9/11 Victims Kids UNLOAD on Coverup & Tell Most GUT-WRENCHING Story You’ll Ever Hear…

(upbeat music) - I'm rubbing off on ya, huh? - Yeah, what the hell, man? - I wore sleeves specially for you today. - After last time. - What does that mean? Why would you do that? - Because last time I was like, well, you showed up, no one was here because Dief was out of town and that was a memorable experience for you. So I'm like, this time I'll be classy. I'll have sleeves on, we'll do it right. And you show up looking like Julian Dork. - This is so intense, so I mean, jump it from no shirt to sleeves. Like, he's a middle ground. - Listen, there's a middle ground. - You're not saying a middle ground. - That works, but it's great to have you back, David. - Michael Jackson. - Glad we could do this, I'm really honored. We could do this today as well. And welcome to the show, Matt. It's great to have you. - Thank you for having me on. - Of course, of course, so we are here where we're recording this a couple of days before crazy, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which has just been like, holy shit, I'm getting old, thinking about that. But it is a seminal moment that changed the country for sure, it definitely changed the world. And it also was a tragic day where just under 3,000 people lost their lives. And both of you did lose your fathers that day. So, I can't even fathom that. All the years I've been talking about this on the show, all the years I've talked about it before. It's just like unbelievable to me that there were two buildings that used to stand right there. And now aren't, and you know, people had family members that just went to work on a normal day and never came home. But David, you and I last year had a chance to go through some of your story. I'm gonna have you do some of that again today 'cause I was just one piece of that podcast last year just for people who didn't hear it. But Matt, for people that aren't aware of your story and your dad, how old were you on 9/11? - It was nine years old. My dad was 38 years old. Nilders are four boys. My youngest brother was born June 2001. So, yeah, dude, just went to work like it was a normal day. And what's crazy is that my dad would go into the city super early in the morning to work out at the gym in the Marriott Hotel. Missed that, slept in, missed the morning workout. And I mean, for him sleeping in didn't mean shit, right? Like it was just, he got to the city at, I don't know, probably 7 a.m. So, as I remember, and David and I know remembers too, like it was just such a perfect day. Crystal clear blue sky. The way I describe it, because if you only know the feeling if you're in the Northeast, that transition from summer to fall, like you could feel it in the air, it was like palpable, you could feel it. - Hey guys, if you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge, huge help. Thank you. - And I got pulled out of class at about nine o'clock in the morning and I walked into the hallway with the classmate of mine. Superintendent of my school walked into the class. - Where'd you live? - I lived in Mara, San Jose. Went to a small school in New Vernon, called Harding Township Middle School. - Okay. - Like maybe 300 kids totaled in the whole school. K-3, my class was considered big at 50 kids. And very sheltered community, I feel. And the teachers were young. They didn't know what to say or what to do. I don't even know if there was a TV in the office. Like I really don't know if they were watching this unfold. I can't remember. I never saw the footage in school. So I walked into the hallway with my classmate and my brother Nick, who was seven, was standing in the hallway with his teacher and my classmate's brother. And they huddled us together and they were like, we think a small planet, your dad's building. They're both safe. There's nothing to worry about. They're evacuating the tower and that was that. My classmate's dad worked on the 33rd floor. I had no problem getting out. And then they took us and brought us to this room. We called the computer room. It was like the luxury playing computer, gizmos and gadgets and like games like that, right? And it was so, what was bizarre to me was watching the kid get pulled out of class. And it was like every 20 minutes. You'd see moms and dads running down the hallway, pulling kids out and my mom didn't come to school to get us. Oh, is moms and dads coming in? - Moms and dads, there were dads too, yeah. - Oh wow. - So a lot of people who either weren't in the city yet or were on their way in, turned around, came, like everyone was freaking out. And so, I sat in this classroom, no one in the school knew that my dad had called my mom. And so, I can kind of backtrack. So, leading up to 9/11, my dad had what I consider a spiritual premonition. My dad came from very humble beginnings. My grandparents came here right after the war. World War II from Italy. Barely spoke English when they came here. - Where in Italy? - My grandfather from Parma, my home, yeah. Grandfather from Parma, my nun knows from Noveli. And so, came here after the war and lived in Fort Leone, New Jersey. And, my dad had a sister who died as an infant. He also had an aunt who died of ALS. So, about two weeks before 9/11, he woke up in the middle of the night screaming, pointing to the foot of his bed. My mom woke up with him and he was like insisting that his late aunt was standing there healthy, holding his infant sister. And like, that was his, they were telling him to come. Some crazy shit. - Now, didn't you know, I mean, you were young. - I didn't know this at the time. - He didn't tell you. - No, I didn't know this at the time. - But your mom, my mom, and he was insisting that it was not a dream, like that they were there. So, for the two weeks leading up to 9/11, after that night, he was just going on and on and on about like, I feel like I'm gonna die young. Like, I wanna be cremated when I die. Like, all these crazy things. And, the weekend before, he said to my mom, like, I'm gonna quit, like, I'm not happy. He was having some issues at work. Wait, he worked at Canter. - He worked at Canter. - What did he do? - He was the managing director of interest rate options. He worked on 105th floor. - Oh, at age 38. - age 38. - Oh, he was very successful. He worked very, very hard. - Yeah. - And he was like, I'm gonna quit. I'm not happy. So, that morning, 8.49, three minutes after the plane hit, he called her from a cell phone. And that was what was kind of rare, is that what people don't always really know is, it was really hard to actually get cell phone service. In those offices. Even though there was the antenna. So, he got through. And all the stories of the people getting through on their cell phones, 'cause the office signs were all dead, is miraculous. - So, that's a strange thing that gets ignored. - It gets ignored. - Yeah. - So, even today, you have problems in those buildings. - Yeah. - Getting service. - Yeah. - So, he gets through to her, picks up the phone. My mom picks up the phone. She's like, what's going on? He's like, hey, she thought seeing his cell phone pop up on the cell phone caller ID, that he walked out, 'cause he never would call her during the day. - So, did she already know the tower was dead? - No idea. - 'Cause he could only call her three minutes after. - No idea. - Yeah. - So, he liked to pull pranks and jokes. So, my mom answers, and she's like, he's like, Michelle, do you have a TV on? We think of a small plane hit. I'm gathering my stuff, beginning to evacuate. And my mom was like, this John, this better not be some sort of sick joke. And when she said those words, the line cut off. He had actually said to her to, do you have a TV on? So, line cuts off, she turns a TV on, and they just now are covering it, right? It's three minutes later. And all these, we don't know what hit. All the reports of, we think a small plane hit. They didn't know at that time. - They were saying like a. - The says no or something. - Yeah, exactly. So, she sees a smoke billowing out of the building. And back and forth, they were calling each other and she would answer, and just hear static. And when she kept calling the cell phone, 'cause the office time was dead, he'd answer and there was static. And finally, he got through to her one last time. And basically, he just told her that he loved her and goodbye. What time was that? Probably, I don't know. I asked her if she ever pulled the logs from like Verizon. She never did, but she wrote a letter to him when we buried him. And 849 was the number she wrote for the first call. She didn't say the second call. It had to have been right before nine o'clock, because my dad's brother, my uncle, was the last one to get through to him, right at nine o'clock in the morning. And no one spoke to him again after that. Whoa. What floor was he on? 105. 105. Yeah. So it hit at 846. And it's unfortunately a very famous story that canter, in particularly, where both of your fathers worked, lost like everybody, 'cause they were all above the hit zone. 101 to 105. Yeah. So the smoke and the temperatures, and as far as I've been told, like in the first 10 minutes, just got to insane levels, like almost unsurvivable levels right there, even before the second plane hit the other tower. And that kind of lines up with like the last time your dad talked to your uncle, was nine o'clock. That's not that long after. So what's interesting is I've done a lot of extensive research over the years. That was where my first obsession regarding addiction that I dealt with was 9/11. And it stems from when I came home from school, later that day, and I saw the footage, and then when the footage was being played on that TV, there was a family friend sitting on the couch, she changed the channel. When the buildings come down on this TV replay, and she went over to a Spanish news station, and the first thing I saw was someone jumping. Oh, that fucked me up and changed me. I was nine years old. That is what affected me tremendously. So that led me down this road of research, [BLANK_AUDIO] Documentary started coming out and these families from Canter were being interviewed and they were like, oh, I was, you know, looking at these photos of all the people in the windows and I was zooming in and it was enhancing them and larging them and they would say how they'd contact the photographers. So I started emailing the photographers. But when I went to high school, I took the train to school, same train I would go in New York City. So I emailed these guys and I was like, hey, can I come to your galleries and see these photos? None of them responded to me. But none of them responded to me. They just were like, we, you know, this is some grieving kid. Like, what do you say? Like, how do you do this? Right. I would think that if you wanted to come see the pictures that they took though, if they saw the emails, I kind of assumed someone dead, that you would respond to that though. That's a little strange. Yeah, a little response. Right? Yeah, nothing. Yeah. So it's kind of weird to hear that. It's kind of weird nothing. Yeah, nothing. Yeah. One that I reached out to in particular was known to be sort of a, like obviously he's an artist, if you will. So he viewed it as like, I think he only was selected with the families that he met with in the beginning. I want to say he only did that in the early years. I reached out to him probably five years later. So like, I think a lot of them are like out of sight, out of mind type of thing. Yeah, I feel like this kind of transcends art though. I agree with you. Yeah. Listen, I agree with you. I look back. I look back like years later and I was like, did you ever, but you never did. 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And I described what my dad was wearing and asked him if he could look through it and he said that he would, and he at least got back, and this was honestly, this was recent. This was over the last few years that I contacted him. I saw him post something on this Reddit page and I personally reached out to him. There are a lot of people I talked to who were there that day, whether they worked in the buildings or more likely were right by there and were looking up when this was happening and were escaping the dust cloud when everything fell, who will not talk about it. And I fully understand that because it was just every single beat of that day. From the things they had to immediately accept were happening, which is like watching people make the decision of do I wait here and die or do I jump to my death all the way to like thinking the world's ending when it comes down. It's just the post-traumatic stress that I had is so insane that like I totally get it. Well, what I was going to say before is that there were reports that the 100th floor and the 101st floor were how the smoke went, hit those floors harder at first. Why did they say that? I don't know exactly. There are pockets of floors, pockets of the Canter offices that were actually immune to the smoke and the fire, mostly the smoke hitting them until later. That's why as you like look at some of the photos, right as the building is coming down, the smoke is dark and arid, but you could see people in the windows still. There were still hundreds of people standing in the windows, like people don't realize that. And now it makes you wonder how many people are behind them, right? That's what's hard to think about. But and then another thing too is the windows on the world restaurant, which was above the Canter floors, also for whatever reason, got hit harder by the smoke sooner than some of the pockets of the offices. And it wasn't, it's been a while, but people, they couldn't access the roof either. It was locked. There's a kid that worked in my daddy was 23 years old and my dad was his boss and he made a call to his parents and the rumor was that he said we're going to try to get to the roof. So I believe that my dad, they tried to go up now, well, I don't know, like did they get up there and it was locked? Yeah. There was no, and they couldn't, that was the other thing, the helicopter pilots there, like some of the guys who were flying around, there were news pilots. I think there were other types of pilots as well. They were making attempts to get even anywhere near the roof and scientifically it was not. There was one one pocket on like the northwest corner, I think it was, it's in the Natuio documentary, where they can literally, you see how close they get and you could, you could see the people in the windows, like waving at them, standing in the windows, waving at them. And the pilot said, you know, we tried to get there, but there was no one there. There was no one on the roof, like, you know, you're in school though, nine o'clock. You remember seeing your seven-year-old brother put it out of class and you're seeing a bunch of moms and dads come and pick up their kids, but your moms, not there. So did the teachers just like take the principal's office, what happened? They sat in that computer room for the rest of the day, basically, and then went back to class and then got on the bus and went home, and when I got home, you went back to class, like for like maybe a little bit, and then we were like, it was a very, no one knew what to do. Right. No one knew what to do. You know, I think most of the afternoon was in that computer room, you know. We might have been in the principal's office for a little bit too. Did you have any concept at that point that your dad might not be getting out of those buildings? No, I had no idea. No clue. No idea. The teachers didn't even know about the phone calls, so I think that no one. I don't think people realized the severity. I think people thought that those people were going to be able to get out, you know. Now who. You took the bus home from school. So when you got home, was your mom there? Oh, yeah, there was probably. there was like 30 or 40 cars parked in the driveway. I really. I kind of struggled for a long time with why my mom kept me in school, and then I understood when I got home why she decided to do it, and I can understand it. And I've done a lot of interviews and things over the years where people. I've seen people like say, like, how could she do that and all that stuff, but it's like. For us to go home and then see the TV footage, and then try to pretend like things are normal. She was trying to preserve our last chance of normalcy, because it was fucked from there on out. I mean, we didn't go back to school for three weeks. It's like, how do you describe the commotion? People running to the house in the days after, and I'm sure you remember this too, like, bringing food, like, trays of food, and there's nowhere else to put the food. You can't even fit it in the fridge anymore, like, no one knew what to do. And again, she was a three-month-old at the house, too, and my youngest was three-month-old, my youngest brother. My other brother, Michael, was three years old. So you got a seven to three, and an infant, and an infant. So it's, you know, they just didn't know. I take issue with people who play the hindsight 2020 game on something like that. You're reacting moment by moment. We know all about this now, but I remember that day. I was seven, eight years old, and it's one of the first things I can viscerally remember every single part of the day in my life. Like, there's things I can remember from before I was eight, but not like every single piece. That day, I know every minute of it. And it was so chaotic, and I was in South Jersey, so there's fewer people who have exposure to people in the towers. Or some, but, you know, for people to like try to determine how you're going to respond at the instant to that, when you're also watching on TV, just like everyone else wondering if your loved one is going down with those buildings. Right. Like, come on. That's crazy. Also, too, I think people don't understand how different the world was back then. Oh, yeah. You know, like, you would, I don't know if you could still smoke on planes at the time? Maybe. God, it was a better time for that. Yeah. Still smoke on planes, maybe. But like, the security. There was no security. Amanda, were you alive? No. You weren't alive. You're post 9/11? Wow. That's why. Yeah. There you go. It's just different. It's different. Just different. Same thing with like, how the hijackers got the stuff on the plane. Yeah. It just, it was just different. Yeah. You book a flight. Now you, and you look down the receipt of all the taxes in the September 11 tax, like people don't look at that probably, and like, know what that is, right? But it's there. We can talk about that today, too. Obviously. a lot, they're still not going all through this and everything's kind of wild. So we're going to get to a lot today, people, but I want to make sure we get through the starts of some of those stories here. So when, when was, when you got home and saw the 30 to 40 cars in the driveway and you went inside, did your mom at that point, like, you know, because you're old enough, you're not like three, did she pull you aside and say, like, hey, we haven't been able to reach your father or did that come later? I came later, I walked through the, through the hallway, through the kitchen and as I kind of entered the kitchen area, there was like family members, cell phones weren't as much of a common thing back then, right? So, but you still have people on cell phones and there was these newly established hotlines and hospitals, obviously, but there was hotlines for the hospitals as well. People were calling in to see if you'd heard anything or person was there. So, I kept walking and there were so many people crying and then, as I turned the corner, that's when I saw the footage and then when I saw the other piece that I talked about before, I, that's, I physically reacted to that, you know, that's when I started, I was like, I was extremely upset. My grandmother saw that and grabbed me and kind of brought me outside and said, go, you know, to go play with my friend, who was my neighbor. Is that your father's mom? That was my mom's mom's mom and, you know, at that point, it was, you know, it was too late. And then I just remember how people were coming in and out of the house all day long. Over the next two days, we had like a memorial at our house, like a, not a memorial, but like a prayer service. And then a week later, they came to the house to tell us that they found them. Oh, they found them. They found them. So it's crazy because David and I started talking about this. So all these years, I thought that they found my father three days later. That was the, for whatever reason, that was the day that I thought he was found. He was found basically two days later. And he was identified by his wallet that was in this pocket. So I went to the memorial and I met with a chief medical examiner, the doctor over there. And I looked at his file and his report and everything like that. And so basically, he was mostly found two days later. He wasn't identified fully. I should say, he was identified by the wallet and then the rest of the remains weren't confirmed until different points, right? So they came to the house to tell us that they found them due to the wallet. And then as time went by, we, you know, we buried him 10 days later, but we continued to get remains that were cremated for his wishes, for his wishes. Yeah. That's pretty what that combination to is pretty insane. You wonder that that's the kind of shit that makes me just be like, what type of dimension are we tapped into? You want to hear a crazy dimension? Sure. My dad's father was 16 years old, ish, maybe a little bit older, I always mess this up. He was taken, him and his father were taken during World War II after the Germans and the Italians broke off the axis. Okay. So now, the Nazis invaded various parts of Italy. They also, we were not Jewish, but they captured non-Jewish people, Italians and made them essentially their prisoners of war, right, and they were brought to forced labor camps. They were not killed by gas and all the other things that the Jews back then, the Italian Jews were killed by in the concentration camps, but they were basically worked to death. My grandfather's POW number was 9/11, I'll pull the photo, we'll get the photo of that. That's, when I say, like, dimensional, crazy fucking weird shit, like, you said he had 80 years to prevent 9/11. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. God damn it. Yeah. So it's like, you got that whole dark comedy thing. I love it though. Yeah. I love it. I mean, he does it for a living. I hope he's got it. He's any delirious currently. That's crazy though. That's crazy. Wow. So I don't know, man, it's some weird stuff. That is some weird stuff. Really weird. All right, so we'll come back on the timeline, but let's come already. You did it for people that didn't hear our episode last year. It's pretend that ones are dead, obviously, because, you know, we do a lot of episodes here, and that one also, I think, is one of the more underrated podcasts we've done. That was one of my favorite podcasts last year. You obviously have your own show where you go through all this stuff with all different types of people from all different backgrounds who lose loved ones in different ways and kind of how they deal with their grief, how they deal with death and the concept of it. And we'll link that down below, obviously, everyone should go check that out. But you lost your father on 9/11. Where were you when you found out the towers were hit? Honestly, a very similar experience that we found, which is why I'm kind of sitting here locked in. I got super, sorry, I'll get to it in a second, but I got like super emotional as soon as you said your dad's age, because my dad was 46 and also seemed to be applying. He might have been more successful at 38 than my father, but besides that, I'm 37. Yeah. And so I'm not quite at the age of my father, which is a thing. You know, my sisters are getting closer to 46 and it's just a weird, trippy idea. And I'm already going to be your dad's age and to think how young that is, obviously, for younger people, I know that, but to like hear it, sit next to me, just like, it just hits differently. Plus, we're both baby boys at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Hit me different. But similar to Matt's story, I was left in school and I had a similar, a similar thought process, but I did always sit with the idea that it was a better to pull us into the chaos. Like she didn't know. And I watched it a lot. If I snuck to the TV, watched it live, see my mom freak out, like, I think that would have been a worse decision. So I backed that decision, I think our mom's made. But my, I think you even have a better memory at nine or nine, right? Yeah. Because I mean, that day was like split in two for me, where I remember our first period came and buddy Jeff, who was late. So he apparently caught the 846 first impact comes up to me knowing my dad works in the trade center. And he said, you know, Dave, isn't your dad working the world trade center? I go, yep. And he says a plane flew into the building. And I was just difficult to understand. I know what it meant. Nor did I think it was as serious as, I don't think anyone thought it was as serious when they first heard it or saw it, perhaps. And I don't know what that meant. So I tried going to the main office. They didn't let me make a phone call. And similar to your place, a lot of people, there's a commuter town. I believe middle town, my town lost the most people outside of the New York jurisdiction, like 30-some odd people. So a lot of students had families and whatnot that worked there, so they're probably trying to keep it under control. Like you alluded to. Yeah. Didn't allow me to make a phone call. My mom left me in school for similar reasons. I was safe. I was right down the street. She's giving me the rest of that day, even though I was so paranoid, I didn't know what was going on. It was as normal as it could have been as opposed to going home. And the bell rang, and that was the time to go back. And one thing I get tripped up on is, while my imagination is running the entire day wondering what was going on, knowing something took place, it was actually happening. So it was my imagination versus this reality that was actually occurring. And while I was unsure of what my father did and happened to him and what was going on, it was happening. You know what I mean? All that wondering was happened. That's just something that is kind of going in retrospect. But by the time it came to walk home, there were two, thirty-three o'clock, so it was all done. I'm walking with my best friend, James, and it was quiet from what I remember when he expressed to me. And I remember getting around the bend, similar to yours again. I saw cars outside. And that was the moment when I knew shit went down. I was like, why are there cars outside? Am I called this act? Or Tuesday at three o'clock? And I was like, okay. Like, even at twelve, I knew something went down. And I was always interested in the nine and twelve. Like, it's a small gap now, but it's a big gap then. The level of understanding for better or for worse, there is a big developmental aspect there. So I just wonder what those feelings were between us as you explain. Get to the house. Me and James get separated. I don't know who separated us. I remember someone trying to keep me away from the TV and I saw it walk into the living room while I wanted to see what was going on. And I remember seeing my cousin's face and I see Joey's eyes right now and he's looking at me. He's wonderful. But now looking back again, the whole timeline jumping, so he just knew my life was about to get flipped upside down in about seven paces. I looked at the TV for the first time. That's when I saw the footage. And I remember everything just came out of me and just broke down crying. But the difference between my experience, which I'm for lack of better words, slightly jealous of is everything blacked out. Yeah. I don't remember anything after that. Obviously, I think that day. And I remember everything else was scattered beyond that, but I don't remember anything after three o'clock when I first saw the footage. When did you, you don't remember like a couple days after that? Yeah. I don't remember anything. Yeah. When I say anything, I'm jumping around, but I don't really remember that next day, the day after. I remember things happening. I just can't view the patchwork of when that was. Right. I know things I was doing. I remember the memorial service, which I don't know if it was a couple of weeks later. We didn't find anything. My dad got identified, I think a while after and I went to the 9/11. When I look at his file, I just don't recall the date when they first, they first found one piece of them. They found one thing, one part of them. That's it. It's identified them by the one piece that they found, but that was a while after. And so we didn't get any confirmation. It was just a knowing. And I remember asking my mom on my podcast, the window y'all remember knowing he wasn't coming back. And my mom said that next morning. And of course, she wanted to hold hope for her children, but she was just trying to put the logistical pieces together, the smoke, and he was so high up, there was almost no shot as much you wanted to hold on to her waking up she just knew that he wasn't coming back and I don't recall having to sit down about this is what happened it was just like we knew just as much as I saw the footage for the first time besides it being violent like you just knew like oh no he's even at 12 like this is he's not coming home yeah you see I would imagine too like trying to put myself back on that day but like especially the adults that day who have a better concept of life than an eight-year-old would have when you see that come down like that you got to be thinking that's an unsurvivable event it's it's a hundred what is it a hundred ten stories you know coming on itself and it was like wasn't long either yeah the first one fall the last one fell at 1008 right something like that 1029 it was 102 minutes 102 minutes and so the south tower was hit 16 17 minutes after the north tower but fell first yeah right yep one did that fall do we have the time on 59 I think 959 I think so that's damn the south tower that was that quick it was that quick yeah well it's funny you mentioned about like the was it right yeah so the blackout stuff because I after that piece the footage that I saw my grandma telling me to leave the rest of the things that I remember are scattered too and like even I had to like fact check so many people in my family when I was writing my book because I was like did I dream this or did this happen I had to ask questions I was like interviewing everyone yeah my mom like my mom wouldn't even remember certain things so I had also realized like okay like she was going through her own grief and trauma interesting though like your mom sent you the next day for us it was two days later the 13th which is eerie to me because that's when he was found that's when we had that prayer service and there's like people sitting on our lawn with candles and then there was like this massive gust of wind apparently which I remember it but legally and my mom turned to my grandfather her dad and said he's not coming home she's still held on to belief in hope that he might but we had family who worked in the downtown my I had an uncle worked in the trade center too and one of my uncles my mom's cousin came home he took him hours to get back to New Jersey did he like do the whole walk like he did a walk and then like how like it took like a a small boat with someone or something like that it might be taking one of the fairies over it was something like that and the car like hitch a ride somehow it was some crazy story he told me before but I forget right now when he got to my mom he got to our house that night he said to my mom I hope we find them that's what he said to my mom like he knew like there was no fucking chance he said I hope we find and so like I hear these stories and I've been told these stories as the years have gone by and like I always will like break down when I hear it but it's I think people don't understand if they weren't in New York City and like so for me where my fucked up brain goes is what I'm there downtown and you see how big those pools are and you have to realize like those were buildings and I don't think people understand how catastrophic it really was that's what that's where I kind of wrestle with this thought like they don't people don't realize like this was like a war zone on a beautiful sunny September day downtown Manhattan turned into like a war zone like they don't get that you know especially after 25 years you see it so much it's it's it's so much in your face that it's not that it gets numb but I mean like a post the other day just talking whatever it comes out I mean I don't know so I say sometimes but I was like yeah we can just watch our dad die and obviously other people are too but sometimes we're looking at like this is obviously catastrophic violent event everyone knows that we're watching it but it's almost oddly pushed to the side and maybe I'm wrong that is that we're watching this event but we're forgetting that we're watching thousands of people die correct on video one by one I said that this morning I said anyone can access my dad's final moments on YouTube like that's where I will never compare my loss our loss with someone else who lost a parent in any way and it's it's always traumatic no matter what but I think that where it goes over a lot of people's heads is they had that maybe they had a goodbye it was private they were able to grieve in private we will never have private grieving never and then you and like I said to my mom the other day from the 20th anniversary to the 25th now like this all feels like one blur to me of like things I've done throughout the years whether it's media things like that and all the calls are coming in on the monumental years but the years in between the days in between are the days that like I get tangled up in it you know I'll be honest like when I went to the memorial to meet with that medical examiner back in June I've been in a really good spot with my descent into looking at the footage and I struggle with that because that's where I wanted to I felt like I looked at that footage so obsessively to connect in a weird way with my dad anyway I've been at a really good place with that and when I went to the memorial and met with that woman she's really sweet and really nice and knowledgeable it it sent me down a little bit of a spiral like in the in the weeks after like I was definitely um I was affected by it I'll be honest like I was affected by it and we had spoken and when we got off when I got off the phone call with you I called her and sent up the appointment and I was like I just got to do this and I knew it would be difficult to do but I was like I have to do it you know I've been saying I'm gonna do it for two years I just have to go meet with her and see what this is all about but I see your point completely that like you getting to have your private moment to go do that you're still examining something that's an extremely public event that the entire world gets to examine as well it's a strange dynamic you get to the memorial and you have and there's also the World Cup so there's a lot of tourists that were in the city well I always wrestle with this because when I go to the memorial and you see people standing there at the pools and you have you see look it's hot it's the summer right you see kids sitting on the pools on the names you see people taking selfies and then it's just to me I don't know I try not to get emotionally attached to it and I have to understand that people don't have the same connection but it's still difficult how many times have you been to the pools would you say over the years probably maybe less than 10 times less than 10 okay so you know as someone who didn't lose family in in the event even me every time I go by those things when I have to be in that part of Manhattan you cannot not stop yeah you can't not stop and like stand there and it's never for like 30 seconds you know you're there for a couple minutes because I I really the way you described it a few minutes ago about how it was a war zone and you realized a scope of the fact that there were two building standing right there it really hits you but as you were pointing out for people who haven't been there before they have all the names pretty beautifully carved in along the edge of every single person the person the towers and on 9/11 and you know it's a really solemn thing and maybe I'll say this probably the World Cup wasn't the best time to be going there because you're gonna see more of that stuff you don't like it but I will say most of the times I go there you know I think a lot of people there's something about it when they're there that the majority of people they get it yeah and they're like yeah you know and and I think I hope people listening to this maybe have just walked by that before or not really thought much of it or you know wouldn't think of memorials like this understand the gravity of that and how it affects you know living victims of that event because it's a serious thing doesn't matter how many years will pass that that's you know your guys' lives were completely upended in one day yeah how well do you remember your dad I remember him pretty well I mean things have sadly faded as time has gone by you know I have I have his voicemail recording like you know when you'd call a cell phone I have that saved I have like home videos like I did lose remembering what his voice sounded like for a long time and I have to kind of play that back to remember it do you remember when you started to forget that like how old you were I mean probably early teenage years I would say it's hard to hold on to like you you don't yeah you lose it you know you lose it um but I do remember him pretty well and it's interesting because I don't have many memories pre 9/11 anymore like I can't think back kids say like oh people say like oh I remember what it was like when I was in kindergarten like I don't remember anything like that not like that I have like the summer before my dad died the last thing I really remember is when I was eight go into the World Trade Center for the Christmas Party and from like then to 9/11 is like a blur and then 9/11 it happens and then the days after Erbler weeks after Erbler and it's like I can't remember what Christmas or like I don't know so then you things fade it's just reality do you remember what he was like though oh yeah you remember his personality yeah very charismatic person very happy love love to joke around he just love life I mean that's like the crazy thing is I hear all the people who died 9/11 it's like they were all described very similarly to me they loved life they appreciated life they were just a joy to be around and I'm never taken so soon yeah which is kind of weird so yeah he just had this this this knack about him I don't know he was very approachable and like most people loved him and if you didn't and love him, he'd said okay. - Oh, okay. - Yeah, that was his personal. - Very, very New Jersey time. - Yeah, exactly. - A spot on. - Yeah, I feel like I know. - He flipped you the burp, so that was it. - At least we do that here in New Jersey. As opposed to out in L.A., they smile at you, you walk by and then they say go fuck yourself. - Yeah, which we can't hear. - They tweet about it. - Yeah, and I actually not x anymore. I'm not gonna say x, I'm California here. - Right, that's, I've heard a lot of people talk about that though in different contexts at all ages. When they lose people and then five, six years later, you start to, you're like, wait, was the voice like this? Or was it like that? It's a really, that's a really odd thing to deal with, and it's hard also when you're in the middle of growing up as well, so then all the experiences that, you know, you have, that you're supposed to have, like your dad there to help you with that you did until you were nine and suddenly you don't have it. But what about your brothers, 'cause they were younger. You know, you're seven year old brother. I imagine he remembers your dad a little bit, a little bit. We, you know, it's interesting because my brother Nick and I approached 9/11 differently for a long time. He would feed into a lot of the conspiracy stuff and all the, all the, the background stuff, which opened my eyes to a lot of things too. He's very research oriented and he's smart. He's very smart and so, he opened my eyes to a lot of things that I was not aware of. I had a different approach to it and I think that I don't know. I don't talk to him about what he remembers. I probably should. To this day, you don't really talk to him. No, I talk to my brother a lot. Yeah, but I'm saying you don't really talk to him about what he remembers. No. It's hard. I don't know. Guys can be different. I don't have sisters, right? It's like my two youngest brothers don't remember anything. They will sometimes ask questions, but it's hard. I think that's hard for them too because they don't have, they don't have a memory. They don't remember it. So, three months obviously doesn't at all, but the three year old doesn't remember your dad at all. Maybe a little bit. Maybe small things. They share a very similar path. I mean, we all share the same passions my dad had, but like my brother, Michael, really, my dad was obsessed with cars and Michael was like that too. And like, no, it has very knowledgeable facts about them and all that stuff. Can spot what that is when he sees it drive by, whatever. But no, he doesn't. It's just hard. I don't know. My story became very public. And I think that was kind of hard for them. I'll speak, I won't speak for them, but I'll, I'll, I'll assess that I think it was hard for them. Harder than maybe they let on to believe that your story became, yeah. My story, our family story became public. Okay. You know, I don't think, to my knowledge, any of them have finished my book. I think it's very challenging for them to read. Truthfully, my mom read it, my stepdad read it, but I don't think any of my brothers have finished it. Wait, so did your story really go public like through this book? - Yeah. - You were sent, okay. - Yeah. - And you wrote that in 2020. - Now, I actually finished it in 2017. Didn't get published until 2020. The long journey. What made you want to do that? - I guess like right now, sub 15 years later. - Well, so I journaled since I was 10 years old. My mom's brother, who I'm very close with, my uncle, is my godfather. He gave me a journal for Christmas, the year after 9/11. And he described, so he wrote this whole note and said, "I have stacks of these journals throughout the years, "you know, try to write it in every night." And actually, I take that back. It was the first Christmas after 9/11. And he just basically encouraged me to write. So I did. And I would write every night in that journal. And then there was a period of my life where I stopped, and then I continued and would stop and continue. So I dealt with drug addiction. We'll get probably into all that. But I started speaking at schools and I was about nine months over. And I'd go into schools and I would never really go fully into my deep wounds of my story. Kind of service level described what happened to my dad, what happened to me, getting sober, et cetera. And one day I went into a school and I got fully honest and I basically shared everything. I didn't plan what I wanted to say. I just let it all out. And the senior, I'll never forget, came up to me after and he said, "I want you know, I want through something very similar." And you inspired me and you should consider writing a book. That's something I started writing the book. - That's cool. - And the book changed. I mean, believe me, like it was a lot-- - We got it right here, sway. - Yeah, sway. - We'll have to be down below for people to check it out. - It changed a lot. I caught a lot of stuff. I rewrote a lot of stuff. My first editor was like, you're not getting deep. You're kind of just like reflecting too much. You need to like really tap back into that nine-year-old. And you could say you don't, you know, you didn't have it all figured out 'cause you didn't, right, in 14-year-old voice and all that stuff. And so it was challenging for me. And it opened up a lot of things inside of me that I had suppressed for a long time. So my brother is basically, there's a lot of stuff about my dad and there that, you know, now like, people who never really knew, now they know, you know. And that was hard. - What are some of those things? - Yeah, just like, for an example, when they found my dad, like they found, I guess they just might as well just say, like they found his lower half first. That's how he was identified. Like I said, his wallet, his keys were in his pocket, his phone, and like his wallet was, not burnt or anything like that, it was kind of charred, but like, it was very waterlogged. And there was photos of me and my brothers in the wallet, which are stained, watermarks, you know, they have water stains, there was money in there. - Do you guys have that stuff? - We have it all, yeah, we have it all. His business card, his credit card, all the stuff is in there. And so like that type of stuff I think was hard, you know. Especially my younger brothers who didn't maybe know. My mom sat me and my brother Nick down and my dad's office we called it, his little home office and told us that he wasn't coming home. Like that's, she delivered that news when they found them. But they didn't tell her until a week later, right? - Some say a week later is when she sat us down and said like he's not coming home. - And you remember that very well. - That is like the last piece around, that and I have like bits of his funeral. And that's it. - How'd you react like once she finally? - I broke down immediately, crying. So you give you an example, right? Like Nick, me and Nick were different as kids. And he said my dad's dead. Okay. And he got up off the chair and he walked out of the room. Me, I started historically crying. And I think Nick has worked through his, you know, his grief with the two. It took us years for us to connect and share tears together over it. Years. Yeah, I would say. I mean, it was just traumatic events that affect people differently for sure, you know. And I have like friends who, like I have one of my best friends to this day, his dad died at Cannes as well. And I told them that I went to the Memorial and I met with that medical examiner lady. And he asked me, he's like, I'm just curious, like why? He's like, why? He's like, I don't really, I don't care to know. Like I've dealt with my own way of ways around it and what I think may have happened. He didn't tell me what he thinks happened to his dad. But he's like, I just, I don't know, like what do you gain from it? And I'm like, I don't know, but I wanted to do it. Did you find friction with that between the two of you and noticing how differently you grieved? Was that, was that the friction? Yeah, probably. And I think that's what he struggled with was that I was so open about it. I don't know if you have any similar experiences to yourself, but like it just, people react to it differently. I mean, I especially with, in general, that's probably one of the hardest dynamics I think, in my opinion, just from the familial aspect of it. Yeah. Relationships in general have different everyone handles everything and that could be rub people the wrong way for me or the other person here based on how you're handling it. Now, we are talking different age ranges here with your families respectively, but if I remember correctly, David, you were the youngest, right? Yeah, two older sisters are 70 years older than me if I have an ass. Okay, so two older sisters and you were the oldest, yeah. And you were about 13? 