Niels Jorgensen: New York Firefighters and the Heroes of 9/11 | Lex Fridman Podcast #220
the following is a conversation with niels jorgensen a new york firefighter for over 21 years who was there at ground zero on september 11 2001. he was forced to retire because of the leukemia he contracted from cleaning up ground zero this podcast tells his story and the story of other great men and women who were there that day some of the stories we talk about are part of a new limited podcast series that kneels hosts called 20 for 20 with 20 episodes for the 20 years since 9 11. to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description as a side note please allow me to say a few words about the terrorist attacks on september 11 2001. i was in downtown chicago on that day lost in the mundane busyness of an early tuesday morning at that time i was already fascinated by human nature the best and the worst of it exploring it through the study of history and literature in the years before as a young boy growing up in russia i saw chaos uncertainty and desperation in the soviet union of the 1990s wrapping up a century of war and suffering but after coming to america for me there was a sense of hope like all of it was behind us a bad dream to be forgotten as we enter into the new century on 9 11 when i saw the news of the second plane hitting the towers my sense of hope had changed i understood that the 21st century like the century before would too have its tragedies its evildoers its wars and its suffering and unlike the history books these stories will involve all of us they will involve me in however small and insignificant a role but one that nevertheless carries the responsibility to help i became an american that day a citizen of the world i felt the common humanity in all of us i felt the unity and the love and the days that followed and i think most of the world shared in this feeling that we are all in this together evil cannot defeat the human spirit there were many heroes sung and unsung on that day and in the years after often politicians failed to rightfully honor the service and sacrifice of these heroes there is much i could say about that but i don't want to waste my words on the failures of weak leaders instead i want to say thank you to the men and women who rushed to ground zero to help who put on a uniform to serve who make me proud to be an american and a human being and give me hope about the future of our civilization here on a small spinning rock that despite the long odds keeps kindling the fire of human consciousness and love this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with niels jorgensen take me through the day of september 11th 2001 as you experienced it as you lived it september 11 2001 uh was a bright beautiful sunny tuesday morning uh as a late summer uh there's a lot of folks who go to the beaches in new jersey call it the short summer it's uh everybody's left there for labor day but it's still beautiful enough to enjoy the weather um i left my house about 6 30 in the morning and uh my four and a half year old daughter said to me daddy which truck are you driving today um the fire truck the oil truck or the boar's head truck because i had three jobs at the time um most new york city firefighters and police officers ems we don't make the most amount of money so in order to live in that city you have to uh you have to hustle and my wife stayed at home raising the children so my daughter said oh she you should be safe because you're on the oil truck i said i told her i was going on an oil truck that day so she should be safe today daddy so i left and um worked for this great company on the north shore staten island quinlan fuel very nice people treated me very well and was my first day back actually for the winter season um i usually get laid off a couple months in the summer because things you know too hot to need oil so i took the truck started my route on that day and uh plane hit the tower so initially i'm like oh it's probably some silly learjet pilot and he veered off track to get a better picture for a client and uh he hit the building probably hit a you know bad turbulence uh gust of wind it's very windy down in that area in manhattan so that was my first thought can we pause there for a second so 6 30 a.m you wake up you leave and then the plane hits at 8 8 45 85 45 am yeah it's just interesting how you phrase it so how did you hear that a plane hit something i um i'm a big news radio guy uh news guy bit of a buff i've been that way since i was a kid and i had the news radio on the local new york radio station and as i was driving the truck i heard you know a emergency report this just in aircraft has just struck the world trade center and uh where quinlan's is located it's on the north rim of staten island uh which is right on new york harbor and uh you could see statue of liberty you know a mile or two away in your distance and then past that as towers so i just literally stopped the truck and looked out and i saw the smoke so there was smoke oh it was dark black smoke it was just yeah i mean it was burning fully at that point and uh did you have fear of what the hell happened or i was i was initially scared for anybody involved uh i realized i said there's there's gonna be lots of fatalities obviously depending on the size of the aircraft and uh you know uh the the business day there had started probably at 8 8 30 so those buildings should have been packed at that moment so that was a thought across my mind um but from our our uh being responder perspective if