2:20:15
  It was just a blindsiding, traumatizing event.
• 2:20:18
  But if we'd caught that...
• 2:20:23
  plot, if we'd thwarted it, would that have made it go away?
• 2:20:31
  Is there a world in which the problem of jihadism and its clash with modernity and Western civilization in the first quarter century of the 21st century does not come to pass?
• 2:20:44
  How many things have to go differently from Operation Desert Storm or before
• 2:20:52
  What different decisions do different people have to make?
• 2:20:54
  How many parallel universes are there in which things go catastrophically worse?
• 2:21:00
  How many parallel universes are there in which things go magnificently better?
• 2:21:08
  You know, if the Bush administration had listened to John O'Neill, the FBI counter-terrorism chief who quit two weeks before 9-11 because he wasn't being listened to and ended up dying in the World Trade Tower,
• 2:21:21
  if they'd thwarted that attack.
• 2:21:24
  By the way, I didn't mention this when I was going through the precursor to the attack, but an incredible stat that I found out when I was just researching this, which I hadn't known before, is that the CIA, they knew, so there was this meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which you might have heard about if you've seen any documentaries about the lead up to 9-11, in which that plan that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Youssef had taken to Osama bin Laden in 1996, which he'd signed off on to use aircraft as missiles.
• 2:21:54
  which Obama approved in 1998, that that plan was discussed and brought into effect, essentially, at a meeting in Malaysia.
• 2:22:03
  And KSM was there, and the CIA got wind of it in a wiretap in Yemen.
• 2:22:10
  that were spying in Yemen and they heard about this meeting.
• 2:22:12
  So they said to the Malaysian authorities, can you spy on this for us?
• 2:22:15
  Can you at least get photos of the people going in and out?
• 2:22:17
  So the Malaysian secret service, not secret service, the CIA, took photos of the people and they got these photos.
• 2:22:24
  Unfortunately, they didn't bug the room.
• 2:22:26
  So if they bugged the room, it's quite likely that 9-11 would never have been pulled off.
• 2:22:31
  So they didn't know what they were talking about there, but they knew they were up to no good.
• 2:22:34
  And they got these photos.
• 2:22:35
  And the US noticed that two of the people there who were actually two of the hijackers who were on American Airlines Flight 77, that's the one that hit the Pentagon,
• 2:22:46
  They were there at that meeting and they came into the United States and the CIA knew about the meeting.
• 2:22:53
  It knew that something big was going down and it knew that these two individuals had come into the United States.
• 2:22:58
  It did not tell the FBI until August of 2001.
• 2:23:07
  The spies did not tell the cops until weeks before the attack and they'd known for over a year.
• 2:23:18
  So suppose that those things, the intergovernmental missteps don't happen and the thing gets thwarted.
• 2:23:24
  So what happens next?
• 2:23:27
  Does it just happen in some other way?
• 2:23:29
  In some way that is potentially even worse?
• 2:23:33
  There's a parable that I often tell about the, you know what?
• 2:23:37
  Instead of telling it, I'll play it from Charlie Wilson's War.
• 2:23:41
  That movie that I mentioned earlier, Charlie Wilson's War, about Charlie Wilson, the American politician who got support for funding the religious warriors, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.
• 2:23:53
  Tom Hanks plays him.
• 2:23:55
  And it's at the end of that movie that they're celebrating.
• 2:23:57
  They've got a big party, people drinking and having a great time in the background.
• 2:24:03
  And Tom Hanks comes out on the balcony and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's the wiser and less frivolous of the two,
• 2:24:12
  talks to this guy and he's trying to tell him, this is not over.
• 2:24:19
  This is not done.
• 2:24:21
  We have to keep now that we've got, now the Soviets are out of there and we've been able to fund and arm all these people.
• 2:24:27
  We have to go back and we have to pay for schools.
• 2:24:29
  We have to pay for education.
• 2:24:30
  We have to rebuild Afghanistan.
• 2:24:31
  We can't leave it shattered and war-torn.
