The Long Shadow: Bonus - Interview with Whit Missildine and Dan Taberski
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Today, as part of our series, The Long Shadow, honoring the 20th anniversary of September 11th, we bring you an interview between me and Dan Taberski. Dan is the host of the podcasts Missing Richard Simmons, Running from Cops, and most recently, The Line.

His new show is called 912, and the series is about what happened after 9-11, how 9-11 the day became 9-11 the idea, and how that idea has shaped the world, our culture, and ourselves for the past 20 years. While my series focuses on the deep personal histories, experiences of the day itself, and the long aftermath for people who have experienced the tragedy up

close. Dan's series takes a sweeping look at the cultural, social, political, and conspiratorial implications of 9-11 and what it means for us today. I really enjoyed my conversation with Dan, and it brought to light a number of insights and parallels. So here it is, my conversation with Dan Taberski.

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Hello? Hello?

Hey, Dan. Yes. Hey, how are you? I'm good, man. How are you? I'm great. I've just been listening to your show. What an amazing series you put together. Oh, good. I've been listening to yours, too. It's really compelling.

It's amazing. I feel like we've got such incredibly complimentary shows. Yeah, they're super different. Yeah, they're super different. But you've got such a broad sweeping story that you're telling and I'm diving so individually into these experiences and it's just kind of like the perfect compliment somehow to each other's work. Yeah, it's been really interesting to work on.

I wasn't sure exactly where to start, but one thing I thought might be interesting is to share our own experiences of 9-11 briefly and just kind of get where we were that day. I know that's like a big connecting point for everyone. So I was going to start with you and just ask you where you were.

I am a New Yorker, born and raised. And so I was here for 9/11. I was living on, well, to be honest, I was living on 59th Street and First Avenue, but I was staying at my boyfriend's place on 10th Street and Second Avenue.

It was just sort of a slow process of realizing what had happened. And then realizing pretty quickly that we had a friend who worked at Canterford's Gerald on the 104th floor. And so it immediately came about him and his wife, who was trying to figure out what had happened to him. So our place sort of became this sort of like touchstone place where people showed up. You know, some people were still unaccounted for. And so everybody just sort of like...

converged on this place, including my friend whose husband was in the tower and who we later found out died. And so it was, yeah, it was, you know, it wasn't death right away. It was missing for a while. You sort of do circles in your heads trying to figure out how they might be still alive. Maybe he hit himself in the head and like he can't remember. Yeah.

Or he must be at one of the hospitals. People were calling hospitals. There was actually the largest boat evacuation in history, I think, from the different rivers getting away from downtown Manhattan. And we were like, what if he's on one of those boats? And he lost his phone. And it's just sort of telling stories. Then we put up posters and the whole thing. And then finally we just sort of acknowledged that he was dead. Yeah, it was super intense. Where were you? Were you a New Yorker?

Yeah, I was in New York too. So I had moved to New York City that summer, basically like about three weeks before 9-11. I went to school at Sarah Lawrence, which is about like 45 minutes north of the city. So I knew New York City. I'd been there a lot. Decided to move there and... Were you from original? I literally...

From Pennsylvania originally. Where? A town called York, which is about an hour and a half east, sorry, west of Philly. Okay, cool. So I had just moved to New York City about three weeks beforehand. I was 23. I was just starting graduate school. And I went to the CUNY Graduate Center, which is right near the Empire State Building. And so if you know the Q train from Brooklyn, I was living in Brooklyn.

I took the train that morning on the Q train and it has this portion underground in Brooklyn and then it goes over the, you know, the bridge. And so it comes up out from underground over the river and then it goes back underground into Manhattan. And it was the most bizarre thing. I've on the subway. We come up, you know, and you can see the whole city and, you know, you're above ground for a little while. And the towers were just on fire. Yeah.

And everyone is glommed to the windows and is just looking at the towers and is like, what is going on here? And it was just the weirdest thing. And then we went underground again and everyone just sat there being like, what's happening? And it was just such a massive fire. And again, like- Wait a second, so nobody knew on the subway, it was just like you popped up and you're like, what the fuck?

Yeah, exactly. Wow.

So it was just weird. And then I went to school. I got off the subway, went to class, had 15 minutes of class while the towers are there on fire. And then all of a sudden someone comes in and is like, this is a terrorist attack. And then we realized we were...