you're off duty normally you you do not go to a scene they don't want you to because of accountability and safety uh the on-duty platoon will handle it and if it's something very horrific then they will have something called a recall which is any police firefighter or ems personnel is obligated to go to their command immediately uh check in with you know their command to get their gear and stand by and await orders for deployment uh or to remain in that command for routine duties how often throughout history have there been recalls i believe the one prior to that was like in the 1968 riots possibly and then maybe in the 70s there was uh another blackout in riots and i remember my dad talking about it and he actually always said just remember if something bad's going down don't just rush in you you you await the recall or at the very least if there isn't a recall you get to your firehouse and because if you show up somewhere there's a good chance that no one knows you're there and now you in your well-intended uh movements you you get lost or trapped or no one's looking for you so that's the whole thing with you know checking in and now you're with a squad or you know group of guys and everyone knows you know hey there's nells there's lex okay they're on you know this team so i i said all right they're not going to need us it's probably going to be a fifth alarm and you know there'll be 250 firefighters there they'll handle it it's going to be a bad day for those guys but you know our guys take on some heavy stuff and they'll be fine a few minutes later um the second plane hit and i knew immediately i'm like okay uh we're under attack so i just flew the truck back in i told my boss i have to go he understood he knew something was way wrong and i just was flying uh at the time i actually had a yellow volkswagen beetle uh kind of a goofy car to be driving but i loved it so for people who are just listening you're kind of a big guy well yeah i could i definitely need to lose about 50 pounds no i don't mean in that way yeah your frame as my hands as my beloved friend bobby adams would say to me i i uh i was driving around in a clown wagon and he also says i have a waving waving hair dude waving bye bye so thanks bobby but yeah he's a great friend uh yeah so i took the volkswagen and i flew in and i was heading over to verrazano bridge and hit the brooklyn queens expressway and my phone rang and my wife normally doesn't uh curse or raise a voice and she was yelling at me and she said don't go in there go to your firehouse first she asked well she knew i was on the way but she just wanted to know where and um i said i'm on i'm on the curve which is 65th street on the brooklyn queens expressway called dead man's curve we we actually used to do a lot of car wrecks up there and i was hitting that curve pretty fast and then right around the curve is the exit to the firehouse and i had to decide well am i driving right in to the battery tunnel to the city or am i going to the firehouse and then i said but i have no gear i i'm going to be ineffective how do i show up with no gear no protection no you know so she said do what your dad would follow the recall go to the firehouse i said hung up the phones i love you gotta go and i did i went to the firehouse and uh i'm glad i listened to her i have my father ringing in my ears my dad beautiful guy he's 82 in 34 years in new york city fire department he uh he came down with end stage non-hodgkin's lymphoma uh he's 38 back in uh going on 39 1978. and uh this guy he uh he's my hero he um he was going to die they sent him home they said you there's really not much we can do go get your affairs and he says but doc i have three young kids and and uh she she called him a couple hours later she said um i got in touch with sloane kettering and now they have a new uh new drug we want you to be a test pilot and she's he said uh hey doc i'mma he's got a heavy brooklyn accent i'm a fireman i'm a fireman i'm not a pilot and uh so she said no no we want you to try this drug out and it's it's uh if it works we might have some success but if not he says yeah i'm gonna die so let's do it so uh every every two weeks for four years he uh he'd go for treatment but uh he was assigned to a desk job after that after the the cancer tumor removal and you know the heavy treatments and he'd get up every morning four o'clock in the morning and he'd uh he'd walk down to the train station in staten island take the train and then he'd uh take the ferry across the harbor and he'd get off looking at the towers and then he'd take a subway into brooklyn and on every other thursday he'd leave at noon and do the same exact reverse route and he'd get to the cancer center and uh my mom would meet him and he'd get his infusion and within two hours he'd be violently ill for a few days really badly ill and i just remember um you know he's 10 years i was 10 years old and he just had to have the room darkened out and he he'd be so sick and i just go in and wipe the vomit on his face just try to give him a little water but he couldn't take it down because he'd throw it up and uh maybe on saturday he started coming around a little bit drink down a little bit of tea and on sunday morning he he put his robe on he'd go down mom and make him black coffee and toast he'd sit up watch the news watch the game and then monday morning he'd go back to work and he did that for four years and uh he's 82 and he's still here uh you said that your dad's a man of a few words but when he talks they're profound so what what words were