12, yeah. 12? No. And you were nine. So again, like it's a different spectrum completely, but it's interesting, like as you grow up, you were the young one at that point. And you know, your sisters are navigating through this, but as you're growing up, you're the oldest one. And you have two siblings who really can't remember. Shit, you know, they were way too young. That's like a, these are two very different experiences of how to later deal with it. So like, David, would you say that as once you got past the period where it was just kind of blacked out to you, like your sisters were there to really talk with you over the years, or was that also a slow process of actually having communication there? I think it was a slow process. Like again, a lot of the pieces I had to put together, kind of what you said in regards to asking people questions. Like I asked my mom, my sister's questions. And one thing my sister said in our family episode is like, yeah, I don't really remember us talking about it for the first few weeks. But then there was a point my mom reminded me that she would have give us the opportunity to speak when we were eating dinner. I would just sit there, not say anything and observe. And that was somehow I took it for a long time, which is why I kind of do what I do now, because I felt the guilt of not even a guilt, I didn't express much. I didn't get it out. But I was raised by three women, and which I think is a big difference as being raised, having men around me or boys around me, because obviously we deal with it differently, but women are a little bit more expressive for the most part. are more gentle around these things, not to generalize any of it, but having the women's perspective was a big deal for me. But a lot of my journey, again, was forgetting, remembering, asking questions, and as it became a man, things started opening up and understanding it. And for one of the things I did, which if you seem like you were doing, was I was watching the footage over and over again in the early teens, looking for every angle. And I wonder if it's partially because we hadn't, we didn't have so many, we had no answers, even 25 fucking years later, we still haven't answers. But besides that, we just, I wanted to know what he experienced, what did he suffer? Was there pain? Was he a hero? Was he scared? And I'm anxious I'm never going to get. So I just wonder if I wanted to see it, to have some control over finding out what's going on, getting information. Everything was already public. I wanted to be there. So a lot of my process was diving into my home, but I did have a support system. It was just different for each of us. Did you, this is like kind of a strange question, but when you were going to try to figure that out, to see if you could find something that like puts you there and figures out what he was feeling, what he was thinking, if you could even get an answer to that, did you feel like going into that, that that would change things for you, or it was strictly just because you wanted to know. Honestly, I did it because I wanted to make myself cry. I think that was the initial thing. I knew I wanted to get some shit out of me and I knew that would make me cry if it didn't. That's a whole other problem, but I just wanted to get it out and I wanted to sit in it. I feel like I defined it later in life as kind of an exposure therapy that I didn't realize I was doing, but I kind of did by putting myself there, by forcing myself to watch it, by letting it come out and not running from it or looking away from the screen and jumping to my mom to hug her. It was just sitting in it, letting the cry out, being scared, trying to put myself there because I wanted to be there, oddly. And by doing this, I just forced myself to feel it and see what came out. And then afterwards I kind of just take a breath and then I realize I'm still here. As corny as I sound as I was kind of what it was, I just wanted to cry and I wanted to put myself through it. And even 25 years later, I don't seek the footage as much, but when it pops up, which is very often, it's just like, I watch it and then I get that feeling back a little bit, but at the same time, I kind of want that feeling. You know what? And I'll say this, just being someone from this part of the world, where you did know people who were in the towers at least, like there were a couple guys from my town who died there and like New York's right here and it's somewhere that, you know, I call home now and everything. Like, we experience thinking about that day in a different way than I mean, you do guys in a way different way, but I mean, like people who didn't personally have family members in there experience thinking about that day in a way different way, no disrespect than someone who lives in Utah or something like that, you know? And so that is the one thing because I've had my own journey with going back to that day and trying to piece things together and I still don't know what the fuck happened there. I think we would all like to know. But, you know, I would find that when, when I would have the conversation over the years of people who were from this part of the world, there was, I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but there was a little bit more of a reverence for the day itself rather than when you're having those conversations about what really happened with someone who's not from this part of the world. I'm not blaming those people, but like they don't have that emotional attachment to it. And even I do to say nothing of what you guys have to it as well. Like, is that frustrating sometimes, you know, like how people will talk about it? Yeah, I mean, I live in South Florida. I don't even, I'm going to ask David too, like what people in L.A. think, but like, yes, two hour flights out and I think the people down there. This is my first time being up north in four years for the memorial, for like this time of year. Normally, yeah, I mean, yeah, the last time I was up here was, I think, 2020. Like I'm here a lot, but for 9/11, it was 2022. So which was actually probably good for me in a way, but people down there don't get it, you know, and also to like kids now, we're not even born. So they don't understand. I'm going to schools, I'm like, yeah, like her. And then what I'm going to schools and these kids are just, it's just so foreign to them and they only know the here of things to like meme cultures. I've had people reach out to me about, like, loss footage and my knowledge of loss footage and I'm like, it doesn't exist. Wait, loss footage. There's a lot of like people who suspect there's like a lot of loss footage, like a people who were videoing that day. Yeah, there's like people, there's these, these folklore videos that people think are real that occurred that didn't really occur. There's one that's very, it's all over these 9/11 Reddit pages. Haven't pulled it. Yeah. One of them is called, what was it called? It's not that guy who's watching, it's like I was supposed to be there. No, LOL Superman, they call it LSM and it's supposedly a video of someone falling from the building and landing in the plaza. Never existed, but people have reached out to me because they heard my story about looking at the footage and I'm like, I was pulling videos from LimeWire before YouTube was like fully, YouTube came out in LimeWire. That's why I was pulling videos from LimeWire. I was down there doing videos on LimeWire. Yes, music. Music. There's videos too. And YouTube was, what, 2006? Yeah, that's just sounds, yeah, it's 2006, I've been in. Fresh, my freshman year of high school and I remember pulling videos and like, I never saw anything like that. So anyway, I've had people reach out to me about that type of stuff and I'm like, if this is what they're pulling from what they're hearing on this podcast or that story or reading this article, whatever, I feel like they've lost the plot in many ways. But there's just a, I don't know, they're just not sensitive to what happened, right? It's history. I mean, it's history, but it's also, you know, you go to the memorial, it's people. Obviously, I don't mean to preach you guys, but like, it's many people who in an instant were gone. And so there has to be a way to talk about both things. And if you got to put them even in separate lenses, fine, but like, that's just always, that's always been a tough line for me. Because like I said, like, I can't imagine it for you guys, but like, for me, it's like, my life, I can like chart it back to that day. Well, it's interesting to you, but the pool is that the people's names, I'm not sure if you know this, the people's names are strategically placed around whether, canner for jail people as an example are next to the people that they worked with, that were friends with. And they pieced everyone together. And same thing goes for the fire departments and all of it. And they're pieced, they're placed on that portion of the pool by the people they were closest with. So not everyone knows that. But they did. There's so many. A lot of layers that people don't know. They did do. I'm not sure how you guys feel overall. It seems like you like it, but from my perspective, like as far as how they did the whole area right there, it's pretty amazing. It's beautiful. And then there's the family room, which I didn't know about until 2021, that's like private, right? Private family room. You can go in there. You can write a letter. You can leave a photo or whatever, which I've gone in there a few times. And then obviously the room where the, it's behind the big blue wall, no day shall race from the memory of time, that's where the repository is. And so what I learned was when I went in the room and I looked at the file, there's two rows. One row is of remains that I've yet to be identified. And the other row is remains that have been identified, but the families don't want calls anymore. So the families do not want calls. Because there's more and more research and there's more and more ways that they've identified people. Like last, I think it was last year, there was like five new people that were identified. How did they do it? Just new DNA testing. So if I'm understanding from something almost microscopic in a way, or yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, they have the whole row, like you said, of unidentified remains of a district, one by one, I guess, putting it whenever they got. Can we Google that deep recent remains identified? It's like a year. I want to say it was a year ago from 9/11 and how they did it. And I think that's wild. I don't know. I mean, when I went to the same woman, I gave her my information. Yeah. Yeah. ABC News 9/11 victim identified using first of its kind genetic genealogy technique, an adult female was formally identified using the technique. Let's go down. This was even more recent than I was. Yes. This is August 23rd, 2026. It's like two weeks ago, 25 years after the September 11th, 2001 in Texas, New York City still working to formally identify all of the nearly 3,000 people killed at the WTC. Now for the first time, the city's office of the chief medical examiner and the NYPD detective Bureau have identified a 9/11 victim using genetic genealogy, which combines DNA testing with family tree research. The family of the newly identified victim, who was an adult female, declined to publicly come forward. She is the 1,654th to be formally identified, which means we have over. We have over like 1,300, isn't it 2,977? Yeah. So like 1,300 people still not identified. So let's go down, Steve. It's a breakthrough. Dr. Jason Graham, New York City's chief medical examiner, told ABC News, I'm delighted to be able to say that we've now applied new methods to the WTC identification efforts. And we have a new identification for the first time in 25 years using new methods for instant investigative genetic genealogy. Such a breakthrough was unimaginable 25 years ago because the methodology did not exist. The technology really wasn't there. There's a lot of good future with genealogy. Forensics investigative genetic genealogy has helped police solve the long-term unidentified the cold cases more recently, the medical Examiner's office in the police department have applied it to the World Trade Center victim ID Dr. Jenner Genody and is the woman that we met with oh, that's who you met with yeah, she's super she's super sweet. Yeah, super sweet. So she's She's with the she's a forensic anthropologist in New York medical examiner's office So she does other things obviously with the city not just deal. No, I don't know actually But she really literally is the one who's there all the time office and she goes downtown to the memorial and she this is what she does She's been interviewed several times over the years by ABC. She's a guy that's great. Yeah, she's so gentle about her gentle Yeah, I just sit down one on one sit down look at the file and Just breaks very patient like I had to take a couple couple breaks and She's very patient and you went alone. Yeah, I went alone. You went alone as well, right? Yeah, I was by myself. Yeah, so how did In the months afterwards like how do you remember like your mom obviously she had four kids including a literal infant like how how did How did she deal with this? I mean my mom was 36 years old so and like you talk about the age I'm 34 my wife is 37 7 Yeah, oh You should figure that one out by 37 Run that back make sure we get that real quick. I'm 34 my wife is 37. Okay. All right So present pretty big this year. Yeah, exactly. So as I've gotten older and I have a son now 9 month old Thank you, and that's where it's become a little bit more trippy for me is I'm like my dad was not much older than me And it's just weird. So like I look at my mom in the different lens now Hey, my mom grieves like she was going through a hard time, you know There were times that I didn't understand her grief. I resented her for it. You resented her for it because I just couldn't understand What I was I come home from school and she would be sitting in the same spot every day pretty much crying and It affected me and she knows this But it really affected me because You can't how do you console your mom? Like you don't know what to say. I didn't know what to say to my mom like I would give her a hug and kiss and tell her I loved her and You can't take away the pain Like you wish you could and you try everything you can But you just can't and I have my own pain. So did you feel like you had to grow up overnight? I've yeah, and I was told by my dad's dad my grandfather my no-no that I needed to be the man at the house I was 10 years old when he told me that and I felt this he didn't mean harm by it, but he did It was just hard to be the oldest of four boys and like feel like you have to be a father figure and a brother and Like sort of like a pseudo husband Straight like weird. Yeah, no, I don't say and like So I struggled and then when I was going through struggles as I got like a little bit older than that Like I felt like I was letting them all down because I couldn't even take care of myself and Let alone be a role model What about your friends like in school, you know where I imagine they were kind of there for you Oh, yeah, my friends are amazing, but What do you say what do you say? Yeah Like they I think that they they struggle with what to say because So many people would say like I'm so sorry You know they can't say I know what you're going through Right, but they would try so hard to level with you and there's just no way to do it Um So they try to take your mind off of it and things like that, but I mean, it's just it's hard and so and all my friends do my dad so Yeah, I mean I don't know I I it was hard for me to grasp what my mom was going through and as I've gone older I have an appreciation because I understand that she lost the love of her life suddenly She's fucked was fucked me up a lot over the years my dad had a vacation day scale to her September 12th Oh And then you have like the sleep in thing on that day and there's a lot of people too who like the washer broke or something happened that day And they happen to be home and it's like yeah, and then I think about what would have happened to my father if he was not there I Think about that and I and I as Crazy as the sounds like I he would never have been the same. He would never have been the same I've watched I've never heard someone say that before yeah, I know that's but that's the way I look at it Yeah, that's the way I try to look at I guess, but it's because I've watched The people that I am close to some of them who worked in the World Trade Center But he worked above those floors too where everybody perished and if he was supposed to be wow like my dad had a colleague her name is Gloria She's very nice woman and she wasn't there and so I remember my mom telling me she got in contact with Gloria Like soon after the plane hit or Gloria called her or something like that and my mom was like, you know Where is he and she said I wasn't there. I was off today so And I just know that it affected the people who who survived it affected them, you know, I mean it's just Undeniable like you lost the entire firm that was there. So How it would have changed them You would have changed them Obviously, there's a lot of questions around all who was involved that day and where money came from and like we said We're gonna talk about that lawsuit and a little bit and all that but do you guys remember the moment when you Found out, you know who they were saying did this and what it was about and did at nine years old like did you Grasp like oh I'll just attack like Al Qaeda. Yeah, I mean, that's what they threw on the newspaper so quickly after Yeah, 30 minutes after they received some of the 11 exactly Yeah, I mean, I had like my way of dealing with it with my friends like we would take Have these printouts of a summon lot and like take air soft guns and like shoot them Like you know, just like as I got a little bit older But it's probably like your age at the time like 12. I remember doing that like when did I had Rob in that chair a couple months ago? Oh, no shit. I have it my buddy got me assigned bin Laden near a times cover with his signature on it I think a big bullet hole through it or some shit really everyone likes to fight over that I I do think Rob fired that shot. Yeah, I do think he did. Yeah, it's like an unpopular opinion these days Because there's like so much internet drama on that, but I really believe he fired that shot out. Yeah It's a good feeling or should he saying? I Believe him. Yeah, I do. I mean, you know how it is like you said across from people for a long time I don't mean you could read it in half hours Yeah, I think you did. Yeah But you know, so you knew it was the you know This guy has probably been a lot and yeah planned it and that was like enemy Numerono for you I mean yet time when did the first it was a Fahrenheit 9/11 was at the first that was a big thing right the first one pretty much Yeah, it was that Yep, yeah, so I feel like it was around then or a little like whenever I first saw that where I started maybe thinking That makes sense maybe there's some more to it the first few years. I didn't know my ass from elbows I was yeah, I didn't think that tracks at the age of when we were shooting BB guns at Airsoft guns out of some of them on but yeah, no exactly And then obviously there's been so much stuff that's come out over the years then loose change came out I think and which I know there was some 2005. Okay. Yeah, I was gonna say 2006 There were some Elements of that that I believe we're proven to be false, but a lot of it partially true But even just like besides just whatever it was true whatever was false just the general idea that people were questioning it Oh, yeah, yeah, that's when I was like, okay people are asking questions and that was just kind of the River from there. There are a lot of people though to who were there that day or lost people that day who Can't even talk about that and I fully understand it because they're like they don't want to think about it They don't know about it. I was just talking with a guy last week who is long-time firefighter in New York He joined after 9/11 and he's like you can't even bring it up in the firehouse and he respects that and understands that But you guys are all so you were young both of you when it happened and then you're growing up You see some of these things come out in the media as well and you're like wait a minute Sorry rabie. I had a bunch of people that were maybe funding something and we're not talking about that and then you go and like you're doing your investigations, but you know At what point Or did you ever find yourself? I don't want to go too far with it But like going down the rabbit home being like wait a minute or was it more like? You're trying to find out more if that makes sense. Don't have the conspiracy theories. Yeah I don't believe I don't believe that the government planned 9/11 What I believe is that they could have prevented it and they didn't Mm-hmm I don't think that they knew the extent of what was gonna happen. I think I'm with you. That's where I stand now I mean, I'll talk to you for hours about Saudis and all that stuff and we'll get to that but And I think that they they use they use 9/11 as a way to of course invade That I can operation northwards. Yeah, that I will Save for sure You know, we've got a good crisis, go to waste. - Correct, yeah, yeah. - I had the fear mongered and they use that patriotic unity, which is country lacks now, as a way to like, let's get the enemy. - That's right. - I had a lawyer on the show, I saw I didn't drop the episode yet, but one of the guys representing Motley Rice, one of those guys on the show just to chat up with them. And one thing he said that I think makes sense. He was like, I started questioning him and just seeing what he wanted to say. And he was like, you know what they didn't do well then and he's not sure they still do well now, is the intercommunication, or one department communicates with another. And they're communicating what information they have. It's like one department might want to be a hero and keep certain information. Either that reason, or they just don't do a well job communicating. And so I think it's a schmorgasport of that, where maybe it was just turning a blind shoulder, there's also the nuance of maybe they just fucked up. - Yeah, I can't. - But maybe they fucked up on purpose. I don't know, there's a million different angles, but the idea of just not communicating between departments and who knew what. Who knew what's the best thing for sure. If you ever read The Looming Tower, like that's, there's, regardless of whether you think that's only part of the story of the whole story, it's a piece of it for sure. And that whole like even just looking at an agency to agency, C-I-A-N-F-B-I, that was a real like Chinese wall between them that shouldn't have been there. And God, I always forget his name. John, what is it, John McLean? Nah, John McLean's from fucking Die Hard. - That's Die Hard, that's Die Hard. - John, the man who knew, type in the man who knew, Dief, and we'll get it about the towers, FBI, John O'Neal. - John O'Neal, that's it. - People with a photo of him? - Yeah, so this guy, I've seen, I've heard about him, but I'm trying to picture him. - Well, they later made a mini-series out of it, where Jeff Daniels played him based on the book. But this guy, John O'Neal, he was a controversial guy at FBI. People either loved him or hated him. He'd kind of rub people the wrong way sometimes, 'cause he was a real bulldog, and not a perfect guy morally off the court. But he was pounding the table about bin Laden for years and years and years, and then he ends up kind of unceremoniously getting forced into retirement from the FBI in August 2001. And he takes a job, I think, on August 17th, 2001, I want to say, as the head of security at the World Trade Center, and he died in the towers that he had warned, we're gonna be hit. - Holy shit. - And it's an insane story, but there's a really sick, sick testimony line that came out during the hearings of this guy, Michael Shore, I believe that's his name, who was on the bin Laden desk at CIA, who fucking hated John. Now, John dies in the towers, and he's testifying, I don't know, two years later, three years later, and you think, bygones be bygones, you know, obviously this is horrible, whatever, but the guy's being cross-examined by the senator, whoever it was, and he says, you hated John O'Neill or something like that, and yada, yada, yada, yada. And Michael Shore leans in and says, no, I'd like to make a correction. I said, the only good thing to come out of that day is that those two towers fell on him. - Jesus, wow. - And I'm just like, fuck you, dude. Like there's just, there's a line with some things that I've had as so far past it, but you hear stories like that. You talk about like your dad's premonition and stuff like that. This guy was also like investigating it. And he was telling, it's on record, he was telling people. And then, there was a guy in the South Tower, Rick, Rescue Relo, I think, has lots of things. - Yes. - Yeah, I