You know, catty corner from the Empire State Building. And we're like, we got to get out of here because that could be the next target. And one of the women in my program, her husband worked at the towers and similar situation. She was, you know, beside herself and we were trying to console her, but we only knew her for a couple of weeks. It was just all strange. That's hard to try to get somebody that when they need they need something more than a two week friendship can give.

Exactly. And the professors were there for her, you know, but it was just like, what do you do? And then we were all trying to, you know, watch out for our own safety. So you're like, well, should we stick together? Do we split up? The subways were down for a while. So I was just wandering around Manhattan for a little bit, just kind of lost. And it was weird. It was a weird day. And I feel like what's interesting to me about it, I was interested in your, you know, your episode on memory a bit because...

Yeah.

Which came up right away. I mean, a lot of people have talked about that process of just sort of mediated memory and trying to figure out, like, what was my experience versus with an experience that is so immediately not just joined by media images but overtaken. I mean, even if you were right, even if you were a few blocks away, like, it was just overtaken by it.

by the way it's being presented. And so it's really hard to tell what is yours and what's not. Even the way that like, we talked to one person, an artist who's done a lot of work about, her name is Ruth Sergel. She's done a lot of work about memory and she's done some projects about this. And she was saying that even the words started to change. Like they didn't call it Ground Zero. The people who were there called it The Pile.

And but they on the news, they started calling it ground zero. And so gradually that is the sort of terminology that took over. But but it was almost put on the people who actually experienced it. That that's not what they called it. So it was just sort of a and they were sort of telling all these stories like the firemen. And but.

telling somebody's story, you can never get the full thing correct. And so they were sort of having experiences that other people were telling back to the world that weren't quite right. And so it just became this. And so what's the real story now? Is it what they said in the news about me or was it me? And it just became quite a confusing process. Yeah, it really did. It really did. And it's

It's strange reconstructing it, and I feel like there's a memory I have, actually, of being in Brooklyn. I got off the subway and was wandering around in a park nearby, and there was a little shard of paper that was, like, burned that was clearly from the towers, and it kind of landed, like, in this park. And I just remember thinking, like, this is probably, like, some sort of spreadsheet or some memo, right, that was passed around in an office, and now it's over here, and it was just this completely...

surreal thing, you know, to have this piece of paper like all the way in Brooklyn. And again, it's a memory that I'm not sure is exactly right. But I don't know, for me, something about it really highlights like the surrealism of all of that. And just the kind of bizarre like way in which everything is kind of thrown up for grabs in something like 9-11. And there's something that I feel like people never talk about that's in my own experience, which is

There was an utter horror. There's like this sinking feeling in your stomach. You know, you know, people are suffering and dying. And at the same time, there's like this weird magic to the city being like completely undone for a moment. And everyone is interacting in completely different ways. And just like the normal rules don't apply. You know, in a normal workday, everyone's wandering around the streets and dusty and weird and...

I don't know. It's just something that I feel like is kind of lost sometimes because everyone wants to, you know, you want to honor the tragedy of it. And of course, that's the element that matters most. But there was almost, I remember this feeling of like an exhilaration of like, what's possible now? Like what's going to happen now? And sort of having the routines of New York, which is such a...

uh, kind of grind of a city. Yeah. It just kind of opened up. So what, what made you, what made you want to talk about, what made you want to do this project about 9-11 in the first place? Like what were you, were you sort of exercising your own thoughts or what, what were you looking for? Yeah.

Yeah, the 9-11 series for me came around kind of through Wondery in a bit. Like, we had been talking about, like, doing a supplemental series. I knew the 20th anniversary was coming up. And it's also an experience that I never really integrated well myself. Like, I went, I was 23, like, I went on to graduate school, and I hadn't really, like, deeply thought about how it affected my life. And I think...

One of the things for me is like in my show, I like to highlight stories of people where it's like we think we know the story. But once you really talk to someone who's been through it, you find out all of these complexities and sort of unknowns that are revealed and surprises that are revealed when you just talk to people who have actually experienced someone firsthand. And so...

For me, one of my main interests was just like, we believe we understand 9-11 and we think we know what happened there, but I want to talk to people who are as close as possible to the event, especially in New York. And again, you're kind of seduced into believing you understand this event and it's just so incomprehensible.