ringing in your ear when you were driving i just always remember them saying kid they give the recall you go to the firehouse you don't go where you think you should you go to the firehouse you follow your orders so do the smart thing do your job yes sir and every time we hang up the phone it's firemen talk he'd say i love you keep low my dad couldn't tell me he loved me until um i told him when i first got on a fire department i was 22 and my dad grew up in a tough household my granddad was a a good man but a tormented man he he was sent away from home at 12 years old um um he was in from denmark and i'm named after him grandpa nils and uh i think his demons took up a large part of his life his his anger his whatever it was his fear i i we got the sense that maybe when he was a child he was an apprentice baker you know living with strangers working for them and we we think maybe he was abused and that's why he took it out of my my dad and my grandma my aunts but um they uh they made it up to each other at the end of my granddad's life my granddad turned out to be the best grandfather ever he i think he tried to heal and heal everyone by his change of behavior so he's proof that you can't change you can improve if you work on it but i know i'm going off track here but uh but you were man enough and you're you said in your 20s to tell you my dad yeah i got on the job uh he said i had to go kid that was the tour we called tour of duty so i thought it was great it was great i love it and he goes we just remember you keep low you always keep low and keep low means you stay down below the flames you know for room flashes over and it's it's burning you if you stay up high you're gonna get burned badly but if you get down on your belly and you crawl you'll get out so he'd always say that when you hang up the phone and i said well i love you pop and he says uh well thanks kid i said well you can say it too and uh oh nice he pressured him and he did and he said it and now every time we talk he says it so you know um you know they they talk about masculinity and whatnot and uh my dad is one of those tough tough guys with a soft edge and that's that's how he brought me up um you know to be a protector i hate bullies i was bullied really badly as a kid and uh i really hated it and and now i i find myself sometimes throwing myself into situations to protect people that are being you know violated and hurt and uh i just can't walk away from it but that's my dad my dad was that you know just a great guy but anyway yeah just to listen to you therefore see you you probably want to rush right to the to the towers but you went yeah so anyway i got i i did i listened to him i listened to my wife i went to the firehouse and it was really strange it was eerie because um the computer dispatch system was was still beeping um which meant it sent a dispatch and the truck received it ladder 114 my my truck company received it and they left they were gone so there's this beautiful old building built in the 1880s with a spiral staircase just a narrow old brick garage and it was empty and i just heard the computer chirping and i looked down on a ticket and i said lotta 114 respond the vessel west world trade center aircraft into building and i said oh god i just hope they're not on a death ride because this this now was two towers and uh they were burning they were free burning and and i knew this was really really bad and i got on the phone and i called command right away i called the 40th battalion and you know chief's chief's aide just said look you know get 12 guys sign them in to the journal there's a journal of daily events every everything that takes place in the firehouse 24 7 has to be logged and i locked myself as coming in reporting for reporting for duty um and as the guys came in i logged them in and then one of our lieutenants took command we grabbed up a bunch of gear and they basically told us get 12 guys get a city bus and get down to the batter the battery tunnel they they said would probably be closed there was threats it was going to be blown up to get to the brooklyn bridge and uh so we did we got a city bus we flagged it down and the bus driver said i'm sorry i can't give you the bus i will drive you and he took us and we stopped at engine 201 which is just about a quarter mile down the road from us uh that's our affiliated engine company and my uh my my childhood best friend uh here johnny uh shard was he was a sign there and he was on shift and uh and they went through the tunnel and uh we picked up those guys the off-duty guys from 201 and then we kept going down fourth devin and we picked up 239's crew and then we hightailed it down the bridge and um there's a lot of traffic there's a lot of people fleeing coming over the bridge and waves so it affected uh the inbound what was the mood like uh it was somber because just prior to getting on the bus the uh first tower went down so we we we figured that i heard 114 my lieutenant dennis oberg i heard him on the radio and he uh he said 114 uh manhattan we're on your frequency what's you know what do you need us and they said uh tallyho which is our nickname tallyho responding to bessie and wes to the command post and receive your orders and i heard dennis the tally ho 10-4 and dennis a little while after that they were proceeding to go into i believe it was i get this mixed up and i'm sorry i should know this by the back of my hand but sometimes it's just such a haze but the second tower hit was the first one to go down and um they were heading over to go in it and all