met his wife, very sweet lady. He knew, he suspected it. Like he was running the whole entire company. We're from Morgan Stanley, he was running the whole company through security, evacuations. He's a head of security over there, because he suspected that there was gonna be another attack after '93, and he saved all those people because of how prepared they were. - Yeah, Rick was squarling, Rick, Rick. - Yeah, I can't believe I just can't remember. - I'm gonna take a quick rest 9/11 and look him up. I wanna make sure we get that right too. - Rick got the rest of the security wasn't he? - He was a head of security in Morgan Stanley. - Rick is telling me. - Rick was squarrying, yeah, I think that's it. - That's him, yeah. - So you got a crazy story, and yeah, I met his wife and his daughters about five or six years ago. - What's that like to meet people that you haven't met? - So I wanted a story like that, and I'm sure David could attest this too. I wanted one of those stories, and I got very close with Allison Crowther too. - Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And I wanted a story like that, and you're just never gonna get that fucking story. And that's like, that's a difficult part about. - What do you mean you wanted this story? - I wanted like, okay, I, some, he, I don't know, some good Samaritan, yeah, exactly. Some good Samaritan actor, my dad did, or something like, some last person he spoke to. I don't know, just something more. - He just wanna know what the hell he experience. - And that's the, and David said earlier, which is so true. When you see the footage, like to understand that there were people that were dying in the building, right? And then you just don't, like, it's a public display of death. The only actual real death that you see, when you see the buildings hit the building, the planes hit the building, or the people falling. You don't see what's happening inside the building. You don't see what all those people are doing in those upper floors, and all the commotion, and all the chaos that was probably ensuing. And that's what I really struggled with, like wondering what happened in there. And then there's all the documentaries that come out, and they try to do these depictions and portrayals of, you know, playing the narrative, but like, how accurate could that really, really be? - I'll tell you what I do now, for sure. I could go to bed with this, and be 100% certain about is that all the floors above there were everyone died. There are so many amazing heroic attempts and stories that happen that we will never know about. - Correct, correct. - For sure. - You happen, and you actually mentioned one earlier, I've talked about this a bunch, where you talk about, you see all the people in the windows, and you don't see the people behind them. And the chances are the people behind them, in many cases, actually, I hope this was the case, 'cause this would've been the best way to go, died of smoke inhalation, rather than, you know, the horror of actually falling through the building, and you wonder how many of those people said, "No, you take the spot." - Right, right. - Little things like that, and I bet it was a lot of them. There's a lot of horrible, sad stories that I've heard over the years, and just things like, by chance, things, you know, and pregnant people at Canter, things like that's terrible, just horrible stories. - I mean, you know, Michael Hinkson's story, right? The blind man who survived? - Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Actually, it's crazy, too. The blind man who survived, this dog Rosalie. - Right, right. - He let him out of the building, obviously the bunch of people, but his dog guided him, essentially, out of the World Trade Center who survived, and he's on upper floor like the 70s, maybe. - Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. - And for, by the way, you mentioned it. So we should all about that, too. For people who haven't seen, there's an unbelievable feature that ESPN's done for many years on Wells Crowder. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - And what he did because he was a, he was a really terrific lacrosse player, I believe, and all that, but for people who aren't familiar with that story, can you tell them what he did in building that thing? - He was a volunteer firefighter as well. And so basically, he was in South Tower, and I think he was in the lobby, or he got to us. I don't know, all the ins and outs of it, but basically, he always had this red band-ass pocket that his dad gave him. And when the smoke started going, he put the band-ass over his face, and he saved about, I don't know, 10 or 15 people, if you wanna look it up, but over the few days after, there was all these reports of these survivors saying, this man and the red band-ass saved me. He led me to safety, he did this, he did that, and then his parents showed a photo, and it was him. And he saved a decent amount of people, and then he just, he went back up. He went back up. - Yeah, two people, that's unbelievable. - They know of, and so. - That is the one thing about this days like this, that are just such a total loss in every way. They also somehow highlight the best of the human spirit, too. - Yeah, and that's the beauty of when you see the photos to people leaving the building. There's no discrimination, there's no color, there's no racism, it's just people helping each other. - Yeah, you mentioned this a few minutes ago, and unfortunately, it's a great point. But like, there was no more united time than September 12th, 2001 in this country, and to think about it, there was like the most, at the time, most contested election of all time, right? Eight months before that, they like went to court. You know, you would think like things were kind of divided, and in an instant, everyone came together, and the sad part about that to me is, it takes like an event like that for people to see each other as humans, or be like, now we can disagree on a few things, but let's agree on the things that make us fucking human and American. I think it's crazy to me. - And now, 25 years later, I'm seeing in the comments section, almost the opposite now, where people are reminding people of the United NIST, but also reminding people of the divisiveness that we're now seeing in the comments section because of the new elected mayor, and people having problems with that. And now they're saying, New Yorkers are so sad, they forgot 9/11, they forgot 9/11, which is, they're pointing to the United NIST that we have, but also now creating divisiveness by talking about that. - Exactly, which is just, yeah, interesting. And I think that's, I feel like the city in many ways, like they lost the plot, like a long time ago, in a way. But you're right, because I think that people highlight things that shouldn't be talked about as much, and then it creates that divide. - Yeah, like I literally posted a video, I got my sister's permission, it was the most emotional, Thank you very much. triggering video that I have, because there's a video of my sister days after a Middletown New Jersey, I guess a news crew came to town and offered families the opportunity to hold signs up. And my mom didn't want to go from what she recollects, my sister Jacqueline for older sister, for whatever reason, like not let's just go, let's just go. And I don't remember this, but you see me in the backwards with like my fake ghetto S slanted back with time. And my mom and I got a forward and I got a phone sleeves and thanks to you. I was trying to be cool. So is a video of worst transition to the worst video of all time, because it's so emotional, but my sister just with a news reporter holding a patch together photos of my dad with his name. So I look for the the deep chain that used to wear this that and the other photo of me and my dad on and my sister's just crying hysterically begging for God for my dad to come home. And I saw you could find it on the internet if you want. But it's in post it down there. Yeah, I posted it again. It's it's posting it for many reasons. This is a reminder and it was a lot to post, but I'm sure we did it. And a whole point telling the story is because the comment section again is just people are just there's a lot of beauty in there and solace. That's not the exactly what I'm looking for. But I do think the power of sharing that video is hoping to bring the remembrance of that day, where it really is. The details of it. But then there's people just commenting on it just completely. Yeah. Reflecting over just find is what it is. I'm like, man, it's outside of me us in many ways. It's a historical event, but it just shows how like the dissensitivity is different. You were talking about people in Utah. It's just different when you're outside of this, like talking about World War II in 1970. Like, I mean, obviously that's a war global different, but you're just attached from it in many ways. And it's that video and the comment section sometimes just an example of that. And it's a, and again, it doesn't, it doesn't piss me off. I'm just like shaking it because I think humans are idiots. But it kind of is what it is, but it's just fascinating. It's like a big social experiment. Sometimes we notice the way people handle it comparatively to maybe us or being local. Well, just this, this is a part I always remind myself of. First of all, half of them aren't real. Half of the other half are retarded. And then on top of that, you also got to look like unless it's something really bad where someone has like some unhinged opinion and you literally see a big ratio, comments are such a small percentage of what's actually there. Like I'll see some of the nastiest comment sections I'll look at might be, you know, whatever, a thousand comments. And they're mostly all attacking something about somebody. And then you'll see like the video has a hundred and two thousand likes. Yeah, or something like that. And you realize most and the like ratio is like 97.8. And you realize most people are like, oh, yeah, no, that makes sense. And then there's a few people like, fuck you, die. Yeah. You know, sometimes it's hard because you're like, Jesus Christ, you know, but you got to put that in perspective all the time. I've looked at and I was told long, long, long, long time ago, I'm going to give you this recommendation. Don't look at reviews of your book ever. But I've looked at reviews of my book that just came out today. Yeah, literally. It's like QVC for 9/11. That's a great title. By the way, you're not dead yet. Love it. Beautiful. Literally today. That's crazy. That's very, very, very weird. Yeah. And people, their comments about the book and just like their takes on me. And then I've looked at articles that are, you know, I think it's Fox. What's it called? Fox News originals, like a short thing I did a few years ago and reading the comment section and that on that page. And it's like, yeah, like, yeah. People just say, like, best up things. Dude, like, I mean, one day, one dude wrote a review of my podcast. The one thing that dropped me down to like 4.9 or some shit. And he was any, and he gave me a one star based on the one episode he listened to. I'm like, you don't have to like the episode. You're judging 260 episode, the whole show based on one episode. I don't know if they know what they're doing. I'm like, it is what it is. But humans are just, we're just, we're something. Yeah, you win some. You lose some on the internet. Yes. I got it for sure. It's just, it's harder when you have, you know, when it, when it's something subjectively personal and something like that, like that video, which do we have that up, Dave? Are you on, was this one yours? I don't think I didn't want it on my page page. So it might have been a trial. It's on Facebook for sure. Look at my ugly mug. Oh, you did it. Yeah, I just, I just, I was probably not putting it on my main feed. I don't know. I just haven't done it. But no, it was on Facebook. It was posted. If you go to Doc's Facebook, it's fucking it. But that, that bangs me up way more than the footage. Yeah. Because I've watched the footage so many times, but it's fucking sister letting her soul out. It's the raw. Yeah. This is alive. You'll find it on Facebook. There's a few posts down, but yeah, I, yeah. And you guys, you were telling me before when, when we got here, this is the first time you two have been in the room together. Yeah. So you've known, how long have you known each other now? At least this year, probably year, right? Yeah. Wow. So even all this year's later, like you can meet people that experience the same exact thing as you. That's such a wild thing. And a similar time company, same floor, same company, same floor, same and similar reaction three years apart. And like, I used to think I was so fucked up and unique in that I looked at the footage. And then all these years later, I find it like so many people like us that do it, that did it too. Yeah. And I became hard into it where I wouldn't react to it for a long time. And now I've reverted back to like, if I do see it, which I do see it, I do have a, I don't always cry, but I have, I feel it for sure. I didn't feel it for a long time. Well, that's the importance of when there are, looking, yeah, but just the whole sharing stories and stuff like that, whether you have a freaking book or not, it's just sharing stories of these experiences because outside of even 9/11, you find similarities, which is comforting. And then you find the differences as well, which you learn something from that too. Because if we could talk to a hundred other people that were 9 to 12, they lost their dad. We're going to find the similarities. We're going to find the differences too. Not one, it's just a different fingerprint for everyone. Yeah. Absolutely. How long ago did you get married, Matt? Almost two years ago. Okay. Because I wonder if, you know, I'm not sure the timeline of like, how long it was where it was harder for you to feel things. But the fact that like, now you've had these, and you mentioned something like this earlier, you've had like the last couple of years you got married and had your own kid and you're coming up towards the age your dad was. Right. There's something very, in like a good way, like evolutionary about that where you're like, whoa, I'm in his shoes now. Well, I also had to, like my wife's from Miami. My wife's actually from Cuba, but she came in when she was 10 years old. A Cuban from Miami? Cuban from Miami. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No. It doesn't happen. That's for evolution. It's like a New Yorker in Span on. Exactly. So she, you know, she was 12. And yeah, dude, like she has no, it's just different for her. It's different for her. But I'm saying like, your dad was, he was a, he was a young father, right? You went up in this career and stuff. Right. Right. 38 years old. Right. 33, 34. Yeah. You know, what I was trying to say is that I think it's allowed me to, the things I used to frustrate me a lot more about people's, people in Utah and all their like reactions. Utah is just getting a lot of hate. Utah's getting hate, I guess. But I've learned to appreciate that not everyone had the same experience. Yes. We have a unique experience. So I've tried to show my wife through my own journey. Why it was so different. Not because I lost my dad, but like for all my other friends who were, who grew up in the town, I grew up in and went through it as well. Like it changed us. For sure. You know, and that's just what I've tried to appreciate is that not everyone has that experience, you know. But yes, I, yeah, you're right. Like as I got to my dad's age, I'm sort of filling that role in the sense. All right. We have this video that David was talking about. So here come the tears. Play this for a quick. This is your sister. Yeah. I'll do my back. How many days after? Was that again, David? I was like a day or two, two days or so. But even besides the personal take on that, the impact that he said, that was a town. You know, I mean, like your town lost people, middle town lost, 30 plus people was a town. That was a big one. Yeah, big one, of course. But like every area, people, it's just, sometimes I look at like these events is bigger than me. It's bigger than our experience. But that doesn't do window our personal experience and connection. It's not like hurrah, hurrah kind of thing. But it's just bigger. Yeah. It's just bigger. It's way bigger than that. And it's just something that I've took me a lot to consider. Sometimes I feel like I was guilty of almost being too honed in on my experience. I'm what I was going to do was boys, but like my grandmother lost a son when she's in her 70s or whatever, eight close to 80s at the time, if he was and my aunt lost her brother, cousins lost an uncle. It's like this is onion and web of the experience. And again, that applies to death in general, just in fact, it's not just you not 11 experience, but the 911 experience is a unique experience. And it's just bigger. It's outside of myself. And I'm just going to take it for what it is sometimes. Yeah. Over the next year, you know, obviously the blur of the let of the few weeks after it is an odyssey that you can't even really put yourself back there. That's just insane to even try to deal with that at the ages you guys were. But over the next year, as you tried to return to life and go to school, have your new normal. Obviously, it's an extremely difficult time. Like, do you remember that well or is that also kind of a blur? The rest of fourth grade for me was a blur. I remember going to fifth grade to this day. My favorite teacher was my fifth grade teacher. She was and it was like my first year try to try to be normal. But then it's like you get to the first year anniversary. And then it's like, remember that I remember in the first year. When I saw in fourth grade, like six months, and then it's like nine months. Later and like you're just like that was a blur to me. But I remember my mom like saying that, oh, it's been six months or whatever. And then like you get to the first year and then I don't know. It was, you didn't really go back to normal, I guess. You found a new normal, like that was what it was. Transition to a new normal because life was just different. And at the time, you had explained how you and your next younger brother was that neck or Michael, Nick, Nick. So you guys obviously like handled grief a little differently. And this was at that time. You guys aren't really talking about it. No, we would talk. But yeah, not that detailed, not that detailed. It's also very fresh. Like I feel like things really evolved after like four or five years later. The documentary started coming out. Things started coming out. Then the what the commission report came out like those first few years when the commission was with 2002, I want to say. I think it was like of the research of four, like they were doing it. They were doing it to maybe yeah. Yeah, let's get there. Right. I'm trying to remember when did it come out? Dave hearings were about 2003 and 2004. It was released in July. Okay. So release July 2004, but the hearings are all in the year building up to that. There's a movie or a documentary movie. I remember I'm drawn a blank on the name of it now. Michael Keaton, oh, yeah, worth worth. Yeah, that shit's why I was a crazy. It's a weird thing to watch. That's about a whole other thing. Looking at what our families, yeah, wait, worth, but why do I know that? I love my. So like that's what I'm saying. There's like layers to this. There's so many layers. That's what it really is a great movie. Wasn't dope sick. Not so long ago. Yeah, don't say it was all in 10 or points. Yeah. So what was worth about? It's about how the families each had a value essentially put on their level. Oh, I did see this. I'm sorry. I know I'm remembering it. Yeah. And there's an intricacies for the people who were like engaged or the people who weren't legal. Like there was like things like that where I mean, my uncle when he came in the pot, my dad's best friend. He brought it up. My dad is different than your dad having the vacation in September 12. But it reminded me of this. My dad was set up for a promotion. Like a big promotion where he was about to make a massive advance in his career. He was about to have his own desk, I believe, a trading just and that was to come. He was told it was going to come in the next few months or end of the year. And then 9/11 happened, but there was no record of that. And then that was like a whole needle and the haystack of when this whole worth thing. Can I know my mom talking about she's like, she looks, she's like, I don't fucking want it. She didn't want to do it. She didn't want the money. And but that was a whole calculation thing that one of those aftermath, the layers of it. When my mom keeps a lot of things and I went to look for my dad's signature for something. And then I saw paperwork that she saved and just unleashed this whole thing kind of with the work thing, just this paperwork to the bureaucracy, the, the administrative stuff that comes with death. And of course 9/11 adds extra layers to it. But just the administration that comes after someone dies in general was something I was so oblivious to. I was the, I, again, didn't know it asked for my elbow, but it's like, it's kind of like frustrating in my own aspect when I go down my own path. What did I do? What did I do? Was I a support? And I'm looking at all the things my mom had to do behind the scenes that she kept from us that was just part of the process. Yeah. And then you got the whole worth thing that just added a whole other thing to it. Yeah, they tried, they, with things, they put a price on life and it's, it's, I think it's one of the just strangest things we do as humans with that, you know? And it's like, so you have all these people die and you're like, well, there were jangers and there were CEOs. Right. Exactly. It's like, but they were all people loved by other people like what the fuck are we talking about? They all died the same way. It's a, if you want to look at it as just like a class action lawsuit, why is that if ever you were going to be socialist, this would be the moment, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, at the same time, what's the difference between someone has a life insurance? Like, how's that work? What I was going to say, too, then there was life insurance policies that weren't paying out if there wasn't a body or weren't what they found. There were things like that. Maybe then by proxy, you didn't have a death certificate. So that's right. Because we didn't get a death certificate until we was found and that was much later. That's cool. That was a good moment. Looking at the death certificate, like, let in the last year or two for me for the first time. And it had the reason for murder. I forget it. I think it said murder. I think it's terrorism. Yeah. But that was multiple for us. It was homicide caused by multiple long-forage trauma. That's another way. And when you think about it, look at our dad's, it's homicide. Our dads were killed. Yeah. Again, this is all, like, the layers of this not-carping on 9/11, it could really extrapolate this with our personal experience. Right. It's just, okay, me and my dad, it wasn't straight being buying to the head kind of thing, like, personal, but nevertheless, their dads were killed. Right. And that's one of the things I think about as one of the lessons, if you will, is the absurdity of which happened. One of my biggest things was, okay, so I 12 years old, my closest people could just die in a blink of an eye, end in that way. So we're talking about growing up, whether I grew up quick or not, it was just this ultimate realization that I had to either consciously or subconsciously understand, was, oh, no, this is- so this is life. This is what can happen in life. And then you have a choice of being paranoid the entire time for the rest of your life and erotic of, my mom could die, oh, this could happen, everything could go wrong in any second, or you could be aware of that, and then think, all right, then I got to squeeze everything out of this. Right. So we're the sacrifice. I don't want to learn. Fuck that lesson. But the reality of it is just the absurdity of which it happened, and then it could also hit you at home that directly just opens up the quote unquote reality of what life can hit with you