And so, yeah, it was just a combination of that 20th anniversary coming up. I really felt this need to sort of integrate my experience in it somehow and commemorate it for myself. And then it just really matches up with my show, obviously, which is about people who experience incomprehensible events and how they make sense of that. Yeah. And this is like the mother of all incomprehensible events in that way. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. What brought you to it? What brought you to the series? Yeah.

It makes me uncomfortable. I think there's something interesting about having an experience that is part personal experience, also part just giant global experience, collective experience. But also being weirded out a little bit by knowing that the 20th anniversary was going to come and that when people ask you to sort of never forget, that they're not just asking you. They're asking for something more than just neverness.

never forget implies, I think. Like, it feels political. It feels... It just... That day, a day that you never thought, literally never thought you would get past, like it just seemed like. It really just seemed apocalyptic. And for it to... How much the idea of it had changed over 20 years. And I was just sort of curious as to how that would shake out if we...

if we sort of spent a lot of time with it and and and really try to look at it not just as the day but as the idea that isn't just like an event or an experience it's also something that people used right like it it's some it's it's something that um there was there was an art there was an art curator uh named peter peter ely who who said he said nine he said 9-11 was made to be used and

And I just thought like that has stuck with me from the beginning to the end of this project. And that's what it feels like to me. It feels like something that people deployed. And so how do you separate that from like just what happened? Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's fascinating. That's actually been my take on it too is like when you have these overlaid narratives that are so powerful, you know, what's rendered invisible by that, right?

And I think that's one of the reasons why, to me, it's always so valuable to go right to people who had this immediate experience. Because generally, they're the ones that are rendered most invisible by a situation like this. What do you mean? Why are they invisible? Well, they're rendered invisible if the story doesn't fit the narrative that's going on, right? So it's...

it's like one of these things where like, there's a way of thinking about nine 11. And if someone has an experience that violates that, that's your narrative about it. Um, it just doesn't get integrated generally. Right. Even if you hear it, it doesn't necessarily get integrated into your way of thinking about it because the media's take on it has been so powerful. One of the stories I have, like, you know, and this is just a, one of the examples is like, uh, one of the firefighters who I interviewed. Yeah, she was great. And,

Yeah. And she was one of the first female firefighters. And, you know, she sued the New York City Fire Department in the 70s to allow women to even be firefighters.

And it is true. It's just, it's a subtle thing, but it's a really powerful thing. The fact that we talk about this like brotherhood of heroes and we talk about, there's like, like we conjure masculine images when we think about 9-11 of what it means, what heroism means. And it doesn't mean that people have never acknowledged that women were there. Like obviously, you know, that's there, but it's not integrated into the dominant narrative. And her story was just powerful for that reason, right? To be able to really bring that up and

And at some point she says, like, you know, it seemed in a way petty to be bringing it up in the aftermath of such a big event. And she's like, at the same time, I knew that media was writing history at that moment. Yeah. But it's so funny because when she said that, I was thinking that. I was literally thinking...

fuck, like you are brave to after this is happening, like you're going to be the one who comes out and it takes a that's pretty intense to like try to point that stuff out when there's so many bigger things going on. And yet, as she's talking, you're like, yeah, you're kind of right. Absolutely. Yeah, it's not a super obvious. And, and I think that's why it's interesting when when she's just speaking from her own experience, like, you know,

You could argue that it wasn't appropriate for her to bring that up at that time. And at the same time, she's sitting there at funerals and they're talking about the Brotherhood of Firefighters and she feels invisible. So it's not really important. At some point, whether or not it's appropriate or whether or not this is the time or this is the story that gets told, it's like she's having a horrific, invisible experience and unable to process her trauma in the same way everyone else is because the gender narrative is skewed. And so...

It was just, yeah, it was such a powerful episode for me for that reason. And then I just started to think of, like, all the other invisible stories, you know? And it's kind of an unknown unknown, right? We don't even know the stories that aren't being told. So, you know, you have only a limited four series run here, you know, to tell these kinds of things. Is there any, like, were there any concerns for you, like...

We had the opposite instinct was to stay away from the first day, was literally to stay away from 9-11 the day for a couple of reasons. First, I was I was I was afraid. And what I expected and what I think we are going to get is a lot of sort of terror porn. Right. It's just going to be a lot of like.

