September 11 and the End of the World I Thought I Knew (9/11/26)

0:00Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes Dr. prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com slash blue urgent care kit.com slash blue. Discovered top rated stays loved by guests. rated highest by real guests throughout thin to produce. Verbo. Book of vacation rental loved by guests. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes Dr. prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses.

1:02So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com slash blue urgentcarekit.com slash blue. What's up everyone and welcome back to the program. Whenever we talk about 9-11, it's a deeply personal day for a lot of us. For those of us that were alive and witnessed it happening in real time, nothing was ever going to be the same. So in this episode, I want to talk a little bit about my experience on 9-11. I'll never forget how clear the sky was on September 11, 2001. I was 21 years old living in Las Vegas, working at the joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel, and convinced that the biggest thing on my horizon was the next concert. The day before the attacks, we had loaded 3-11 into the joint for a multi-day event, and I was fired up about being part of it. I love that world, the noise, the crews, the equipment, the control chaos of putting on a major show,

2:07and the feeling that anything could happen when those lights went down. I had worked a brutal 16-hour shift, getting everything ready, and by the time I finally got home, I was completely spent. When the first plane struck the World Trade Center, I was dead asleep. My mother woke me up and told me that a plane had crashed into one of the towers in New York. At first, my mind could not process what she was telling me, and I pictured some little sessna or some small aircraft accidentally slamming into the building. It sounded awful, certainly, but it still sounded like an accident. Within minutes, every assumption I had made about that morning and about the world I thought I understood was about to be destroyed. I got out of bed and walked downstairs into my parents' living room, still trying to wake up and understand what was happening on the television. Yo, I can still picture that room as clearly as I can picture almost anything from my life. I remember the television, I remember my parents, I remember the pillar I was leaning against as a live coverage rolled on from Lower Manhattan,

3:10and then the second plane came screaming into the other tower. In that instant, every bit of uncertainty disappeared. I looked at my mother and father and said the words that millions of Americans were suddenly realizing at almost exactly the same time. We're under attack. There was no need for an expert to explain it, no need for a government announcement, and no need to wait for someone behind the podium to give the event a name, we knew. The United States of America was being attacked in real time, right there on television, and nothing in my 21 years of life had prepared me for what that felt like. Almost immediately my thoughts turned to the people I loved. You see, I had family working on Wall Street and others who were down in the city that day, and suddenly New York was not some distant image flickering across a television screen who was personal. Nobody knew how large the attack was, whether more planes were coming, whether bombs had been planted somewhere, or whether other American cities were already being targeted.

4:10Every unanswered phone call carried a little bit more terror with it. Every breaking news banner seemed capable of announcing another catastrophe. The Pentagon was hit, another plane went down in Pennsylvania, and reports and rumors were moving faster than anyone could possibly sort through them. For those of us watching from thousands of miles away, there was a feeling of helplessness, and that's difficult to explain to anyone who didn't experience that morning in real time. Las Vegas suddenly didn't feel safely removed from New York or Washington. No were a felt safely removed from anything. The entire country seemed to be holding its breath, waiting to find out where the next blow would land. Before September 11th, I think that a lot of Americans, my age, carried around the sense of security that we never consciously recognized, because we had never been forced to question it. We had grown up watching the United States emerge from the Cold War as the dominant power on Earth. The Soviet Union was gone. Our military seemed untouchable, our economy dominated the world,

5:12and every enemy that stepped into the ring with us seemed to get flattened sooner or later. War was something that happened somewhere else. Terrorism was something we watched on television from Beirut, Jerusalem, Belfast, or some other place that seemed impossibly far removed from everyday American life. We knew intellectually that violence existed, but knowing something intellectually and watching nearly 3,000 people murdered on American soil, are two entirely different things. September 11th shattered the idea that geography, military power, or national wealth could somehow make us immune from people determined to kill us. Suddenly oceans did not seem particularly wide, borders did not seem particularly strong, and the world had felt so enormous on September 10th, suddenly felt considerably smaller on September 11th. For me personally, the attacks destroyed something even deeper than that sense of national invulnerability. They destroyed the illusion that history was something happening in books,

6:13while the rest of us simply went about our lives. History had just exploded into my parents' living room. I watched human beings jump from the World Trade Center because the alternative was burning alive, there was no intellectual abstraction capable of sanitizing that horror. I watched firefighters and police officers run towards buildings that everyone else was desperately trying to escape. I watched the towers collapse and understood that thousands of ordinary people had just gone to work that morning and would never come home. Fathers were gone, mothers were gone, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, friends, co-workers, cops, firefighters, office workers, restaurant employees, flight crews, and passengers were suddenly part of history because a group of fanatics decided that their ideology justified mass murder. Whatever innocence I had about the world disappeared with those buildings. I didn't know exactly where the road ahead would lead,