with. But you could look at it on the other side too, just as quickly, should could be great. Right. But it was just a shitty way to take it and learn it. Matt, had you ever experienced death anywhere close to you before you're dead? No. No. Had you ever thought about it a ton? No. Not until you died. David was saying, like, I had this, I was super neurotic when it came to my mom. She, I remember when she would, when she started dating, and I would like, I'd freak out. How much? How long after? A few years. Yeah. But I started freaking out thinking like something bad's gonna happen or, you know, like something bad's gonna happen or, and like, bug out and have all this anxiety, like, it would ruin me at times. Super neurotic. Like, anything bad could happen at any point. And it's like, you almost become more but curious, in a sense, because you've been exposed to death in such a unique and publicized way, but also, like, an event that completely altered and changed history for all generations. That I think we, at least in my experience, we figured that out more as the years went on. We changed everything when it happened, don't get me wrong. But like, you get to '06, '07, '08, '09, now, like, it's a new presence in everything. The global financial crisis, '10, '11, you start to see the reverberating effects that it had. And like, today, it still gets struck like the, the echo of that gets stronger and stronger, which is a strange thing, because you get farther and farther away from the event. But you're like, whoa, everything, socially, economically, culturally. In this country, and in places around the world, it's completely changed. Yeah, from that. Yeah. Yeah, so I was bigger than I was. Yeah. For sure. Do you, when, but that moment, like, when your mom started dating specifically, it was like, would you say, I was like, kind of like a triggering thing to make you think more, like, the worst is going to happen specifically because I had a lot of fear as a kid. A lot of fear. I mean, I didn't deal with any death. Like, I had like great aunts, my great grandmother, I remember, died in like 2004 or 2003, but like, my dad was the one. And then like, I still have both my grandmothers, my grandfather's passed away in 2013 and 2017. So like, no immediate, no immediate family, like nothing besides my dad. So yeah, you like just don't know, like, it's like, what could happen next? Yeah. Had you dealt with it, David, with anyone really close to you before your dad? Obviously not that close, but that closest was my dad's dad and we were going to that funeral and see my dad cry and understanding it. And then I guess the notion subconsciously that my mom's dad died a year before I was born so that contemplation, someone not being there was really just my grandfather. But obviously that's, nothing, it's nothing, but it's, it was something I observed and took in. So I vividly remember seeing my dad cry for the first time. So not really comprehending it because I was in single digits at that point, I believe. But other than my hamster, Stimpy, I mean, I watched that thing die, now I think about it. That was a very traumatic event because I was watching my hamster breathe and I was crying because my hamster was just dying in front of me and then we tried to bury it and my dad did not want to bury it and he was like, fucking just shoveling it. next to my trampoline. That was oddly traumatic watching my answer die, not 9/11 traumatic, it's traumatic. It's tough. The goldfish, too. When the goldfish starts to flip over and go up, you're like, "Oh, no." Well, they have like a seven-second memory, so they're probably fine. Yeah. But still, if that was your goldfish, you're right. Yeah. So your mom ended up remarrying, though? Well, mom remarried, yeah. How old were you when she remarried? 15? Yeah, I mean, it was, I have a good relationship with my stepdad now, but there was a lot of. Like, 9/11, it was like a ripple effect for me. I went to my mom and my dad's brother, Adnazium, asking them the same questions. Mostly my mom. What was the phone call like? What could you hear in the background? Did he sound scared? I found this box that my mom put in a closet in my dad's office in the house that had the stuff that they found on them, was wallet, all that stuff. Had a file at the autopsy report. And I found this letter that I talked about earlier that she buried with them. And I read that. And that described a lot of the stuff that she went through that day. Things that she didn't even really remember. And so she had described it, when he called her, she picked up and she heard the normal commotion in the background. People yelling. I mean, he's on a brokerage for us. So they're always yelling. They're on phones, like, you know, the box, and so I had asked her about that. And then anyway, I got to this point where she was, it was just too much, it was just too much for her. And then I had an uncle through marriage, who was the one who said, yeah, I'll talk to you about it. I'll ask you the questions about it. Whatever you want to know. Wait, uncle through marriage. Yeah. So he was married to my mom's sister. Got it. Okay. And he's dead now, actually. And yeah, basically, he started feeding me all these fucking lies and telling me all of these things that I wanted to hear. And he said to me, yeah, like, you know, your dad jumped, your dad jumped from the building. That was my thing. Like, did he fall? Did he jump? Like, was he in the building when it collapsed? Like, I wanted to know. When did you find out these were lies? Not until years later, until I was like 18 years old. Was he still alive at that time? He was still alive. He didn't die until literally six months ago. Well, so I mean, I can't really imagine that. What, why did he, did you ask him why he did that? He was praying on me. So basically what happened was I had a team of uncles married uncles to blood uncles. My mom's brother, my dad's brother, and like all these people who were looking out for me and my brothers, like, you know, you have like a lot of people who pray on vulnerable kids in these moments. So there's coaches that could potentially be of harm. There's counselors, camp counselors, like, you just never know. So they all stepped in to like be like protective of me and my brothers, right? And that one uncle was a predator, playing in simple. And he, he would eventually sexually abuse me. And so that fucked me up, obviously. And so it was all around 9/11. It was all around like the things he was telling me. So when he told me those things, I'm thinking finally like at 14 years old, I'm like, well, now I'm being told the truth. Someone's finally looking at me as the adult that I believe I am as a kid. And I'm getting told the truth. I kept that a secret, obviously, and for years. But so after he was doing those things, he abused you before, before my dad, no, no, before he was telling, when he was telling you those lies to the abuse you after that, or was he already abused you? He abused me. He, he used as his entryway. He used as his way to get close to me because my mom and my dad's brother, my dad's brother was 23 years old. My dad died. He's 15 years older than me. So he's like an older brother I never had him and my dad were 15 years apart as well. He was grieving. He was in law school. He was becoming an adult. Like he was finally, he's getting into the workforce, like, and for my mom, she was going through her own life, moving forward, right? And so me, like when I tell you, like obsessive is one thing, like I was addicted to wanting to know what happened, like any moment that I had to look at the footage, I looked at it, like to a point that it was like, it was not healthy, I'll be honest, it was not healthy. So I would interrogate my mom, like interrogator, my dad's brother, same thing interrogate him and he was like trying so hard to help me. So then that other uncle basically was the one who was like, what do you want to know? I remember, I remember, I don't know, I just came out too and he was like, he had me watch that. I don't know. I watched that and like didn't show anything to me, but like he wanted, he just knew that there was a way to finally break down that wall and when you're like so vulnerable and you're so effed up, you know? And so that happened. I've never heard a story like that before. It's really messed up. It's messed up. It's messed up. I mean, they're all messed up. That's a whole different level. Well, and that's so when I finally came forward about it and then I took, I, so I got sober in 2015. Okay. I'm just all right. 11 year sobriety. Congratulations on that. Let me get a timeline here though. Okay. Okay. So I was being groomed, clearly, if you will, from like 11, 12 years old and then he started to. And nothing happened for a little while. And then like when he found out that I was so enthralled in this 9/11 stuff, like the desire didn't know more. And like I'm going, I'm sort of going through puberty, like I'm, you know, sort of becoming a man. Like my mom didn't know how to handle certain things with me. I was angry at her. I would get pissed off. Like I just was, I wanted to talk to her and like try to know and learn and dissect things and understand it for myself and wanting her to level with me. She didn't know. All, all she, she told me what she did know. I didn't want to hear it. I was convinced otherwise like whatever she was withholding from me, which she had nothing that she was withholding. But I was like, there's something that she's not telling me. And like when you have a fatherly figure and I had several of them who are trying to help you in their own various ways, none of them in the ways that I wanted to be helped. Like I wanted someone to talk to me and tell me what I was perceiving to be the truth that was withheld. Right? As if they all knew the answers and were not telling me, right? So he pretended like he knew the answers and that's what it was. And so there was not, there was, it was all lies. It was all lies. It happened in like 2005 or 2006 and you didn't tell anyone about it? I didn't tell anyone for a long time. How did you, a little bit, how God, that's such a, so it's like when my mom is trying to help me and my dad's brother is also trying to help me but he's like going through his own thing and he's in law school and now he's graduating law school and it's like this other uncle is close to home and like we're with them all the time and seemingly he's a father figure because he was an approachable person and it's always like the people you least expect. And when I ended up coming forward about this year's later, I mean it took my whole entire family by surprise. Oh, they, no one knew. You didn't tell anyone even in the interment in years? No. No one knew. Was he still in the picture at that time? Yeah, he was still in the picture. And like the craziest thing man is that he had abused like several, not family, several other kids. So like did they get in touch with you after you came forward? So what happened was I came forward when I was in my first year of sobriety, right? Uh, wasn't planning to ever come forward. I came forward and so how do you do it? Because my third youngest brother called me and said something on a phone call. I was sitting in my sober living in Dairy New Hampshire and I'll never forget. And he was like saying these things on his phone call and I was, I was scared that he was going to be abused or that he had been. He was just saying things about my uncle that I was like, did something happen to you? Oh, about the same uncle. Same uncle. Did something happen to you? And he said, no, but like it scared me. And I was like, at that point I was like, I'm 23 years old. If I don't do anything and or say anything and as a result, my brother something happens to one of them, then I had to live with that. So I came forward and I ended up getting them on a recorded line, emitting to everything. And so when we went to court and he was facing, he was facing a long, long time in prison. He got a plea deal. And when we went to court, um, that was the argument was the fact that not only did he abuse me after my dad died, like that's sick. But he literally and specifically used 9/11 as his way to do it. And so like, look, yeah, that's, it's, it's tragic, it's fucked up and it screwed me up for a long, long time. And I'm not saying any of this to, for, for sympathy or anything like that, I'm saying this because like there are so many other stories of other kids, 9/11 kids too that were abused. So that's like the sickening thing. about it, like someone used an event so tragic, losing a parent so tragically, so publicly, for their own, you know, sexual divances. And so, as messed up as it is, I've used it as a sort of way to, I mean, obviously it takes vulnerability to talk about it, but I have yet to go to a school, especially, in the last few years that there's not at least one kid who hasn't been abused, like this shit, and like, what's fucked up is, I don't even live in New Jersey anymore, and yet I go on Facebook and I get all these feeds, on my, on my, on my, what do you call it, homepage. This coach, this teacher, it's like all, and it's not just New Jersey, but it's like this New Jersey, there's all this recent stuff in the last like three weeks, I'm like, what the fuck is going on in New Jersey? Like, coach this, coach that, like, I film in a girl, these kids on their skirts, like, all these things, and I'm like, it's just, it's bad, you know, and so, and it's, and it can ruin someone, and it can ruin someone, so like, yeah, I mean, look, I'm not any more unique or stronger than anyone else, but I, I was, I was dealt the cards, I was dealt, you know, playing in simple. - That's, I've really, I'm serious, I've never heard anything like that. That's, yeah, I've heard some crazy ones, that's a whole, to pray on 9/11 itself when you were a victim of it. - Yeah, he was close to my dad too, that's like the thing. - That's insane. - And like, and then I find out years later, like, my dad wasn't super fond of him, but like, he like made it seem like they were super close. - Right. - But so he was, he was married, he was married to the sister of your mom. - Yeah. - I like strategically wrote it in the book where it wasn't like that. - Oh, okay, I don't give a fuck anymore, truthfully, like, you know, it's the guy's six feet under, and what, I don't have anything to be scared of in that regard. I was scared for a long time, believe me. I don't know why I was, but I was. And yeah, like I changed his name in the book, like I changed a lot of names in the book, and I had some family who were like, you know, you changed all these other people, like drug dealers and people like that. But like, I should have fucking blasted his name. I mean, he was all, it's all over. Like, I can, we can talk about it, but like. - Can I ask you a question? - Yeah. - You mentioned earlier about how you got in public, well, there's some, I want to say, friction for a lack of other words that your family had a different approach on. Was this story? - Oh, yeah, this is friction about you sharing it. Was there more proud of you guys they should be for opening up? - No, they were proud about that. My cousins, his kids do not talk to me. They hate me, they hate my mom. They believe that I should have kept this within the family. So, to answer your question, I come forward. - They believe you should have kept this. - They didn't believe me. They didn't believe you. - They didn't believe you. - So I had, I was facing, I had three felony drug charges. So, I'll come back to that. I'm just, let's stay with this. - So I had three felony drug charges and basically he was telling his family that I was doing all of this, that I was making up this whole elaborate thing to get off of these drug charges. As if they're like the two are correlated in any capacity. So anyway, I come forward. The prosecutor's office in Morris County sends out a thing. I was so, I couldn't definitely tell them my age. I couldn't, this is the power of trauma, blacking out, like throughout it all, right? Like I knew how old I was. I couldn't prove it when I sat in that police station. Okay, I was 14 years old, right? So when you're at certain gapping of ages, it's automatically first degree sexual assault, automatically. But when you get a little bit older, like as an example, 16 years old, which I was not 16 years old, but because I couldn't prove in that moment when I came forward, when I was reporting it, that I was 14, they charge them a second degree first. So the article comes out. Then I go back to New Hampshire and my sober living. And I'm like, light bulb clicks. I'm like, it goes off. I'm like, yeah, I got it. I know how I can prove it now. Go back to New Jersey, sit in the Morris County prosecutor's office, the victims unit, and I tell them how I can prove it. And I prove it. And then I get them on a recorded line. And he admits to everything. And the sickness about this guy, man, predator. And his kids still don't talk to you even though he admitted to all of it on a recorded line. Yes. And I don't even know if they know. I don't know if they've ever read my book. It's all in the book. I don't know if they've ever read it. But that's also like a case that their dad was involved and presented in court, right? They didn't go. They didn't go to the sentencing. My aunt didn't go. So during the case, so it wasn't like a trial. So he did a plea deal. He did a plea deal. So after the second report, they charge him at first degree. So now he's facing 20 plus years in prison. And here's the problem. The state of New Jersey had just changed his statute of limitations. Well, literally, that's the reason why I was able to come forward. So it was just under 10 years that it occurred. So I was able to come forward. So I come forward. They felt like they didn't have sustainable evidence. So they just said, hey, we're going to give him a plea deal. We're going to give him this plea deal. He'll be facing 10 to 15 years. Guaranteed, he will go to prison for 10 to 15 years. Are you OK with us giving him this plea deal? And I was like, yeah, sure. I was like, newly sober, definitely vulnerable. Sort of like reverted back to like a childhood mindset in the sense, because I was like, it's really just like living and refealing all these things. I had suppressed for a long time. And I said, yeah, sure, right. Yeah, just do it. He's going to go away. We don't have to do trial and nothing like that. Well, they removed the first degree charge and only given the second degree charge as part of the plea. The max he's facing is seven years in prison. And he gets sentenced to those seven years. And he serves four of the seven years. Literally, my book came out six years ago to the day today. He got out one week before he came out. Oh, man, dude. So like, it was COVID, all right. He was supposed to get out in December of 2020. And like, he kept getting all this good time applied. Then it was like Thanksgiving. And then it was like October. And then I'm like, boom, September. And then boom, last week August. He got out in 2020. And he was on lifetime parole. Megan's loss, registered sex defender, all that stuff. And he literally died 10 years, pretty much 10 years to the day, which is the craziest part that I came forward. I came forward in February, 2016. He died in February, 2026. And like the day, it was like-- He remained married to me. My aunt divorced them. But I mean, the relationship was severed between me and her. And I've tried, you know, to be at peace, and to try to forgive. I don't forget, but I try to forgive. That's corny, it might sound like that's what I've learned to do in recovery. Because look, I carried that resentment. I harbor that resentment. Who is the effect and affects me? That's, you know, I've covered a lot of hard stories in here, seriously. Like, and on that topic, I've had some tough ones in here where people talk about that. And that just gave me like a feeling in my gut I've never had. I didn't know if I was going to even talk about it. I know I was with you, but that's like insane. That's just like-- Wow, I'm sorry. So I go back and like look at those years, and then I look at my relationship with my mom. And like, he had essentially severed all my connections. He had broken the connection I had with my dad's brother, at that point. He broke it. He used all-- this is what I'm telling you, man, like predators are sick people, they're manipulative people. They know how to manipulate. And they know how to take advantage. So it's one thing to do the act. It's another thing to essentially cut off all mechanisms of escape and hope. So like the relationship with my mom-- well, I strongly resented my mom for a block of years because she had remarried. And the remarrying piece was one thing. But it was like all these lies that he told me about my mom and about my step-to-all things that were just bullshit. And that's so hard because he was in a position of trust and that made you believe things. And now you probably feel bad to believe those things. That's not your fault. But that's-- so that was part of the sentencing was like the power, right? Because there's a clause. When a person is in the position of power, usually family, or some examples, teacher, student, or coach, student, et cetera, those get looked at in a more severe light when it comes to the courts. Obviously, this was family. And I mean, the 9/11 piece of it didn't add to it. Obviously, he didn't get sentenced to the rest of his life. He should have never seen the light of day ever again. What I was going to say before is after the second arrest, they put out a tip line and basically said, if anyone comes forward with any news, anything about this guy, anything about-- if he did anything to you, come forward type of thing. And there's a lot of anonymous tips that were sent into the local police departments. No one came forward. But both of those police departments in these neighboring towns in New Jersey came to me and said, yeah, we had these reports and these cases. He did this to other kids. We can't do anything about it because they won't tell us what their age was at the time. They won't come forward and tell their story. If one other person had, he would have never gone out. But at the end of the day, a man gave me a voice. and I, you know, - No, I ran with it, ran with it. - Were you at such a hard place for anyone to be and the people around you to be too, 'cause he's like a trusted person in the family and there's no reason to think like. - Correct. - Obviously something like that, but were you pissed at people in your family for? - No, no, no, I wasn't pissed at people in my family, but like the first, you know, there was slight things that occurred, right? His past is, if you will. The icing on the cake was one night, I had seen some very graphic 9/11 footage. No one was at my house, my mom wasn't home, and I called him and he asked me to send him the link to what I saw, which the thing that I saw actually wasn't even 9/11 footage. It was just, there was a thing you could do back then on Google where you could tag things on a Google image search, so people were putting out images that were graphic and saying it was something related to 9/11 when it wasn't. And I saw this and I sent it to him. And then within a matter of probably 30, 45 minutes, you came to my house to console me, right? And then that's, so that was his way. And he would talk to me about it. He would show me things that he would find. And so I was just trying so hard to navigate this as a kid and then young adult and like try to understand and like no one felt like I had no one to go to, obviously. And like it's like you're already dealing with the grief, you're already dealing with this feeling of being isolated and looked at differently and feeling differently. And then you have this occur and it's like I already, I went to a high school that I was the only kid who lost a father on 9/11. There was one kid in my grade who lost his brother. Where'd you go to high school? Where'd you see an all prep? Oh really, yeah. And school of 1200 kids and there's two of us. And the other kid, and he's a friend of mine now. But he knew what I'm gonna talk about it that much. At the time it was just different for him. I wore this bracelet, I still wear it. I've worn like four of them at this point 'cause I've broken them. It says my dad's name in World Trade Center. Just to give