The plane's going to the towers again. The plane's going to the towers again. And just like just the sort of shock of that traumatic event and just sort of bringing that back without much sort of introspection. I was sort of I think we're going to get a lot of that in the 20 year anniversary. But also like there's the sort of experience of like we sort of explore the idea of that. Never forget makes me a little uncomfortable and how the idea of like.

People talk about 9-11 as a time where we have to get back to the feeling of that day because it's when we were so united. It's when we all remembered what was important. And I have such a mixed feeling about that because that feeling was real. I felt it. A lot of people felt it. But in retrospect, I don't know how true that was. And...

How much does the last 20 years of completely abusing all that goodwill that was created that day, how much is that first day even real anymore after our reaction to 9-11 and how we used all that unity to start wars and all this stuff? It just has gotten so muddled that I got worried about going back to the first day just because is that even true anymore to talk about that as if it were its own experience? Yeah.

Right. Well, in a way, that's what I found was almost invisible. I think this is what's so strange about it. I'll just talk about a little bit. So part of the series for me too, the angle that we ended up taking on, it was really focusing on people who had jobs to do on that actual day. And so I had to focus on what the day was because these were people who were in a sense like transvestites.

charged with managing an absolutely unmanageable situation. And that's what kind of fascinated me most. It wasn't just someone who was there wandering around the city or having their personal experience, but people who are actually forced to do something about it

And then also take on their shoulders like a sense of responsibility, not only for like fixing what was happening on the day and solving immediate concerns, but sort of being the face of healing for the nation and how that unfolded for people. Wow. So they had this like double burden in a way, right?

And all of them walked away with a sense like that they didn't do enough, you know, that they could have done more, that they were completely humbled by the scope and scale of the event. And some of them, like the port authority worker who I interviewed, you know, were absolutely directly attacked by victims' families and saying the port authority is responsible. You know, he or she's lost dozens of colleagues of her own. She's going through her own grieving process. She was on the 68th floor, you know, and covered up.

covered in dust and narrowly escaped with her life. And in the immediate weeks afterwards, she's sitting in on hearings of people saying like, Port Authority, you killed my kids. And so these are people to me who are like, like this invisibility piece I keep going back to me is so fascinating because there are a lot of like faceless workers, like they're the heroes that we see pictures of. And then there's like scores of just like faceless workers who are there doing things to really help the whole nation like come together and heal. And, and,

And some of them were then like to blame, you know, a spread of the insurance stuff as part of the just who's accountable to it. And then layered on top of that, all the conspiracy stuff that came after that. Yeah. You know, so I really had to focus on that day. And there. Yeah. I always in my show, like run the risk of having a sort of like trauma porn or terror porn that people talk about.

But I feel like we have to go really deep into the deep experience. And I feel like the reason I can do that is because I provide their entire life story wrapped around that. And so I'm always trying to present people as not that moment. That is a moment in their life, and they are a million other things at the same time. And I try as much as possible to anchor the story around that.

you know, the, the bewildering or, you know, horrific event. Yeah. I had, it's funny. I, I, I heard, uh, if this is a spoiler, you can just take it out. Uh, but I, I, I heard the one you did with the ER doctor and I, I did think it was interesting to hear his experiences of that, of nine 11, but with the context of the fact that he had essentially fucked up and accidentally, uh,

or did not stop the death of one of his patients previously. So to know that this guy is going into this day, not a hero, you're not like with literally a cape like they portrayed it on television, but like the guy who already has the burden of like, I have lost lives because of potentially my incompetence or my mistakes before. And will that happen again? Like that's really added an interesting layer to it that had nothing to do with that day, right? Yeah. And you see that where the motivations are coming from to do everything you can and that

And it really made me think of just like, and all of these stories really made me think of all the different things that people are bringing to these experiences. And that's been a lesson I've learned from my show kind of in general. Every person is bringing their entire life experience to this like one moment.

And you can see how it actually impacts then the aftermath of that. But for me, it was so fascinating seeing what people are bringing into the event and then seeing how they manage the trauma afterwards, how they cope, like what healing practices they bring to bear and how they either fall apart or not. And one thing I found so fascinating about the jobs angle is that

the job itself, like having to kind of be on point and on task, like in the weeks and months following, um,

exacerbated a lot of the trauma for people because they just didn't have time to really process and integrate what was going on psychologically. So it ended up delaying their PTSD by a lot. And then they were exhausted and then they're losing sleep and they're having nightmares and they're just because they keep returning to work and keep having to go back, they can't process. At the same time, the job itself was exactly what provided a lot of healing for them because it was the way in which they felt they could do something about it.