• 2:24:33
  And Tom Hanks' character is like, I mean, Jesus, come on, bro, we've just had a victory.
• 2:24:38
  Stop being such a downer.
• 2:24:40
  And Philip Seymour Hoffman tells a version of the parable that I've told several times on this show.
• 2:24:45
  I'll leave it to him to take it from here.
• 2:24:49
  Listen, not for nothing, but do you know the story about the Zen master and the little boy?
• 2:24:53
  Oh, is this something from Nitza, the Greek witch of Aqualipa, Pennsylvania?
• 2:24:58
  Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is.
• 2:25:02
  There's a little boy, and on his 14th birthday he gets a horse.
• 2:25:05
  And everybody in the village says, How wonderful, the boy got a horse.
• 2:25:08
  And the Zen master says, We'll see.
• 2:25:11
  Two years later, the boy falls off the horse, breaks his leg.
• 2:25:14
  And everybody in the village says, How terrible.
• 2:25:16
  And the Zen master says, We'll see.
• 2:25:18
  Then a war breaks out, and all the young men have to go off and fight, except the boy can't, because his leg's all messed up.
• 2:25:24
  And everybody in the village says, How wonderful.
• 2:25:25
  And the Zen master says, We'll see.
• 2:25:29
  So you get it.
• 2:25:31
  No, I'm not that, because I'm stupid.
• 2:25:33
  You're not stupid.
• 2:25:34
  You're just in Congress.
• 2:25:36
  Send them money.
• 2:25:37
  You can start with the roads, move on to the schools, factory.
• 2:25:39
  Now it's a party.
• 2:25:40
  Restock the sheepherds, give them jobs, give them hope.
• 2:25:43
  I'm trying.
• 2:25:44
  I'm fine for every dollar.
• 2:25:45
  Yeah, yeah.
• 2:25:47
  I took you from five million to a billion.
• 2:25:49
  I broke the ice on the sting in the Milan.
• 2:25:51
  I got a Democratic Congress in lockstep behind a Republican president.
• 2:25:54
  Well, that's not good enough, because I'm gonna hand you a code word classified NIE right now, and it's gonna tell you that the crazies have started rolling into Canada like it's a fucking bathtub drain.
• 2:26:04
  Jesus, Gus, you could depress a bride on your wedding day.
• 2:26:07
  Hey.
• 2:26:11
  Listen to what I'm telling you.
• 2:26:21
  So that's the Zen parable.
• 2:26:23
  I love it.
• 2:26:24
  What I didn't notice the first time I saw that film, but which I just heard listening to it then, is that when Philip Seymour Hoffman warns Tom Hanks' character about what might happen, did you notice that the sound engineer puts a plane flying overhead?
• 2:26:38
  A plane flies overhead just as he says that foreboding line.
• 2:26:44
  I'm guessing that's intentional.
• 2:26:50
  What you notice as you get older is how the scope of what is possible changes.
• 2:26:56
  To bring us back to the first point that I made about how unimaginable it was prior to 9-11.
• 2:27:03
  How difficult it is to get ourselves into the mindset of a universe in which a thing that we now regard as having, as being sort of embedded into the fabric of reality, of history.
• 2:27:13
  Into the mindset of a world in which it hadn't happened and couldn't happen and wouldn't happen.
• 2:27:21
  So what's up for negotiation shifts as you get older.
• 2:27:26
  More things have happened and you start to wonder about the contingency of them.
• 2:27:32
  And what I wonder at the moment is whether we're in a bit of a slow motion 9-11 with respect to liberalism and democracy.
• 2:27:45
  There are a lot of tectonic plates that are shifting in the world right now.
• 2:27:49
  A lot of forces from artificial intelligence to us being buffeted around by algorithms to the decline of communication and conversation across partisan divides, the rise of extreme versions of culturally reactionary young conservatives on the internet, the incels, the manosphere, the social justice warriors.
• 2:28:14
  And for me, the lesson of 9-11, as I ponder it and think about how we could do better over the next 25 years, is that it's very hard to see what you're taking for granted.