you an idea like kids would make fun of me for wearing the bracelet. Like kids just didn't know. Like it's like this is what kids do. That's kind of crazy. You know what I'm saying? It's like that age. It's just 'cause all boy school 'cause wanna be funny or whatever, I don't know. But like I already felt spotlighted is what I'm trying to insinuate here. I really felt like a different. And I was like, there's just no way. I could say anything 'cause then I'm just gonna be made fun of and ridiculed and there's just no possible way. Is that what made you wanna try substances to get away from it? To escape, yeah. It was the first time I fell in normal. I started smoking and drinking when I was 14 years old, 13 years old. It didn't become a problem overnight. I would smoke weed and drink every weekend. My friends, parties, whatever. Never had a problem really until like my junior year of high school. I was smoking a lot more senior year. I was smoking pretty frequently. When I got to college I went to Villanova and there was a lot of kids who were doing pills. Oxies were huge and cocaine was huge. And I started doing coke and Adderall my freshman year. It didn't hit me. It didn't have the hold on me. And my sophomore year of college, I was 19 years old. I was sitting in my dorm room. I just smoked out with my friends. Fucking stone sitting there playing FIFA. And like one of my friends walks into the dorm room, pulls out a baggy of pills from his pocket. A bunch of baby blue pills, little ones. And he pulls it out and he like holds it up. And I'm like looking at him and he's like, have you ever done these before? I was like, no, what is it? They're called blues. It's like you're stoned, but better. I'm like, all right, fuck it, let's do it. And he breaks 30 milligram oxen half, size me 15 milligrams, I snored it, and I was off, dude. That 15 milligrams eventually would be 900 milligrams a day. This fucking sickening, man. I literally sickened me. 900 milligrams a day. I snored 30 of those pills a day. 30, it's disgusting. And it sounds crazy, but if you, you know, anyone who was in that world knows the progression, man. You just don't feel it. Like you're just chasing and chasing and chasing and chasing. So yeah, everything I said I wouldn't do, man. I did, you know, and most importantly, right? Like, lied and robbed and cheated and stole from my mom and broke her heart a million times, like put her through the ringer. You know, it's like, I think back on like 9/11 when I was in college and like, I would begin fucking so high and like watch the footage. Just to try to feel something. And like, I'm already like numbing myself but I need to feel something. So I'm like, look at the footage. Like I was just so lost, man. Like just so desperate to, I don't know, heal. That's like the best way I could put it. Like I wanted to heal so badly, but I couldn't. Yeah, to heal in a lot of more ways than one. Yeah. I mean, it was like life really threw the kitchen sink out. Yeah, every possible way. And that that's why like, you know, and I hear how you talk about it and there seems to be like regret. It's some of the things that happen and things like that. I'm not like saying like, oh, it's fine. You're robbed from your mom or shit like that. But people get pushed to things. Yeah, yeah. Some people really get pushed to things. Yeah. And I'm no doctor here. But I would say you were quite pushed in the direction of just getting me out of whatever the fuck this is. I'm feeling yeah. And I got more than a lot of empathy for that man. And I don't, there's no excuse, right? Like, I don't take any amount of victim. And I appreciate you saying that 'cause you're a stand-up guy and everything. But I just, I can't imagine growing up how you grew up and then having the very thing that was already the most traumatic thing used against you in the way it was. And possibly not wanting to get, yeah, I don't. Yeah, I do not, I mean. But you know what? The baffling part about a man is that the book comes out. And you're gonna see this. I promise you. I don't know. You're gonna see it. There are so many other 9/11 kids, now adults who were dealt shitty hands too. Yeah, you know? And there's a lot of kids who went through worst things in me. That's crazy. Worst than you. Yeah, I don't know all their stories, but I've heard bits and pieces. And like, those stories aren't always publicized, you know? But a lot of people reached out to me and I immediately found solace in knowing like, maybe I gave them some sort of hope to speak up. That's right. And it's more than, it's more than just that too. It's more than just that community, which this course can identify with you, but like whenever people are brave enough to tell these kinds of stories and how it happened, those are the coolest messages I get from a podcast when people are like, hey, I saw that podcast with someone. So I just want to let you know, like that was six months ago, and now I'm clean. Like you get messages like that. And I look at it and I'm like, holy shit, dude, I'm doing this in my second bedroom right here. But people like you come in here and do that. And it never, not only does it never get old, I never lose the gravity and appreciation for, you know, you be invulnerable like that. Because it really does make a difference for a lot of people. - I just know because someone did it for me and a person who had no identity for you, no connection to my story. I was in my sober living and I was, it was like telling you, man, God, my dad, like everything intervened and was looking out for me at one time. I got the phone call, well, this part, and this is the thing, I was sober and it's still easy. It's the power of trauma, truthfully. It just blacked you out. It's in a sober living with about 45 men. And there was a guy who was in there who had basically been gifted a second chance because he was in prison for some very bad things. And the court went a little easier on him and let him go to treatment. And when he was in the treatment center, he spoke in front of all these guys. We're in like a big U and he talked about being sexually abused. This guy was big and tough and tatted up and all that stuff. And I'm like, maybe everyone's intimidated by this guy, but no one was like laughing. And I was looking around the room like no one's laughing at this, like hearing these words, no one's like snickering or anything, there's nothing. I was like, what's going on here? So I walked up to him after and I will never, ever forget it. And I said, listen, I just want to let you know, I went through something very similar and you really inspired me to speak up, dude. And he was like, you and I are not the only ones who went through it. We're the ones who have the courage right now to speak about it. And I literally have taken his words and applied it to my life. He had such a different story than me. Very bad story. You still talk to him today? Yeah, he wasn't, he wasn't sober for a little while. He didn't stay sober, but he's back. And I told him that I talk about that story because it changed me. It changed me fundamentally, man. Like, then I get to call for my brother. Did I do my fifth step, my first fifth step in AA? How did, can I back up for one second? How did you, how did you even go to get clean from this? 'Cause that's, I mean, 900 milligrams a day is, I was in my first detox at 20 years old. And what caused that? Like, what got you there? So, March 2013, I was doing 10 oxies a day. 300 milligrams. Cry for help. I stole from my mom. Took her a debit card, went to the ATM, guessed her 10. I knew that she'd always pull out $200 every week, for gross reason for this. I'm gonna, in a little spending, whatever. So I pulled out $200. She didn't notice. The next day, I did it again, $200. She didn't notice. The next day, $60. For whatever reason, the $60 was like the trigger. And $60 would get me about two pills. So she calls me into my dad's office, this infamous room that all these things have occurred in. And she says to me down, she goes, she has her statement highlighted. And she's like, what are all these charges? I didn't take out this money. Did she know you had it some-- She suspected, and she said, what's going on? And I broke down. I said, mom, I'm addicted to painkillers. The thing I need help, I think I need some fucking help. That's the first time I admitted it. At that point, I've been using, I've been doing pills for six months, maybe, eight months, the most. - I don't take much, man. - Doesn't take much, it doesn't take much. And I'll tell you, I went to that detox, while I'm in that detox, they're giving me medication called Suboxone. Which would they give you for withdrawal? But it blocks you up with receptors in your brain. - That's right. - You cannot physically get high after wallets in your system. You need to wait at least 72 hours, I think it is. Something like that. Otherwise, it does nothing. And you also can't take Suboxone too soon after using because it'll put you into precipitated withdrawal. Which is the worst withdrawal ever, times a million. So anyway, I'm in there. Counselor calls me into her office on day five of being in detox, there's gonna be, like, seven or eight days. And she sits me down, she says, your mom's on the phone. Hands me the phone, I'm like, hello. And my dad's dad died of a heart attack. So I was very close to my grandfather. And I hung up with my mom. I walked out, I walked up to the nurse and I said, I'm not taking the Suboxone anymore. And she looked at me and she was like, you know you're gonna be in withdrawal, right? I'm like, yeah, I know. I planned it. The moment I got to that detox three days later, I left and I got high. Went to my grandfather's funeral. This is one thing, you know, I talk about regret. Like, I don't have a lot of regret. I've made my immense. I've made a living immense to my father. Graves had immense to my father. I mean, living immense to my mom. You know, my dad wasn't even alive for all of this, obviously. But like, I've made my immense to him. And I went to my grandfather's vacant funeral. I had a baggy full of pills in my suit jacket pocket, right? And I'm sitting with my grandmother. And my dad's brother asked me to speak on behalf of my father. My dad was the oldest and I'm the oldest. I was the first botchy grandson. So I was the first continuation of the name, right? And he asked me to speak. I'm half my dad and being the oldest grandson. And I said, okay, yeah, I'll do it, right? And I'm texting my dealer the whole time. Texting my dealer, like, when can I meet you? When can I meet you? 'Cause I'm so afraid of not having pills to get me through this. And I had enough in my pocket to get me through the night into the morning, which is what, like, every addict's thing is to get to the morning. Wake up, you're dope sick, you get high, you figure out the way you're gonna get more money to keep it going. And my dealer hits me as I'm sitting in that front row about to go up and speak. She hits me, she says, if you wanna come through and copy, gotta come now. I walk up, I walk up, I get up and I walk out. And I never, I never say a word. And my whole family just washed me leave. And that is something that really bothered me for a long time. I made a great sight of my grandfather, but it really affected me. I mean, I was so powerless in that moment. That run continues for a few more months, that summer, I go to my second detox and while I'm there, I'm getting high in detox. I get out, how do you even, 'cause I was at a place that I wasn't staying at. It was like a weird, like, intensive outpatient place. So they're giving me Suboxone, but as I, they give it to me, I put it under my tongue, I'd walk away from the counter and throw it out, and I'd get high. And that run then continued for two and a half years. And I graduated from Villanova. I'm working, I graduated from Villanova during this whole graduate from Villanova. You're a fucking galaxy brain, bro. Not even, man, I just like, I just kept it going, man. I don't know. Like Villanova's a hard school. It was down in New York College or something. Like, holy shit. I don't know how I kept it afloat, truthfully. I mean, I struggled, believe me. I was this close to withdrawing, going on a medical leave. Like, but they were encouraging me to do so. I was failing classes. Like, I didn't have a good GPA. But I graduated. But I graduated. I ended up passing. Yeah. I got to have fewer men study, you know what I'm saying? So, I graduated. Damn, man. So I graduated. So I graduated. I've been living like that for two and a half years. Two and a half years, two and a half months. Two and a half years, three. I mean, I total of four years of, of active use with, with oxies and heroin and Xanax and again. I'm glad you're still here, man. I shouldn't be. True. I should not be. It's funny, like, reading that because it's like, the amount of close calls I had, like, when there's no doubt in my mind that there was something looking out for me. I know it was my dad, but like, there was something there. 'Cause like, there were a lot of close calls in the end. Like, May 2015, I supposed to get high with a friend of mine from college. We were both in New York City. He-- You're working at this? We worked in New York City. I was working in-- I worked at three different firms one year out of college. I couldn't keep a job. Yeah, but what, what, what type of work? Finance. I was trying to be like my dad. So this is like, you know, it's crazy because I never wanted to be in that field. My dad hated his fucking job. But I was like, I'm going to do it. I want to do it to feel like him. I want to do it to keep his name alive. And like, I get my first job out of school. I worked at RBC. Can you name me? Yep. I was on a bond desk and great opportunity that I ruined. And I had some crazy stories about that. But like, yeah, I ruined it. And I filled my series seven and I had walked into the exam blitzed out of my mind. And they tell you to write this, like, t-chart for the options table. The options portion of the exam was heavy back then. It was like-- About 55, 65, 60% of the exam. And if you're right, put call by cell the right way. It's your cheat sheet. Well, it's a six hour exam. Three hours into the exam, you get your break. I walk out my little pink sheet because you're allowed to leave with it. And I walk into the bathroom. And I realize, I flipped the fucking thing, right. And I failed by like three points. So if I had gotten that right-- And they give you the result, like, right there. And do some-- Right there. And it's right there. And it's immediate. It's immediate. Yeah. And so I had fit-- And this is where, again, it's a gift from God. Because if I had passed that exam, who knows where I would have been. Like, I was going to get a promotion. I was going to get a big commission-- Come from a promotion doing 900 milligrams. Yeah. And like, dude, I was so-- You're going to get everything I've done sober. I can't do half the things you've done like that. I never met someone that productive. It did a lot of oxy. I'm just letting you know. I think that I just had this way of-- I'm not a genius, believe me. I am not a genius. It might be a little smarter than a self-credit boy. Maybe. Maybe. But, dude, honestly-- Oh, you want a break for once? Let's take a break. Let's take a break for it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's take a break for the beta meeting. We'll be right back. I got a pizza. All right, we're back. Your bladder's OK now. It's crazy. It's not the fucking post office. You don't have to like clock out. You don't fucking go. Well, like I said, dude, after what you went through, and me complaining about a piss, I'm pussy. It's like, I'll take this pain, hold it, hold it. That's it. But you were just saying so you didn't pass the Series 7, and you're grateful now that that happened. Because you're like, who knows where I would have been. Because obviously, I guess after that-- I was making good money out of college, too, and I had no money to my name. So I think that if I hit those goals and then continued in that field, then I-- I don't know what would happen. But anyway, I remember where I was going. I-- front of my from college, we were supposed to get together and get high. And he bailed on me. And he went home to New Jersey. And he died of an overdose. And I found out, soon thereafter, that he only left because he basically got evicted from his apartment, and all these things happened. And I just don't know. If I was with him that day, that night, we were planning what would have happened. Fennel was just becoming a thing. So when I first went to detox in 2013, there was guys in there that were in there for Fennel patches, that were like-- they were severe pain management cases, but there was not pills, lace, which Fennel. And then when I get heroin in New Jersey, it's by the bundle, with a little wax paper baggies. And they have a stamp on them, right? So I don't know how much was in each bag, but in other states, they do them by the gram. And then it gets to a point. Like when I went to Derry, New Hampshire, all these kids from Boston and Mass are coming into this over-living, and they were telling me, there's no dope anymore. So the heroin idea was brown. They were like, this is like white powder. They know it's Fennel. And they're purposely wanting to get it. And that's like the sickness of addiction, man. People die from a bag, and the attic wants that back. They want to feel that high. So yeah, God intervenes several times. My dad intervened several times. I had a sign from my father, ultimately. So. Well, your friend passes away friend passes away with them. So if my friend passes away a month prior to that I get put on probation for one year in the state of New Jersey for my felony charges So you already have felony charges. I got arrested. I got a written. No, so I graduated from Villanova in 2014 Mm-hmm in November 2014 I get arrested for speeding I get pulled over for speeding and I have three ounces of weed and 50 oxies on me and you were eight with pending charges. You were able to work at the bank. I was able to keep it going So here's what happened. God, I wasn't allowed to work at a bank because I had a fake ID. Hold on. I mean what bank is this? So so it's it's fucking Canada So we're gonna talk about like you think I'm a genius. Well, here's where I'm not a genius. So I get arrested okay, I get arrested and I get a lawyer and he's like here. Here's my retainer like here's my you have to sign this agreement and here's my retainer So I'm still high. I'm at work and I print the fucking retainer from the work printer fill it all out Scan it and set it to my attorney. I get called into HR and they're like We saw this. It's got flagged. What happened here? And I don't know what I said. I'm just like a I'm not a con on us But like I'm like a talker and I said whatever I said till I sort of get around it and like I was good I didn't get let go because of this now mind you nothing happened yet. I wasn't sentenced anything. This was November 2014 and he like don't worry about it. We'll figure it out very new jersey. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know what I said I schmoozed it. I don't know what I said like I think I said I got like pulled. Oh, I don't know honestly they didn't drug test me nothing After the like when I was when they caught this so I don't know how I got around it So then April 2015 after like all these little things that I did manipulate the system a little bit My lawyer worked in my favor and he was like look we're gonna get you Drop down on these felonies and they're gonna be missing some of them are misdemeanors But if you if you screw up and you get drug tested and you fail they will send you they could potentially send you to jail that day Right and there's no you know three strikes It's you get lucky if they give you a second chance, but this is what it's gonna be So I get sentenced to one year probation and he tells me the first letter is gonna come probably in like two months My friend dies in May in June I get the letter early June the letter a letter in the mail for my probation for Mars County probation services or whatever it was and it was like your first drug test on the bottom It's bolded July 22nd 2015 at 10 a.m. In Dover, New Jersey So I'm like all right. I got like two months to get sober two months to figure this out. I called up one of my dealers who I knew Was on what's called drug was was called drug court in New Jersey where he'd have to call in a A number of phone number every day. They would read off his number or color Depending on the day and if it was picked he'd have to go in the test. He told me He get mouth swapped. So what he would do was drink this mouthwash and like swallow it and it would give you Clean saliva for like 30 minutes. So I went to a smoke shop in Patterson, New Jersey and I bought two vials two little bottles of this mouthwash and two bags of synthetic urine fake urine and Um, I was staying with my grandma for a couple weeks. My mom was like afraid something was gonna happen. She like was really Worried obviously. I was a didn't look the way I looked today. I was extremely overweight I had no color in my face. My body was shutting down on me. You were overweight. So I was addicted to opiates and benzos That combination completely messes with your metabolism like I was eating junk food left and right Fast food all that stuff, but I couldn't go to the bathroom You know because the opiates they make you constipated so like I couldn't go to the bathroom. So like I just you know I was horrible shape. I didn't take care of myself physically. I didn't eat healthy nothing and drink water so Anyway, the morning of that drug test I go to the to the to the sit the testing center. I pull into my spot and I get high I start drinking the mouthwash and I go inside and I sit down in the waiting room is like a kind of like another Like a square room and there's like a guy in one corner in a gray sweat suit It's the middle of summer and another guy in another corner and they're both like chugging water doing jumping jacks And I'm like sitting there like with this complete ego in the suit and tie and I'm like these fucking guys man Like I drank my mouthwash. I'm gonna go in there. I'm gonna swab clean I'm gonna walk out and I'm gonna keep going my lawyer told me if I pass the first drug test like they might not call me again for the rest of the year You might get lucky you might never get called again. He knew though. He's like something that you're not sober like he knew I wasn't sober So I'm looking at my wash. I'm like, okay, I got like 20 minutes left the clean saliva and I get called into my pio's office I sit at her desk and On the keyboard is the mouth swap in the packaging. I'm like looking at the mouth swap and I'm like holy shit Like this is it. I'm gonna she's gonna swap me. I'm gonna pass. I'm out of here And she has like a stack of papers and she's going through all the papers asking all these questions and like my youngest brother I was out by my mom's house And she was like your youngest brother's under the 18 so if you failed this test we can call a diet fist and all this thing I'm like, okay, yeah, sure whatever And she looks at me and she's like are you gonna pass? I said yeah, I'm gonna pass Are you sure? I was like, yeah, I'm gonna pass and she like bends down grabs a cup Hands it to me and I stand up and I'm like gonna hit me and I'm like the figure and was not shot to my leg grab the cup go into the bathroom When I get into the bathroom, it's like an angled mirror So in these centers like a guy walks in with you or woman walks in with a female and they watch you They watch you pee and so like I go in I walk up to the urinal and the angled mirrors there The guy's not watching me pee I'm peeing into this cup And I look and he's looking at the literally like this and he's standing staring at the door and I'm like If only I brought that fake urine and so another moment right and so I walk back in her office I sit back down at her desk. I'm waiting for her to come in and She comes in and she starts spinning the cup in a circle and showing me everything that I failed for Like things that I had no idea still to this day how I ingested them like what pill I did or what powder I snore whatever I did that was least I don't know and She sits down and she's like look you had two months notice of this test Like