So it was, again, like the type of work that people were even coming into the experience with impacted so much than how they came out of the experience.

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I was curious from your perspective, just in terms of the aftermath of it, I was really struck by the episode, the first episode you had where the people were on the boat. Yeah. And

Just that situation of kind of being, you know, everything matters in terms of how something affects your life. Right. And those people just happen to be on a boat in the middle of nowhere. And how they process 9-11 has everything to do with like where they were in that moment. Right. Yeah. Anyway, I was wondering if you had any if you were struck by any of the stories and like how people carried forward what happened afterwards. Yeah.

We have very few, if any, stories of like, I was there in the middle of it, building fell down around me, can't believe I got out alive, here's how I dealt with the trauma. We had very little of that. It was more sort of ways that people were impacted in ways that they didn't even sort of see coming. You know, like we spent an episode talking about this guy who lived in Little Pakistan. His family were Pakistani immigrants and how on 9-11 like,

His world and his family's world just completely changed. You know, in a few weeks, the feds had rounded up like 500 people from his neighborhood. You know, anybody, it was just like crackdown time on anybody who was not like white American citizen and how it just completely decimated his neighborhood. He owned a 24-hour bodega. His dad did in the neighborhood. And next door, there was a barbershop and he tells a story about how one day the guy

The guy just left like he didn't just he didn't decide to leave America. He left like left the scissors sitting on the counter, you know, left the barber pole there like he left everything. He just took off because of the crackdown and feeling like that he was going to be arrested, deported for small and for small infractions under the guise of, you know, the war on terror.

And he's now living in – he's now a barber in Toronto. As the guy we interviewed said, you know, he's living the American dream in Canada. And so the indirect sort of impact that it had for us was the part that we really zeroed in on as opposed to sort of the sort of individual trauma. Right. Yeah. Right. And in a lot of ways, I think it probably really is similar to trauma. It's like –

Like you have this experience that is life altering as a country. And then, yeah, like your next 20 years, a lot of it's going to be about that without even realizing it.

Just like it would be for a human being. That's fascinating, like having this sense of almost like this, you're exploring like the collective trauma of it in this way. And what do you feel like evolved the most or changed the most over time? Or how did the narrative around 9-11, do you feel like changed over from five years on to 10 years on to 20 years on?

Is there anything that you came away with to be like, oh, wow? Like you kind of said earlier about how it was the pile and then it was ground zero. And ground zero is a military term, right? So immediately they're turning it from a pile of rubble into a war zone. Right. So did you feel like you saw the narrative change over time in a particular way that you want to talk about? I wouldn't say it was a straight line, but I would say that the farther you got away from it, it definitely did evolve. Like, for example, conspiracy didn't really...

become that big a deal until around the fifth anniversary. Like after the 9-11 commission report came out and said it was not an inside job, we talked to the director of Loose Change, which was basically the seminal 9-11 conspiracy film and the first viral film. And

You know, he basically when 9-11 happened, he was 17 and basically wrote, edited and directed a movie by himself about the conspiracies that he thought were true about 9-11. And it all but that all really ballooned, you know, in the at the fifth anniversary when when when you had enough distance where it wasn't completely, totally and utterly disrespectful to be talking about these things in the face of.

a burning pile in the face of people who are still having funerals. I think it just took a while. It takes a while for the sort of immediate trauma to go away, for then other things to take its place. Like, okay, now that we have a little bit distance, can we talk about how it was an inside job? And I just thought it was interesting to hear people who had conspiracy theories about what happened on 9-11. It's not a surprise at how little of it was based on actual hard fact, but

I was surprised at how much of it was based in feeling, in the feeling that we are not getting the full story,

about what's going on and the feeling that 9-11 happened, the two years later we're invading this country. How are these two connected, that they're connecting them? The feeling that 9-11 was becoming more than just this sort of this attack and this tragedy that was being used by the government and that it was being used by forces in a way that they could kind of see happening but couldn't get the whole picture and that it felt like more like the conspiracy theories were coming out of that.