• 2:28:35
  It was very hard for that guy who lay down next to us
• 2:28:42
  and looked up at the World Trade Towers, all for us at the time, to see the amount of security that we took for granted.
• 2:28:56
  You go to work every day, you get used to what you get used to.
• 2:28:59
  You don't think about the hidden structures on which the illusion of normality depends.
• 2:29:06
  But all around us all the time,
• 2:29:09
  is like a network of invisible superstructures that other people have built that sustain and feed people
• 2:29:22
  an equilibrium that we don't have the brainpower to keep paying attention to.
• 2:29:26
  We would go mad if we kept questioning it.
• 2:29:28
  We just have to take for granted the things that we take for granted.
• 2:29:31
  We're Pavlovian in that way.
• 2:29:33
  You know, I shake my cat's box of treats and she comes running.
• 2:29:40
  She doesn't have the mental power or the time to expend any effort wondering whether or not I'm actually going to give her treats.
• 2:29:48
  She's learned the pattern and she responds.
• 2:29:49
  And that's what we do.
• 2:29:50
  We are mammals.
• 2:29:51
  We're primates.
• 2:29:52
  We learn patterns and we respond.
• 2:29:54
  And we take for granted things that we really shouldn't be taking for granted.
• 2:29:56
  We're not going to be taking for granted.
• 2:30:01
  I remember taking acid when I was late teens and just having this experience of understanding the cosmos in a way that I had not before.
• 2:30:09
  The scale of the cosmos, our place in the cosmos, how tiny I was on this rock that was flying around this flaming nuclear power plant called the sun on an outer spiral arm of a galaxy of which there are hundreds of billions in the universe.
• 2:30:23
  And as I had this insight, as we were coming down,
• 2:30:27
  I could feel the doors of perception closing.
• 2:30:30
  I could feel my capacity to retain that sense of wonder morphing from a truly felt, lived, experienced truth into an intellectual truth.
• 2:30:47
  And I thought to myself, this is an incredible substance because it gives me access to an insight that...
• 2:30:57
  which is actually in some respects truer to the nature of the world that I'm walking through, the universe that I'm occupying, than would be evolutionarily beneficial.
• 2:31:10
  It would do us no good as an early homo sapien on the savannah to constantly be thinking about our actual place in the cosmos, to be thinking such vast thoughts, to be contemplating the yellowness of yellow and the treeness of a tree and the mystery of...
• 2:31:29
  material that is spewed out of stars assembling itself into my brain, which is capable of reflecting back upon the biggest questions of the mystery of the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 2:31:40
  You just wouldn't procreate enough and you wouldn't hunt enough if you were thinking about that all the time.
• 2:31:44
  But our brain is capable of it because sometimes when you're on certain compounds or when you're in a meditative state, you can access those zones of perception.
• 2:31:56
  And this may be a long bow to draw, but I do feel we're sort of in the same precarious situation when it comes to taking things for granted.
• 2:32:04
  We just have to get used to the shit that's going on around us.
• 2:32:08
  We have to treat it as normal.
• 2:32:11
  And so when shit just works, we treat that as the normal state of affairs.
• 2:32:19
  When you live in a world in which airplanes don't fly into buildings, that's perfectly normal.
• 2:32:24
  then all of a sudden you're in a world in which they do.
• 2:32:27
  It's very, very abnormal.
• 2:32:29
  But gradually, that becomes part of history, and we now live in a normal world.
• 2:32:39
  What is the thing that's around the corner that would shatter that normal world and reveal how naive we were to take for granted things that we can't even see?
• 2:32:51
  My worry is that the new towers...
• 2:32:55
  that could come down are not just security towers.
• 2:33:00
  They are things like openness and pluralism, like stability and tolerance and universalism, egalitarianism, debate, nonviolence, a whole set of institutional norms, like free markets and free speech.
• 2:33:24
  an impartial justice system, blind justice, democratic consultation.
• 2:33:34
  Prior to 9-11, what we couldn't see, the things we took for granted, were the security apparatus.
• 2:33:46
  It was not useful for us to spend a lot of time questioning our safety.