of a sudden he looked up and he saw like what he thought to be disintegration and he turned the guys around he said run just run don't look back don't look up go they sprinted as fast as they could and uh they dove under a fire truck and the guys that were sprinting behind him 40 feet away were underneath the pile that was 10 stories deep they they were killed and just further into that pile was his rookie son who dennis's rookie's son who was working in ladder 105 which was my first command on the department i worked for proudly served for three years and just beside them was my childhood best friend john shard and his uh his crew from 201 and uh they they were all killed and the strange irony to um to that is that dennis dennis's son dennis jr was working underneath the uh under the wing of a senior man as we say senior man is a guy with a lot of experience and he'll uh to watch over you make sure you don't you know veer off like i veer off a lot and talking and uh you don't veer off and you get yourself hurt in the morning in 1993 bombing henry miller was my senior man and i was the young guy under his wing and he protected me until the end of the day looked around he said kid it's a bad day he said they didn't do it right they blew it up in the middle if they did it in a corner they would have dropped this building half mile down to canal street but don't kid yourself they'll be back and they'll do it and they'll do it right next time and it's so strange and so prophetic because he was there with him he died with dennis he knew it and like 1994 we had a training manual with a picture of the towers with a target and this is not not a matter of if but a matter of when be prepared it's one thing it was like people knew right and we didn't stop it and uh so we got off the bus but just prior to that coming over the bridges the second tower was gone now and we're just destroyed because we're like our guys are there they're all in there now we're feeling like cowards because we got there late and initially we're thinking there's 500 guys that are gone because it was a 10th alarm assignment which means 50 60 fire trucks uh five to six guys per you know you're looking at at least you know it was even more 10th alarm plus multiple alarms on top of it there was a dispatch basically equivalent of five to 600 firefighters you figured oh they're all they're all in there all gone all the police officers port authority police nypd police court officers just up the street from the courts transit cops from the train tunnels like just you know we knew everybody was going and uh now they're gone so you what you saw what were we looking at what did it look like so you saw rubble and then you knew that many that 105 and 201 many of those guys are in the they're dead yeah what and we thought was in there too we didn't realize at that point we didn't even realize that they had gotten under that truck we thought they were all gone but yeah it looked like like it looked like it looked like a movie scene with just end of the earth destruction these just massive piles of intertwined steel what was left of the steel and and you know there was no cement it was all just dust and it was just a burning pile of dust and concrete and plastic and it was just everything was just pulverized and it was it was truly hard to mentally compute that like it was like what and then there was just fighter jets couple fire just just circling and and you just heard that flying by over your head i mean you'd literally see the guy banking the turn around the brooklyn bridge and just coming back and i'm like holy shoot we're under attack and we couldn't really get concrete intel as to what exactly we knew planes but then we kept hearing there was multiple devices there was devices in a battery tunnel and there was devices on the george washington bridge and in the subways and it was just it was just chaos it was i mean we kept it together obviously because that's kind of we try that's what we do but the the just constant barrage of different reports it was like holy shoot and then as we were being deployed it was a little frustrating but they were trying to take command and send us in groups now because they realize we have to start searching this there's you could hear the alarms on the on the scott air mask the packs we wear to go into the building it has a motion alarm and if you stop moving for 30 seconds it just sounds like this whining you know this screaming bell like it just keeps going and going and you could hear multiple units of those going off and you're like wait a minute there's guys with those like where are they and it's emanating from underneath the pile and wow you know it was it was just surreal and um truly like like like a war zone you know i mean i was a soldier in reserves and i never saw combat and i would never claim that i did but you know we trained we trained for a lot of situations and we trained in you know real life atmospheres and whatnot and this was just beyond that by leaps and bounds it was it was bizarre did you see the towers collapse as we were coming over the bridge the first one we were as we were deploying from the firehouse we had a television and i saw it go down and it just it was just like and and you know we were so involved in getting gear together and getting okay you know team set up and okay you're going to be with these two guys and he's gonna and i just yell there's the guys and they're looking at me i dropped to my knees and i started praying they're like what what the hell is wrong i said i couldn't