trying to explain something they couldn't quite put their finger on. It's interesting. One of the things in my show that I find so powerful that I found over doing, you know, almost 200 episodes now is that at the heart of every one of my shows is an encounter with the unknown, like a really massive encounter with uncertainty is really what creates trauma. And, you know, this comes out when, you know, people, for example, an encounter with uncertainty is what creates trauma.

is to me kind of at the center of the most powerful forms of trauma. You know, a lot of the PTSD and healing, it goes through these phases of like there's shock and there's loss and there's grief and there's sadness. And then there is always like a paranoid stage and people start having nightmares if they start seeing things around the corner. And I've interviewed so many people who have like had psychosis and various episodes. And it's a way of dealing with trauma.

a situation of massive uncertainty your brain can't integrate into your sense of who you are what has happened in your life and it starts basically inventing a lot of stories about what's true about the world because it's basically said if this event happens and disrupts the story of who you are so massively then what is the world right and now you're afraid of everything um and

And the mind rushes to make sense of these kinds of things and does start creating paranoid narratives. And it's so fascinating when you were talking about this kind of five years on, the conspiracy is really kind of welled up because I feel like that's sort of a personal timeline often for people when the symptoms of PTSD start to reveal themselves in a more complex way. Not necessarily five years, but it's not in the immediate aftermath that those necessarily come up. It's in the long term that those develop. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, it's like interesting because I always think about it as the mind trying to integrate and make sense of this incomprehensible experiences that happened to us. But I never thought about it collectively in that same way, especially in terms of conspiracy theories themselves. Right. And I think as our world becomes more and more uncertain in general with COVID and with just access to the Internet, where we now are confronted with just like gobs of information that we have so much trouble like integrating into our experience. Like this is a time when conspiracy theories are just at their height. Yeah.

Because everyone, it's better for them to come up with something that is known but might be totally false than to not have a narrative at all. Than to not have a narrative at all, yeah. Yeah, for sure. That I completely get.

So what was your big take? I mean, what was your big takeaway? Like, like, where have you where have you arrived? One of the themes I think that was the biggest was this sense of survivor's guilt. And again, it's one of these terms that we kind of know, like, but I hadn't somehow it just hasn't like hadn't really clicked for me what the deal is, you know, why people feel so much guilt when they survive something that someone else doesn't. And, you know, there are obvious reasons why that happens. You know, it could have been me.

But there was something about 9-11 that created such an incredible like randomness to who made it and who didn't. And they talked a lot about like, you know, just taking a left turn versus a right turn. Or if your duty was on the 69th floor instead of the 67th floor. And then your colleagues either died or not. And who was saved or not. Again, it kind of goes back to the same theme about like not really having a story.

The random, like being faced with that enormous randomness of just who's dying and who's not like you lose all sense of control about your way in the world.

And I feel like this is especially brought to bear with people who are there in a job function. So like the doctor, right? In the first episode, you know, he was a medic in a war zone in Nicaragua. He had 20 years experience in an ER. He, you know, graduated from Harvard Med. He is just like this incredibly powerful person and has years and years of experience. And he was totally humbled by this thing. And just to be confronted with something where he not only feels powerless, but he's also

But the way in which it's unfolding around him is just so far outside of anything he can manage. It just brings home for you the seeming randomness of death and the randomness of who survives and who doesn't. And so I really got the survivor's guilt at that time. Because again, it's not just about the guilt of not being there. There's something about they're also confronted just with how random the circumstances can be.

So that was that was a big one. The second thing that I hadn't thought about a lot is that like goodwill that was created at that time and sort of the squandered opportunity of the world having come together. And I want to put this question back to you, because to me, everyone talked about it. They talked about how much they felt this like upwelling of like the world is there for you, like we're all Americans, you know, and that.

Yeah.

in so many ways and not to be sort of nihilistic about it. But I can see why, especially people who were there, though, you can see how that feeling is so potent for them. Yeah. And anyway, I wanted to put that question back to you just in terms of the squandered opportunity of it. How did that show up in your show? Oh my God, it's the whole fucking thing. It is literally the whole... And how many different ways can you explore the idea of squandered opportunity? Yeah.

And I don't even mean that in that it's repetitive. I just mean that that is just the thing that constantly comes up. And it also makes me relook at how we felt during 9-11. It's funny, you said like we were all Americans that day and a lot of people felt that. And like patriotism...