• 2:33:52
  And since then, it sort of has been.
• 2:33:56
  There was a strategic failure on 9-11 by a political class in which they underestimated a physical attack from abroad.
• 2:34:07
  And so after that, we stopped taking that for granted.
• 2:34:11
  And we did what humans always do, which is we solved the last problem.
• 2:34:14
  And we put a lot of energy and money and time and resources...
• 2:34:21
  into making sure that that political class would no longer underestimate a physical threat from abroad by super-empowered individuals.
• 2:34:33
  What we're not good at doing as humans or as cats who are coming for our treats is interrogating what else exists.
• 2:34:45
  There is an apparatus around us which is just as important, if not more, than the security apparatus
• 2:34:51
  which is an apparatus of democratic checks and balances, and we can see that there is a failure.
• 2:35:00
  We can see that we are living through a slow motion failure point, a failure of communication by the institutional class, mostly, who are underestimating cultural threats that come not from outside, but from inside the house.
• 2:35:24
  Everyone complains about how terrible everything is at the moment, but that's a dangerous way of diverting attention from the things that we should be mindful of cherishing.
• 2:35:35
  All of our complaints about inequality and about house prices and about inflation and about this and about that and about kids on Instagram, whatever it might be, they're all legitimate.
• 2:35:44
  I'm not saying they're not legitimate concerns.
• 2:35:47
  People are allowed to be concerned.
• 2:35:48
  People are allowed to be pissed off that the rent is too damn high.
• 2:35:52
  But be pissed off in a context of appreciating all of those invisible things that in a heartbeat you could so miss.
• 2:36:05
  You could miss as much as we missed the sense of naivety that we felt on September 10th on September 12th.
• 2:36:16
  Shit just works is not a fact of the universe.
• 2:36:24
  Shit just works because we live amongst institutions that make shit work.
• 2:36:30
  You get to walk down the street without a fear of violent crime all the time.
• 2:36:34
  That is not a usual thing for human beings to enjoy.
• 2:36:38
  You get to eat food that is not contaminated by shit.
• 2:36:42
  Oh, but it's got microplastics in it.
• 2:36:43
  And do you know about the hormones that they put into the food?
• 2:36:46
  Go back and look at what they were eating three generations ago and tell me your food is bad.
• 2:36:50
  You have a spectacular variety
• 2:36:54
  of affordable cuisines, housing is a problem.
• 2:37:00
  We know how to fix it.
• 2:37:01
  We refuse to.
• 2:37:02
  We don't build enough.
• 2:37:07
  I don't know what the next 9-11 will be.
• 2:37:10
  I don't think it'll be a 9-11.
• 2:37:12
  Things are moving.
• 2:37:13
  Things don't always happen the same way.
• 2:37:14
  That's the problem about learning from history.
• 2:37:16
  You have to learn trends.
• 2:37:17
  You have to observe patterns rather than observing specifics because otherwise you're always fighting the last fight.
• 2:37:23
  It's not going to be planes coming out of the sky and landing in towers.
• 2:37:31
  But if the far right takes over Europe...
• 2:37:34
  or if a clash with China comes, or if a climate catastrophe hits, or if another plague strikes, or if artificial intelligence attacks critical infrastructure, or if the anti-capitalist left gains power and taxes innovation out of the economy completely.
• 2:37:54
  Or as I said, the far right takes power and penalizes people for no reason.
• 2:38:03
  if American debt hits a point at which it drives the world into a money crisis, if a jihadist nuke goes off somewhere, if half of white-collar workers lose their jobs because of AI within five years, then whatever it is, whatever those metaphorical aeroplanes are that slice towards us out of the clear blue sky, we do not want to say, we have no excuse now to say,
• 2:38:33
  huh, I've been coming and going every single day and I never thought to look up and appreciate that.
• 2:38:45
  Be gentle with yourself on this quarter century anniversary of America's darkest day.
• 2:38:51
  May we do a better job and may we be more unified, more universalist, more contemplative, more restrained and more appreciative in the next 25 years than we were in the last.