7:13but I knew with absolute certainty that I could never look at the world the same way again. Before that morning, I'd been studying Entertainment Law in college and imagining a completely different future for myself. I wanted to become a big-shot sports agent, make deals, represent athletes, and build a life somewhere around the intersection of sports, entertainment, money and law. It sounded exciting to a 21-year-old kid in Las Vegas. Then, September 11th happened, and suddenly those ambitions felt very far away from the questions consuming me. Who were these people who attacked us? What did they believe? Where did this movement come from? Why were young men willing to hijack civilian airplanes, murder thousands of strangers, and knowingly die in the process? Those questions grabbed me by the throat, and they didn't let go. Before long, I changed my major to political science with an emphasis on the Near East because I needed to understand the world that had just forced itself into mine.

8:13And that decision opened the door, and I have never really closed. The deeper I went into the history, politics, religion, colonialism, nationalism, warfare, and ideological movements of the Middle East, the more I realized how little of us understood, on September 10th. I began studying the long and complicated relationship between the Muslim world and the West. A history filled with trade, scholarship, coexistence, empire, conquest, warfare, colonialism, resistance, alliances, betrayals, and competing visions of political power. I also began studying the much narrower, but enormously consequential tradition of modern jihadist movements that had declared the United States and its allies' enemies. Elkadeh had not suddenly materialized out of the desert on September 11th. The ideology behind it had been developing, organizing, recruiting, fighting, and issuing warnings for years. There had already been attacks against American targets, including the 93 World Trade Center of Bombing,

9:14the Embassy Bombings in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. The warning lights had been blinking. Most Americans simply had not been looking at the dashboard. After September 11th, I couldn't look away. And the more I learned, the angrier I became, about how profoundly unprepared we had been to understand the threat growing in front of us. The men who attacked us were not comic book villains, and they were not mindless lunatics committing random acts of violence without purpose. They were ideological extremists, operating within a violent jihadist worldview that gave them a framework for identifying enemies, justifying mass murder, recruiting followers, and turning death itself into a weapon. Understanding that did not mean accepting their worldview, excusing it, or confusing it, with beliefs of every Muslim on Earth, and meant taking our enemies seriously enough to learn what they themselves were saying. Bin Laden had declared war on the United States years before September 11th, and Elkadeh's leadership had repeatedly described America as a principal enemy. They meant it.

10:18We had treated much of that rhetoric like distant noise from a distant world. September 11th was the moment that noise reached the front door. The consequences of that morning have followed my generation ever since. Afghanistan, Iraq, the intelligence agencies transformed, the military transformed, airport security transformed, American politics transformed. An entire generation of young men and women went overseas to fight wars, born from the aftermath of those attacks. Some came home wounded, some came home carrying injuries nobody could see, and some never came home at all. Arguments about those wars, the decisions made by our leaders, the mistakes, the lies, the victories, the failures, and the enormous human cost will continue long after all of us are gone. But none of those debates can erase what happened on that Tuesday morning. People went to work, boarded airplanes, sat down at desks, poured coffee, answered phones, and kissed their families goodbye, without knowing that hatred conceived thousands of miles away, was already moving towards them at hundreds of miles per hour.

11:2525 years later, I can still put myself back in that living room. I can still see the pillar, I can still hear my mother's voice telling me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I can still remember watching the second aircraft disappear into the tower and knowing before anyone had to tell me that America had entered a new era. The 21 year old who stood there that morning never got to go back to September 10th. His plans changed, his interests changed, his understanding of the world changed, and the comfortable assumptions he had carried through childhood disappeared almost instantly. Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes doctor prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com.

12:28slash blue urgent care kit.com slash blue. September 11th taught me that history does not ask permission before it arrives. It taught me that enemies do not become less dangerous simply because we'd rather not think about them. Most of all, it taught me that thousands of ordinary people can wake up beneath a perfectly blue American sky, believing they're about to live another ordinary day, only for the world to change before breakfast. And I think that's one of the parts that still hits me the hardest all these years later. How ordinary that morning began. There was no thunder clap in the sky, no warning siren echoing across the country, no sense that we were standing at the edge of historical abyss. It was just another Tuesday, till it wasn't. I'd gone to sleep thinking about 311 work, school, and all the other nonsense that occupied my 21 year old mind, and I woke up in a different America. By the end of that morning, thousands of families had been ripped apart, Laura Manhattan looked like a war zone, and the country had been introduced to an enemy most people barely understood.