Not my thing. Like before 9-11, like no way. Flags make me uncomfortable. I don't want to see it. But after 9-11, there was this weird feeling, even in New York, the least patriotic place in the world of like, we are all Americans. And everybody put up these flags, right? Like in their windows. And it was this sort of sign of unity. And it makes me realize that the we were all American part,

That is not the part that needed to happen. It was that we are all human. We are all connected.

The fact that the New York Times printed an American flag insert that made it really easy for people to pull out of the paper and put on their window, the fact that that was what was connecting us all, I feel like that's patriotism and that's nationalism taking the opportunity of a tragedy and turning it into an advantage. And I feel bad for being a part of that now because I think what it really is is it's not –

We just grabbed the flag because it was the closest thing to us. Like if somebody had said, here's the new flag, that means you're a human being. Like I would have grabbed that one. And so it makes me look back on that moment and hopefully look towards future moments to realize that when things like that happen, the feeling that we are having is connection-based.

It's not necessarily patriotism. And that I hope I don't make that same mistake twice. And I hope we find an easier way to sort of substitute the flag for just like a hug or like fucking, I don't know, like something that is not, does not lead us down the road that it did. Amazing. Absolutely. Again, like, you know, I'm always kind of stuck in the human story. Like for me,

My kind of tagline for my show in some ways is kind of like the only universal human truth is our shared experience of confusion. And for me, it's like that's what binds us is like these moments in which we were thrown. And that's kind of what I was talking at the beginning about the magic of New York City. Like, again, it was a horrific event, but there was a magic to having the routines of everyday life kind of like all up for grabs and all sort of.

Now it's loose. But it makes you want to figure out what is the antidote in a time where that tragedy was fast and big and tragedy now is slow and it takes years and it takes centuries. Global warming and pandemics take months and months. And how do you get that

The thing that was so exciting, and it was exciting, and 20 years later we can say it, it was exciting to have such a horrible thing happen because anything could happen now. Anything could happen next. And so how do you make that happen when, how do you sort of capture that feeling of like, oh, okay, now anything is possible? There's something that's not converting when the tragedy is slow instead of fast, and I wonder how you get to that.

That sense of everything being up for grabs, what I feel like is so potent about that is that everyone does become human in that moment. Yeah. Like, you're no longer a trader on Wall Street and a subway operator and, like, a garbage collector. You're all people dealing with this event. And that is the squandered moment. Like...

And you're so right on about everyone's grabbing the closest thing to them. Because what I feel like can happen in situations of massive uncertainty when everything's thrown up for grabs is us to all look around and be like, holy shit, we're not just these roles that we play every day. We have a common humanity with each other. But I think that's so scary for people that they glom on to whatever fixed identity they can quickly. And we can get into a whole thing about that. But it's just a...

It's just an unfortunate kind of human tendency right at the moment when you have the most potent opportunity for loving and common humanity. It gets weaponized. Yeah, it's disappointing. Anyway, yeah, it's disappointing. Let's just end on the word disappointing for the whole time.

Yeah, what a bummer. Yeah. It was a beautiful, it was an oddly beautiful time to go back and remember. And I will say, the antidote to feeling just totally distraught at the decisions we make as a country and sort of the condition of the world, like...

Pretty much to the person, like you meet a person and you separate them from the system that they're a part of and you just sort of try to figure out how they're dealing with it or fumbling with it. So meeting all those people who experienced 9-11 and experienced the days and weeks and years after in really specific ways, like people are good. Yeah.

And so that is a good, less disappointing way, for me at least, to talk about that time, is to get down to just people and their stories. And all the stories of growth that have happened as well. I mean, so many people, you know, everyone that I interviewed,

has transformed that event into something really amazing in their life that I don't think they would be doing otherwise. They became better doctors, better volunteers, better community service members, better healers for other people. And so at an individual level, I think there is an enormous amount of growth that comes out of this. See, that's a positive way to end. Yeah, exactly. Well, maybe we should end it there. We should end it there. Yeah.

I know, for real. Quit while the quitting's good. Exactly. Good to talk to you, though, I will say. It was fun to have this conversation. I haven't been talking to a lot of people who aren't directly involved in the project about this, so it's interesting to just start to think like, oh, what does this mean in my life? Yeah, likewise. Just a great conversation, and thanks so much. My pleasure. Thanks so much, Dan. Oh, thank you, man. Have a good one. Good talking to you. Take care.

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