you literally two months notice like I don't know if this is a cry for help But you genuinely can't stop and I cut her off and I was like man like sincerely like I want to get sober like I want to stop I really want to stop I can't stop but I want to And she's like look I'll give you one more chance you come back in one month and you're cleaning sober I will drop all these charges down to misdemeanors. If you stay sober for one year you'll finish this probation And you will not go to jail if you come back in one month and you fail that test There's no more second chances. You're going to jail that day. I stood up and I shook her hand. I said okay, deal I left Called out of work went back to my mom's house. No one was at my mom's house and this is where it's like It gets emotional for me because I will never I will never forget like that day And I got home a paste back and forth that same kitchen Paul way I walked through on 9/11 back and forth back and forth debating what to do go back in one month bring the fake urine Bring the mouthwash again And maybe con the system and pass the test or maybe just wave the white flag and surrender and say I need some help I made myself a drink Roll myself up a joint Call him one friend. He's like do just go back in a month and bring the fake urine. You're good. Another friend's like just go to treatment Why don't you just go to treatment finally get go to rehab for real I walk outside to the backyard and I spark up the joint and I look up and it's like So vividly crystal clear blue sky just like 9/11 and I'm like fucking done Don't I'm so stoned and I just sort of sterically crying Stereically crying and I'm like dad. Please. Please. Give me a sign. I need help so Talked about my dad's premonition I That same timeline the two weeks before I don't know why or how this even came about but my my dad sits my mom How he wanted to be cremated which I mentioned But he talked about when he died. He was in a comeback as a fly don't know why he said it. I don't know why and My mom on September 12th was told to look for the science From a family friend. She said Michelle look for the science And that night this fly lands my mom my mom's nightstand And like that was like I talked about like the the memorial service the kennel that service with the with the wind and all that That was her moment where she was like It's it That's her sign When I say that I've had I had visits Still to this day. I do but then visits from this very specific type of fly um In moments that I can't explain you know Winner side street and Philly getting high in my car windows up flies in the car like all these all these other random moments uh And on that sunny day in July 2015 I'm leaning on this railing and this fly lands on the railing and it just sits there And I'm staring at it and I'm like looking at the joy and I'm like I'm so fucking stolen like What is going on here and I'm crying hysterically and I'm like going like this to make a go away fly away And it won't go won't go. It's spinning in the circle. I pull out my phone And I start recording and I still have the video. It's our recording it "Me, you hear me sniffling and this fly is just sitting on the railing." And I put out the joint and I said, "I'm done. I'm done." I walked inside. I called the bit detox. The lady picks up and I said, "Mem, I'm not sober right now. Please get me in tonight. I need a bed. I need a bed tonight." And she said, "I can't get you until Friday morning." And I said, "Okay, fine." I gave her all my information, my insurance, all the stuff. I'm like, "I need the bed. Please reserve the bed for me." And I wrote my mom this long letter. I had committed credit card fraud on my mom's accounts. She was dealing with all this stuff with American Express and chasing all these things. All these things that she knew I did, but she couldn't prove it. And I admit it to all of it. And I was like, "Mom, I'm going to treatment. I'm going to get help Friday morning. I'm going detox." And I've been sober since. I was July 24, 2015. And man, six months into sobriety and all that stuff I come forward about the abuse, like dude, I did my first fourth and fifth step and I had signed from the fly. I had all these other moments in that first year of sobriety where I felt my dad's presence, felt it, knew it. He was there. And like, you know, these moments, these things you just cannot explain. And that's kept me through. It's kept me sober. I had a really strong resentment towards God for a long time. My dad was a strong man of faith. And I had a really strong resentment against God. And I was told that I needed a higher power. I needed to pick something greater than myself. My first sponsor said, "It doesn't matter what it is." And I said, "I'm going to make it my dad." That's it. And I've realm of that for 11 years, you know. And like, so there's a lot of young guys who struggle when they get sober like, "Oh, like, I don't want to pick, you know, I need a higher power or like, what is that going to be for me?" And I'm like, "Well, I tell them my story. This is my, this is my higher power." So we have this like little cut out thing that someone made, my mom had made of a fly. And like, I talked to some of my dad's colleagues and they can all, they all like attest to why he would like fly on the wall, like that type of thing. And like, that was like my dad's personality, like just this exuberant in your face, but in a loving way type of guy, you know. And yeah. And you just quit that day. I went to detox and I, man, I'll tell you like that detox physically was the hardest thing I went through. I had two seizures in a week because of the amount of Xanix I was addicted to. If I was not under medical supervision, I would have died. The opiate withdrawal is, you can't die from it, but Benzo's an alcohol you can. And it was scary. And then I went to, I had always avoided 30 day treatment. That was my thing. I'll go to detox, but I won't do anything more. So I went to detox for, it ended up being 10 days. Then I went from there to 30 day treatment, I was there for 34 days. And then I went to the sober living thing and I was going there for 90 days. I stayed there for nine months. Good for you. And change my life, change my life, you know, like I, did you totally remove it? Do you feel like you totally removed the, I don't even know the word here, but the feeling of need for that for substances like, like you, meaning as someone who was addicted very heavily to things, like in the years after that, it wasn't like, it was a constant demon hanging over you or like that was an old me. I got sober at 23 years old and I was told that I needed to be comfortable to a degree around alcohol, like the weed's pub, like weed's legal, right? I needed to be comfortable. Doesn't mean I want to put myself in situations I used to be in. So yeah, like if I have a problem with someone drinking or smoking a joint at a wedding, like whatever, walking near a city three hours ago and I'm like, you're with it everywhere you go. You know, sometimes I'll be like, yeah, it smells nice, like, I'm not going to deny it. Like I am human. I wish there is a part of me that's like, yeah, if I could smoke weed and it would just stay with that, yeah, I would smoke weed, but I know myself, I know who I am. I tried. I tried just drinking. I just smoking. I always went back. That's just me. The people in my life who can smoke or drink and have a glass of wine at dinner and that's fine. Like, I just know who I am. It might not happen right away, but it will get me again. You know that that's really matured that you know that way yourself. I just, I won't take the risk. That's tough. And again, like also like you were saying, like a 23 to kind of make that. Yeah. I didn't know I did enough damage in those years to know like, okay, it's just not worth for me. You know. But again, like I have friends who drink my wife, like she's not an alcoholic or anything. She can have a glass of wine. And you live in Del Rey Beach. I live in Del Rey Beach, man, like, you know, it's the rehab capital of the world. It's dangerously close to four liquor days all right there. Right. You know, but I put myself in situations that would baffle a lot of people. I've learned how to live my life sober and have fun. You forgive yourself, though? I have forgiven myself. I would hope so. Yeah. Yeah. It's the bottom line. I don't ever, and, and good for you for being like so mature about it in every single lens. But like, you know, it's not to say like, oh, it's all excused or something like that. You don't want to be like that. Like people that will say, I don't regret anything I ever did because it made me who I am today. That's a dangerous thing. If you're not learning moving forward, which clearly you don't have a problem with. But, you know, I would like to think that like people who go through the kinds of things that you did, especially after the fact who then are brave enough to like be able to get through it and get yourself on the other side. You have the grace for yourself to be like, hey, you know, there's things I regret there. But like, I understand how I got pushed there and you should be really proud of yourself for pulling yourself out of that. I think I am. And I mean, look, I've been connected to a lot of people in this 9/11 community as a result of this. So I say, like, my story's not unique. There have been widows who I've been in contact with who had problems with drinking or whatever the case may be. I mean, like, there are, I've been connected to a lot of people. It doesn't excuse, and 9/11 was never, and this is where the growth really came for me. It was like, when I came forward about being abused, my mom called me when I got back to Delray that night. She said, or, excuse me, Derry that night, she said, this is why, this is why you did the things you did. Like, it wasn't just dad, it was, it was this. And this was like the mature moment for me, where like, I realized I was actually learning. And I said, mom, like, I'm an alcoholic, I'm an addict. This is how I am. I've been like this since I was a kid, like, I had the traits. I had it addiction, I had it before my dad died, and then his death brought it out. His death brought it to light sooner. And then drugs, look, maybe if it wasn't going to be drugs in alcohol, it was going to be something else. I know that. And I've seen that in sobriety too. Like, I've had my own, you know, I had a struggle with gambling for a little while. I'm gambling in six years, like, I can't do anything safely, you know, so that gets me outside of myself. But I told her that, and she just couldn't understand it. And, look, there are other 9/11 kids who didn't, who don't have a problem with drugs in alcohol. Like, there, you know, so it's just, it was never an excuse. I used it a little bit. As an excuse in the beginning, yeah, it did. But it's not the reality. Yeah, it's clear, like, there's a, whenever I hear a story like that, that firm line in the sand moment, it's like the biggest growing moment that a human being can have because you just go from this, all right, I'm at the bottom of the ditch right now. I'm going to have to get out of this, like, let's not ignore that. But it becomes clear and you're finally like, oh shit, all right, right, this can't be this way. Right. I don't want to ever get to that moment, so good for you that you did. Thank you. And, you know, I guess, yeah, how did your siblings like deal with that era, too? You know, your younger brothers? Yeah, that was hard to them. That was hard for them. I mean, you know, there's, I have videos on my phone that I sometimes will rewatch from like the last two weeks of my active addiction was very, very, very bad. Basically a blackout. I tried killing myself. That didn't work, obviously. They make a look like an accidental overdose. And I, there's videos that my brother's filmed. One of which is funny that we laugh at now. I had this bad obsession, if you will, addiction, if you will, with sugar, candies, and things like that. So I used to eat rice, crispy cereal, and I would put sugar on top. And it was like, and the way it would like, when you put the milk in there, it does like this like almost pop rock sounding thing, and it's amazing. And I'm blessed out of my mind that I'm eating it in the kitchen with this big bowl and this big pasta spoon. Wouldn't pasta spoon. So my brother's filming me and he's like, he doesn't know, like he's laughing, but like, it's like, it's bad. And I do not look good. I do not look good. Huge belly hanging down. And then the other video, which is, which saddens me, is one of me nodding outside. My brothers were filming me and they're like, they're laughing. They didn't understand it because my youngest brother was the one who was laughing. So he's like 14 at the time? 15? No, he was, um, yeah, he was like 14, yeah, yeah. And, uh, but he's so immature, who's age, right? And he just didn't understand it. The things that they had seen with my mom and me, like my mom had me to like, you know, try wake me up and, you know, a lot of arguments and things like that, like her taking stuff from me, like, just a lot of things that I put them all through, you know, so I had to make my amends. Um, and I had to forgive myself, you know, my youngest brother, I really, I brought him on a drug room with me, um, I left the kid in the car to go get high. And so yeah, that messed me up for a while. And it was hard for him to hear. He knew, you know, he was young when it happened, but like when I made the immense to him, he was like, just, I'm glad that you're doing better. And um, you know, it's like, you have to live with that, but you have to forgive yourself too. Hell yeah, man. You know, so it seems like, yeah, you have a great mom too, who, no, she's made support you throw it. And then, yeah, you know, she knows you're under the influence when you're doing those things to people do things that they don't, yeah, they would not normally do. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So what about your step dad, was, was that tough like that relationship during that time or, he didn't know how to approach certain things, it was hard for him. No one's ever going to be your dad. So it's, he tried, it's a, it's a hard line, a lot of baggage to walk into. Oh, yeah. Believe me. A widow's one thing, 9/11, four boys who are, can be a little rough, you know, friend of mine married in 9/11. Yeah. Widow with three boys and stuff. It's hard. Yeah, it's hard. I don't blame the kids at all. Yeah. It's already difficult dynamic. Yeah, it is. And, and always the remaring, no matter what, it's always hard, but, but he's, you know, my mom and him are so happily married and he had a good relationship. We have a really good relationship. That's great. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's hard and as I become a father too, it's been hard. Because I, I think about things, I reflect on things and I wonder what it would be like my dad was here and, you know, I, I feel him, don't get me wrong, I feel his presence, but it's hard. We name my son after him. That's cool. My dad wanted to name me after him being the first, the last second he pivoted, your name after you died, right? Yeah. Just like a middleman. Yeah. So, he pivoted and he said, I'm going to give him his own identity. That was his thing. Okay. Matthew John, his name was John, and then as we, you know, kept going, he, same thing and my youngest brother, who never knew my father really, he was going to name him John Paul. And I, as a nine year old, was like, that's not fair. Like, you're going to name me after you, like, I'm the oldest and I felt like kind of guilty about that for a second. But then he was like, you know what? Yeah. He should have his own identity. He should have his own identity too. So he named them Paul, which is his middle name. That's cool. Like a nice homage to my father, we named him, my son John and, you know, it's, it's been a beautiful gift, beautiful blessing. Circle life. Circle life. Yeah. And he's like the next generation. Hundred percent. So it's cool, man. It's, yeah. I often say, like, to think I could have missed it, you know? Right. But now you're here. I mean, I get the opportunity to do that. And, you know, hopefully as your son grows up, get to do the things that was taken away. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And I'm sure you'll have an extra special appreciation for that that even like very excited fathers out there can't possibly have, which is, that's kind of cool. Yeah. Absolutely. Do this. Good call. You just edit me out of this episode. No, no, not at all. This is not at all. This is great. You told me this was going to be fun. No, man. I know we just met this. You have a dude proud of you, dude. Yeah. Especially here. Especially here. But, you know, you don't have to give me the like wise. I appreciate it. This is your story is incredible. Yeah. And I got all the details. It's just proud, man. It's great. Yeah. A lot of resiliency. A lot. I mean, I had every step for sure. And I just, I don't know, podcasts like this are my favorite. Just because it's like, like I was saying earlier, it just gives an example for people out there to see, like, someone that's going to hear this right now and just be like, whoa, I see myself in that. Yeah. I hope so. Yeah. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's something. But you were before we got all into this in your personal story. We were talking about how like the 9/11 Commission report came out and there was like, okay, what the fuck is going on there? And David, you mentioned some in the years right after that, you started obsessively, like, trying to go look at some of the footage and find things out. But what kind of gets ignored, in my opinion, in the media is the fact that there has been a literal ongoing legal process. If you even want to call it that, it's been an embarrassment in some ways as to how this is going down. Like a legal process with the entire 9/11 victims as a class action with the Saudi government. Because the Saudi government had all kinds of people that, you know, definitely knew something or were around something and you guys, right, just like so, and your families are trying to get answers. And now there's, it's moving something moving forward in court finally. Yeah. This year, the federal judge was overseeing the case, essentially ruled that the Saudis do not have a position to dismiss the case, which they've been trying to do. Now, they sure you heard about the live golf tournament? Yes, but please explain this to people. Okay, so four years ago, you have the PGA, which is, you know, the biggest golf network of tournaments and the Saudi family, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has essentially sports watched in many different capacities. They were involved in sports watch, so it's called. I like that. And fact, check the soccer team. There was a soccer team that they did a big buyout or something and they invested a lot of money into. So basically what they've done is a big FU to the 9/11 communities, essentially, is they've taken their money and they have a lot of it. And they put it into all these different pools and just said, okay, instead of settling this case and being done and taking full culpability, we're just going to spend money all in these different places and make ourselves look better. So four years ago, they established this tournament, this golf league called the live golf league. And the idea was to make golf fun. And it's like there's these events and golf is, you know, and I'm a golfer. But golf has this ability at times to be, you know, this like almost like snooty kind of sport in a sense, right? And they want it to be fun and they're playing loud music and all those things and like, you know, drinking and whatever, trying to make this whole thing. And their idea was to basically poach all the big players. So they throw millions of dollars, multi millions of dollars at the biggest players in the game. Phil Mikkelson, I think he got $200 million. Yeah, I didn't think of it for like the shambles. Price and the shambles. I can't stand him. I have a very strong been dead against the guy. I do. I do. I really don't. Roy held strong. Roy held strong, Tiger held strong. And basically the players who went over to live could not go back to the PGA. But then, you know, there was, what pissed me off was that Bryson. And I actually DMed him, and he never responded. He said this thing on air a few years ago, and it was basically saying the 9/11 families, it's been 20, what do you say? It's been 21 years. They need to move on or something. Something along those lines. It pissed me off. It really said that. It really said that. When they've had no justice in court. No justice in court. So that if we can get the number, they spent a lot of money like over a billion dollars easily to get these big players, right? And so four years ago, I started doing a lot of advocacy work. And I had to really take a step back because it was draining. But just basically the show. And this is the thing, like my friends who knew my father all reached out to me and said like, I, yeah, I had no idea that the Saudis were involved. They didn't? They didn't know. Like, because this wasn't, listen, let's be real. This has not been a thing that's been publicized correctly until recently. That's right. You were right. By the way, Dave pulled it up. 1.3 to 1.6 billion specifically dedicated to signing bonuses and guarantees for poach golfers. Yeah. John Rom got 300 to 350 million. And so like, I saw, I saw where you LeBron. I started seeing some of these people's arguments and saying like, oh, it's life changing money. And like, you know, like, what would you do? And like, sure, like, I could sort of see it. But yeah, Boomer Saisin loved the guy. He plugged my book years ago. He actually, he referenced my book with the event, with the live event. So the first event was at Trump Edmitzer. I remember that. Yeah. But it doesn't matter where you stand in the political spectrum, but like, that was what really bothered a lot of 9/11 families was that the first events happening in our backyard. Yeah. Like, Edmitzer, New Jersey, where there was a lot of families in the nearby towns, my town included. Who lost people, families, and they're having the first event there. And they're, you know, parading around and, you know, meanwhile, this is all the Saudis. So anyway, that's just to give you some backstory. But yeah, October 7th, the proceedings are apparently going to be continuing. So this also came up in the Epstein files too. And you were telling me before you at least saw some of this, but there's literally, I don't I don't know if we can pour it off Jamie. LD from he probably already has a deepest fast, but there's literally an email where Jeffrey Epstein is going back and forth and the context, this is like maybe 2016, 2017, the context is he's explaining legal maneuvers to be able to delay these hearings in court, meaning he's working obviously directly against you guys, the 9/11 victims families to try to do, I don't know, aid the Saudi government in a way, and you just see stuff like this, and it's, I mean, it's slapping the face when I read it, can't imagine what it's like for you, and the fact that there's been clear protection over the years, we saw one that really bothers me, man, Muhammad bin Salman killed Jamal Khashoggi, ordered the killing of him in the Saudi consulate in Turkey, and there's even evidence, this one is not 100% proven, but like there's strong evidence that he was on the video monitor in the room while they chopped this guy to pieces, and we saved him, we let it go, we kept all our arms deals in place, like, so I look at this and I go, you know, everyone talks about the relationship with Israel and how messed up some of that is, like, you also have to talk about this one too, because there's something there behind the scenes that like these guys were also directly involved in some way in 9/11, and then they're also killing journalists while they're living in the US, by the way, operating for US companies, and they just get away with it. I don't understand what that is. Well, there was people who reached out to me when this first became a thing, and they were like, well, you know, the Saudi family is connected to this and that, and they have investing in Metta as an Facebook as an example, and I'm like, I'm not