13:31For me, that day became the dividing line between the person I had been and the person I was becoming. I wanted to know who had done this, why they had done it, what ideas drove them, who inspired them, who funded them, and what other dangers were hiding behind the comfortable assumptions we'd carried for so long. I never again wanted to be caught looking at an enemy, as some cartoon-like character on television, while he was studying us, planning against us, and waiting for the right moment to strike, and September 11th burned that complacency, Adam E for good. So every year when this day comes around, my mind, my mind does not first go to geopolitics, military campaigns, intelligence failures, or the endless arguments that came afterward. It goes back to that living room in Las Vegas, to my mother waking me up, to my father standing there, to that pillar against my back, and to the second airplane exploding into the South Tower while I watched it happen live. I think about the people who called home from doomed airplanes, and people trapped above the impact zones, the firefighters climbing stairwells, while everyone else was running down, and the families who spent hours desperately hoping that someone they loved would somehow walk through that door.

14:44I think about how many Americans left home that morning, after saying something completely ordinary, like see it a night. Never imagining those words would be among the final words their families ever heard from them, and that's why September 11th has never become just another anniversary to me. It's not just a chapter in a textbook, not a montage played once a year, and not some distant historical marker fitting into black and white. I was 21 years old when I watched my country lose its innocence, and part of mine went with it. 25 years later, I can still see that blue sky, still see that second plane, and still hear myself saying, we're under attack. And somewhere, in America that morning, thousands of people kissed someone they loved goodbye without knowing they were saying it for the last time, and that's why I remember this day. Because memories carry obligation, and for me that obligation is to remember the day as it actually felt, the confusion, the fear, the rage, the helplessness, the disbelief, and then the horrible realization that there would be no waking up from it.

15:49I remember the people who went up those stairs, whenever instinct in the human body must have been screaming at them to run the other way. I remember the people aboard Flight 93, who learned what was happening elsewhere, and decided that whatever came next, they weren't going to allow their airplane to become another weapon without a fight. I remember the empty chairs that remained at dinner tables, the bedrooms that stayed untouched, the weddings where a parent was missing, the children who grew up knowing their mothers or fathers, mostly through photographs and stories. Those are the consequences hidden behind the number, like 2,977, because numbers can't laugh, numbers, they don't hug you, they don't have favorite songs, and numbers don't have someone waiting at home for them. Those were human beings, those lives were deliberately stolen from them on a beautiful September morning. So when I think back to that 21 year old kid standing against that pillar in Vegas, watching the second plane hit and saying, we are under attack, there is one thing I wish I could tell him before the towers came down, and the world you knew disappeared forever.

16:54Remember every second of this, because someday people who are not there will know September 11th's history, but you will always know it as a morning thousands of Americans expected to come home and never did. And that for me is where September 11th will always end, not with the words that followed, not with politics, not with arguments, not with the intelligence reports, and not with the years of history that were written afterward. It ends in that living room, with me standing there at 21 years old, staring at a television, and realizing that the world I thought I knew had just been ripped away in front of me. There was a life before that moment, and there has been a life after it, but there is no bridge between the two. The young man who went to sleep after loading in a rock band, never really woke up again, someone else did. Someone who was more suspicious, more curious, more aware of what evil looks like when it stopped being theoretical and comes crashing through the front door.

17:54That day changed what I studied, what I cared about, what I paid attention to, and ultimately how I understood the world around me. 25 years later, I'm still carrying that morning with me, and I suspect I always will, because some days pass into memory, some days fade into history, and some days divide your life forever. And look, no anniversary can make what happened smaller, no speech can make it cleaner, no amount of time can turn it into something less than what it was. September 11th was murder on the scale most Americans had never imagined could reach us, and for those of us who watched it unfold in real time, there will always be a part of that morning that never ended. 25 years later, the smoke is gone, the skyline has changed, and the world has moved on. But 2000, but 2977 people never got that chance, and that is the part that should never ever be allowed to become history. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.

18:57Hi, this is Dave Roberts. Heading into summer without a medical emergency kit, that's a risk. Summer colds can linger, and getting sick on vacation can derail everything. That's why everyone needs a medical emergency kit. It includes Dr. prescribed medications to treat common and serious illnesses. So if you wake up sick, at home, or on the road, you already have what you need. It's like having an urgent care and pharmacy at home. Say $45 with code blue at urgentcarekit.com. Slashblue, urgentcarekit.com. Slashblue.