denying that they don't have involvement in numerous big companies and organizations in the United States, but the whole point of this tournament was literally to create an event where they were essentially money laundering and sports washing their image, and for what? Now the tournaments failed, it's no longer, it's dissolved basically, I think, not all the players. So that was the whole thing too. The players were able to come back to PGA, and so there was a whole outcry about that. The players who stuck with the PGA and said, I'm not going to take the Saudi money. Now, these guys get to come back. They took all that money and now they come back, and people were like, well, that's a smart business move. Like, yeah, like, can I see that side of it? Sure, but at the same time, I'm like, you're just taking blood money. Right. You're taking blood money. You know, the argument I could see being made, like, are we taking blood money if there's a lot, you know, settlement or whatever, which who knows what's going to happen with this, right? But at the same time, it's like, these people were culpable. We know it. It's proven. And it wasn't until the British government brought that video to justice. I think it was a year ago of what's his name, parading around the White House, the Capitol building. Um, a video that we had, the United States government had and was withheld. What videos? I don't know about this. What's his name? Um, he was scouting the area, he was scouting the area, and he was filming, and he was showing them. And it wasn't until the British government, this is prior to 9/11, obviously. So they have a Saudi scouting the area. What's his name? Omar, I by you, me, I think. Right? Am I right? It's crazy. It's crazy, man, and it's like, then that, this is where you can kind of run into this rabbit hole. Like, what did our government? The man, the new videos of a man in 9/11 lawsuit reveal extremist links to just getting the video that it's just loading, but let's at least read it. So we have it. So the man at the heart of the $1 trillion lawsuit brought by 9/11 families had extensive links to Saudi government officials and went paintballing with one of al-Qaeda's future leaders video obtained by the BBC reveals the footage, which the FBI had within days of the 2001 attacks, stands in stark contrast to Omar al-Bayoumi's 25 years of denials that he was an extremist in the Saudi spy. Bayoumi, who claimed to be a student when he was in the United States, is seen in the clip, what? Embracing on-war al-Alohlaki. So this was an American citizen that Obama drone strike. He loved drones. The drones striked out in Africa, which was controversial because he wasn't an American citizen, but he was on foreign soil, I guess at the time. So he's seen in one clip, embracing an war, al-Alohlaki, who would go on to lead al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And another, Bayoumi and al-Alohlaki are paintballing near San Diego with an official from Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The video is formed part of the 9/11 families lawsuit against Saudi Arabia and have never been shown publicly before. The lawsuit argues Saudi Arabia was complicit in the attacks and that Bayoumi aided two of the 19 hijackers who flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with another crashing in Pennsylvania. Bayoumi was arrested in the U.K. by the Metropolitan Police days after the attacks and the videos were found among his possessions along with other crucial evidence. This included a diagram of a plane with a flight to send equation written al-Alohlaki. The FBI was there. They were there for the interview. Multiple FBI agents received copies of the diagram but it was never shared with the British interrogators even though it had been courier to the police station where Bayoumi was being held in custody. The diagram was also kept from some FBI agents investigating Bayoumi as well as the 9/11 commission, the independent inquiry into the largest mass murder in US history in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Bayoumi was never prosecuted. He and the Saudi government did not respond to the BBC's request for comment but both have always denied any involvement in or prior knowledge of the attacks the FBI declined to comment. Wow. So the video that I was referring to, this is different, is one of him and I'm sure he could find it. And he's walking around the area so the fourth plane presumably was supposed to be D.C. Yeah. And so yeah, and that wasn't until the British released that video and I believe it was a year ago and again like we've known about this so how does it make you feel to find stuff out like this so long after? I mean, it's fucking frustrating. Yeah, I mean, it's not shocking at the same time, that's the weird part, that's the messed up part. What did it take for the 28 pages to be released and they were redacted? The 28 pages? Isn't that, I'm pretty sure that was a bomb in that spearhead, that's the video that I'm referring to. What Saudi intelligence officer films location in D.C. two years before 9/11 so it was two. Okay. Okay, let's play that. Yeah. Well, there you have it. I love it, she and brothers are greeting you from Omar Ala, you me, they say that our kids are demons however, these are the demons of the White House, they are going upwards as you are seeing. I'm reading his translation here. Okay, this is the new White House. Also the airport is not far away, they're cars looking at secret service cars, you said that in the plant. Look up the pages. That's like saying hello, I'm guilty. Like, you can't. Wow, you're talking about Epstein, like the delay tactics, the lawyer I spoke to said something. He said, yeah, we get these documents, they're redacted and then we have to go through another process to get the redactions cleared. So this, Dave just pulled this up water, the 28 pages, they are redacted classified final section of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the September 11, 2001 attacks. The detailed potential unverified connections and financial support between the 9/11 hijackers and individuals who may have been linked to the Saudi Arabian government, the Obama administration declassified and released the long hidden 28 pages on July 15, 2016 following years of pressure. What were you going to say? But most of the information that was what we needed was backed, yeah. So it's been a lot of fight and pursuit and there's been a lot of laws and all these things that have been passed recently to help us, but like it's, and then the frustrating aspect of it is that each administration has promised that they were going to do what they all should have done a long time ago and they haven't, you know, and so it's, why should it be so much effort for us to do this? This is, this is where, that's where people run Ryle with the conspiracy theories. Dude, I would just love to be a fly on the wall in the rooms where they talk about this. I know you probably love that even more than me, but, you know, I wonder if there were people in our government, even if it was two or three who maybe knew it was going to happen. I'm like, this isn't the worst thing. We can use this, which would be sick. And then I wonder what foreign governments knew about it. And I'm very, in my opinion, having looked at this case, I'm comfortable that there were elements of the Saudi government who were directly involved, let alone knew about it. And there were elements of the Israeli government that knew about it. And I've had Jim Deoreo on here who was in the FBI investigating things around the case. He told a famous story that hadn't been told before, back, told it in episode 48 and then he told the full thing when he came back and like 74 and 75, I think, or 73 and 74. you know, we're going to be doing it. So he arrested the financial arms in the Jersey Short Town on September 15th, 2001, and it's an insane, like, hairs on the back of your neck hearing about it. But it's just the tip of the iceberg. These guys were funneling money in for the hijackers and stuff like that. And you know, he wonders about all the people that they didn't arrest or cases he didn't get to make. You know, I remember a phone call I had about the, it was someone at the FBI who was there at that time about the whole guys, the, the massage guys who were filmed in Fort Leigh, the quote unquote dancing Israelis. And I just asked them, I said, what happened there? Because you know, they had the ABC report 10 days later than nothing was heard about it. These guys were sent back on November 6th, 2001 to Israel, they're seen on an Israeli talk show never seen again. And there was just a long silence on the phone. And the guy said, brother, I think about that once a day every day, wouldn't I like to know? I'm like, what, wouldn't you like to know you were in the fucking office that arrested him? What does that say about, you know, how high up the levers go with something like this, to just whatever the truth is, like, let's say the truth weren't even as bad as we think it was. The cover up has made it way fucking worse. And then when, when I think about the people like you who lost people in it, and you think about like justice, justice is never going to bring your family members back. No money is ever going to replace the whole lost or anything like that. But the quote unquote, air quotes of like closure, you never get the ability to do that. And in some ways, your government, in some ways, in a lot of ways, like your government, my government is at the top of the process to make sure that that doesn't happen. And something about that is just so fucking sick to me. And I can't imagine how that makes you feel every day. There's no closure. They said, I even asked that question, all right, the fucking money they're going after. What does that do within the day? It's just the truth. Yeah. It's just the truth. Yeah. And again, the more they cover it up, for whatever reasons, regardless, whatever direction you want to go on the side of the aisle, it's. What the fuck is taking so long? And there's just these nuances, the relationships, the geopolitical issues or whatever you want to build it to put another McDonald's there. I don't know. It's just. Yes. Frustrating. Yeah. I'd say when, how long is this going to keep going on? Yeah. In 25 years. Just going to JFK all over again. Like 25 years going to go by. That's right. And what, and to this day, however many users have been for JFK, like, has that full story ever been really? No. Not even close. And I, I've had a lot of conversations with people about that too, but yeah, what do you do? Right. There's nothing. That's the worst part. There's nothing you can do other than like try to yell loud enough that maybe someone will be forced to do something. But like you said, it's been 25 years, you know, do your families have a, do people within your family or is their kind of mix have strong issues with the story and think that there's, that it's been a lie. I know you mentioned your brother earlier, but is it ramping across your families or how would you describe that? For me, no. No. Actually, yeah. My, my, my aunt says an example won't, they don't bring that type of stuff up. Right. And I understand that completely. Yeah. I mean, like, it's also never, I feel like there's never been a time that I could ask them or question them about it. Yeah. I don't know. I think I'm bringing it up in two days. Now they bring it up. Yeah. Yeah. Curious. It is just one of those things. I guess going to the memorial to get that file. Okay. What does that do for that? And it might not just be necessary from my, my, my our heads. Yeah. You know, we've sought so much information for whatever reasons. Right. I already know what it would do for me. Like, I try to put myself there. And if you say it is revealed, I mean, let me get all the truth. And then what? What am I, what, then what? Yeah. I mean, I mean, I want it. Yes. I think there's power to knowing. But and then what? Like, I honestly feel like if it was revealed, what's going to change? I still don't think anything changes. That's the thing for you guys. Yeah. I'm not sure. Doesn't never bring them back anyway. But even just in general, like the world, what, obviously more truth, the better. And they're going to flick more change. But what the fuck do we do? Right. It's not a sad, it's horrible, it's horrible. If people don't want to adjust this for it, then it doesn't, it's like, it's almost in a sick way. It's like, aha. All right. There you have it. That's what would sit wrong with me. But my friend, Joseph Scott Morgan, who you should definitely have on your show, by the way, he, he was a, he was a long time medical death investigator. I've had him on my show a bunch, one of the best storytellers ever. But you know, when he talks about death and grief and things like that, he takes it so serious like, because he used to be the guy that had to go notify a family member that like, you know, we just found your family member murdered or something like that. And it's still every single one of them gets them to this day. But you know, he, he talks about it, he's like, he, he's got a real problem with the word closure. It's like, it doesn't exist. Because he's like, you know, that's not to, that's not to be a Debbie Downer or anything. But the fact of the matter is once, once it's done, there's nothing that can change it. When you finding out every which way it happened and stuff like that, yeah, it might help in the grief process. But you don't, he's like, the term closure makes it sound like, all right, we've shut the door and we're moving on with life. He's like, there's not one person I ever talked to who didn't carry that with them for the rest of their life. I carried it with me. I didn't know the people, you know, I, I don't know if that speaks to kind of how you guys feel about things, but that always stuck with me when he said that. Yeah, I just think the grief evolves. I don't know. I don't think it's closure, but if anything, it's one less box that you can check in a way. I don't know if that makes sense where it's so you harp, we have these conversations constantly over the last 20 years and think about what ifs and what's the truth. And then if it is put to bed, okay, now that's one less thing to constantly contemplate over. But then it's just still left with the truth and then with the fuck to do with the truth, you know? So it's a never-ending cycle. Sometimes I'm like, what am I supposed to do, like when I was a kid, I supposed to go to war. So I suppose to sign up. Maybe I should have. I don't know. Like, well, what have that have done? And then what points, like, what's my lane? Like, well, I'm doing my work right now and my lane isn't to get all political and push that is just not. And that's what what point do I just say in my lane and contemplate it? I think that's important. But I don't want to sit. I can't sit in it forever, but then what gets what changes from that? You say grief evolves over time. I mean, yeah, I just think that it, like, there are moments for me where I feel like it was yesterday, where I feel like the loss, I'm feeling it heavier in that moment. And then there are times where I feel like it's, yeah, it's been 25 years, however I still think about it. And it's interesting because I'll speak for myself. I think about my dad every day. I do. Whether it's good things or bad things, I think about him every day. And I have friends, you know, who have lost their dad on 11 as well. And they say, and my one friend said to me, like, I don't think about him every day. And I was like, okay, and I'm like, that's not, that's not me, though. And like, no one's right. No one's wrong. It's all different. And so for some people, like, yeah, if they can, I don't know. I mean, again, like, it's just different for every single person. I don't know. I haven't asked my brothers, do you guys think about that every day? I know I do. It doesn't make me any better or worse than you, you know, it's just, it's just how I am. And I will say, I've come to a better place with it. I don't look at the footage the way I used to. The times that I'm exposed to the footage are when I do something on TV and they show the footage next to me. So in the years prior, everything was streamed, because there's COVID, and, you know, years after COVID. And I always did zoom. So I'll be watching the interview as I'm giving the interview, right? And I see what they're showing on TV next to me. And it's like, picture of my dad and me. And it's like, here's the buildings on fire. And that, that'll hit me. Yeah, it's like, such a, they just try so hard to, like, capture the audience with, like, sensationalized. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's, I don't know there's a more generational piece of footage than that. Like, if you, if you're looking at history 600 years from now and what's the main image of, like, this era, I don't have a better count of them. I mean, the biggest city in the world just, you know, say it's, but it's a strange thing. Because like you said, every time you're seeing that, you're seeing a replay of losing your family. Right. Right. I think it was, I hope I don't miss, I miss, attribute this, but I want to say it was Andrew Garfield. I heard him say something recently where he said, grief is the price you pay for the love you didn't have a chance to express. Hmm. You agree with that? I just simplify it. And it's a beautiful quote. I just think it's just love. Hmm. But it's also, it's everything. Love is literally everything to me. Everything is just a smorgasbord of emotions. Sometimes you don't know what emotions you're feeling. Sometimes you don't know if the emotions are coming from the grief. It's just like it comes. It oozes out of you. You don't know when. I mean, it's been 25 years. I was literally looking at, from the view of my hotel, looking at the World Trade Center. I just kept like, I was playing with the sheer that was in front of it. Yeah. Going back and forth. like see it and not see it. And I kept like flickering in my imagination, seeing the towers there, just seeing that they used to be there. And I was crying, just thinking about it. I just, like, 25 years later. - Yeah. - And I'm still shedding tears. - Right. - But that's grief. Again, this is my specific, I were a specific experience or 9/11, but it shows up down the line. We lost our dad at nine and 12. So I feel like I'm living in the future that I was grieving as a boy, knowing it wasn't gonna have. And now I'm in these moments. I wish I could share with my father. And that's the representative of grief too. It's like there's new memories I'm not gonna get. And you're not gonna get with your loved one. And that's what I do. - It just pops up like a groundhog. You never know when. Maybe on a two to three o'clock, something hits you. But I like to like that sadness because it is that love that I think he was expressing. I sometimes I wanna dive into as a reminder, not only what we endured, but also it's my dad. Like that pain, if grief is love and grief is pain, it's altogether. And that love is that pain. And it's pain because of that love. And sometimes that's why I wanna feel that pain because it's a reminder of the love. And I forget so much of my dad and what he felt like and sometimes all I have is that emotion. And so I don't wanna forget that. But at the same time, we gotta remember his love. Because he can't, I don't wanna dwell on it so much, but it is important to sit and it contemplate to feel it. - Yeah. - And then it sucks. But you know, it's what it is. And there's a lot, there's a lot of shit I would trade for it, but there's a lot of good shit that came from. There's a lot of beautiful shit. I mean, I would have never met you. - Yeah, exactly. - I would rather not have met you. If my dad was still alive for another one of the last years, you're a great guy. (laughing) - You think the kid's out of Jersey. - Never, never, never, he's true though. I mean, there's a lot of good things that came out of it too, for sure. - Yeah, you have to see like the beauty and that silver lining I would imagine as the years go on. - Absolutely. - Yeah, I have to, but yeah, it still sucks. - It does, I genuinely can't imagine, but you guys both do an amazing job of telling your stories and you know, David, you do it really well through the podcast, through other people's stories as well. But thank you so much. - No, thank you for having me, David, thank you for this. I mean like, what a gift this was. You know, I've never done this before. Like I've never been in a podcast studio like this. - No, I have, not like this. I've been in a podcast studio before, but I'm saying like I've never done a podcast like this with someone like David. - That's not what you're listening to, man, for real. - Yeah, I know, I mean, it's just, this is really, really, really special for me. - So, well, I'm glad to hear that, man. I'm glad we could all put together and could us to you, David, for being able to get this, make this possible. But what, we're recording this a couple days before 9/11, this is gonna come out on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. What are you guys, sorry, from my table right here, going down, but what are you guys gonna be doing? One, one, nine, 11. - We're doing a small family. Well, we have a moral in the town that I grew up in, in the morning. I have one thing I'm doing for media that day, that's it, and then I'm spending the afternoon in my family. - That's nice. - Yeah, just simple, it's gonna be a beautiful day. - Love that. - I look at the weather, it's gonna be a nice day. And just try to, what we've done differently in the last few years, I'm sure you're gonna test this, too, probably, it's more of like a celebration of my dad, not as much of a grieving. I still feel the emotional hangover, and I'm gonna feel it heavy this year. I already know it in the day after. Like the 12th is always the day you wake up, and you're like, "Oh, fuck, I feel like shit." I don't feel it, there's the, I have a friend who lost her at 9/11 as well. She describes it as the anticipatory anxiety as you lead up to it, and it's so true, 'cause it's not the day itself for me anymore. It's the days leading up to it. It's talking about it incessantly, for the days leading up to it. Day comes, you feel like shit, but you kind of get through it, and then it's the days afterwards, like, you kind of have a relief, but you feel it's heavy. - Yeah, so this is like those anniversaries in general when it comes to grief. And so that's, I've talked about that. It's amazing you're saying that, 'cause it's September 12th. - Yeah. - It's the day after. - Day after. - Day after, so it's like, okay, it's like Christmas. You leave the Christmas, it turns into Christmas, but you get to Christmas, you'll hype the stress once it's over. That's it, now it's done. - Yeah, exactly. - But it's a reminder of zooming out. I think that's September 12th, there's a reminder of zooming out. It's just, everything else has come before it, but this year, 25th, I'm just gonna be with my family. I always get some more emotional when you're with everyone out of the grant, like, niece and nephews. - Oh, yeah, yeah. - That's a whole nother weird thing, and they know Grandpa David from Stories. They, it's just, it's just weird, man. The more time goes by, the more it feels like a fuzzy grainy family video and gets weirder and weirder. - We can't do that so spot on. - It's fucking weird. - I don't know. - I'm glad you guys are both gonna be with your family, so I think that's pretty cool. - Yeah. - And nice and low key as well. - Exactly. - And that way. But thank you guys so much. - Thank you. - This was awesome, and I know, I know people are gonna be really inspired about a story. They got to hear today from you, so thank you for sharing that with us. - Yeah, of course. - Thank you, brother. - All right, everybody else, you know what it is? Give it a thought, get back to me, and by the way, books are linked down below. Check them both out. Peace. - What's up, guys? Thanks so much for watching the video. If you have not subscribed, please hit that subscribe button before you leave, as well as leaving a like on the video to the YouTube shop. You can join my Patreon via the link in the description, and you can also join my clipping community via the Discord link down below. See you for the next episode. (upbeat music)