even say it's like i said i'm 14 they're in there and and they're like what i said the tower's gone and all you saw on the tv was just this pile of dust and i guess because they didn't see it going down i probably thought i truly lost it and and then then the realization came was like oh wow the tower's down so now it was like wow this is really on so we we just took off and got that boss and uh so if you thought many of the guys on 114 were dead if you thought that did you think you're going to die i mean if you're rushing into the towards the rubble i as crazy as it sounds i never thought that the other tower would go down i said okay maybe some freak chance that one went down but no the other one's not gonna go like they're built so strong you know i was in those towers so many times and i mean i ate dinner up in the top four restaurant windows on the world and i'm saying nah there's no way like like how the hell did this one happen but i i was having a hard time mentally processing that the building was gone and and and believe me if if you don't have fear in this industry and you know police fire military then you're you're kidding yourself or you're a danger to everyone i don't care who it is as tough as they are this and that everybody has a certain level of fear with doing this and i don't care how long you do it there's always that chance of something going bad and and everyone who does it has that certain amount of fear but at that point it was such a feeling of disbelief that fear wasn't even kicking in it was just like what the hell just happened and i honestly think it was almost like a shock and it just stayed that whole day um so the building is before collapses is burning it's just burning i mean upper floors is you know up in the 78th up to the 80s and then it's you know there's the way that the cut was from the plane it wasn't just straight across it was you know from the 78th then you know on up to maybe the 86th and you know um then the jet fuel had come down and was burning down and there was people on the on the ground who were doused with jet fuel that was already burning and they were lit on fire on the ground it was it was just insane how vast the destruction path was a firefighter what are you supposed to do with that scale of fire i i think the first bosses in the first chiefs were going to do their best to get as we we get hose lines what our whole theory is or our tactics is to get water at the fire at the base of the fire and get the truck company which is the ladder company they're the guys who break the doors down put ladders up this and that to get them to where the life is most expected and get them out of there so i think the chiefs tactics at that point was let me get multiple engine companies let me get four five six hose lines fighting this fire this massive fire and let me get 15 20 truck companies up there just yolking people out of there yeah but you got to go up the stairs everything's not working yeah guys had to walk up 80 80 90 100 flights of stairs and there's audio of of officers and firefighters speaking to each other on the radio channels and unfortunately at that point in time we had very very bad communication system we've been fighting for years to get radios that work properly we couldn't because it was a lot of money we fought for years to get the full bunker firefighting suits which is the pants and the coat we used to have just coats and these roll up rubber boots and guys were burning to death and we had to fight and unfortunately we lost three guys in one vicious vicious fire in 1994 and then they finally said enough's enough give these guys the gear so it's a strange phenomenon in the first responder world and in the military world it's really one of the most important things that takes place in society the most pertinent organizations and we can't get the funding we need it's crazy they'll throw money at every nonsensical thing but when it comes to gear equipment protective equipment trucks this couldn't get it just all the ways you could take care of people i saw in since 9 11 the wars in the middle east have cost america over six trillion dollars and the amount of that money that was spent on the soldiers in this case the first responders is minimal compared to it yeah almost nothing they they like stay closed down i believe it's either seven or eight in may of 2002 they closed down nine fire houses in new york city for budget reasons we hadn't even finished cleaning up the world trade center site and they slashed the budget and still to this day have not reopened those fire houses there's a million more people now living in new york city than there were in 2001 and the fire protection is is way less than it was and it's it's a sin it's really a sin can i ask you a a difficult question so there's this famous um photograph of a falling man so many people had to decide when they're above the fire in the fire whether to jump out of the building or to burn to death what do you make of that decision what do you make of that situation those people who jumped those were acts of sheer desperation i've i've been in fires and and just minor burns but minor you know in situations but i've been trapped caught somewhat ended up in the burn center for some nothing nothing serious at all but like but i i for those brief seconds half a minute was thank god if i didn't have my fire gear on i would have been burned to a very very horrible level those people were burning alive and they had the choice of either to stay there and burn alive or to launch themselves and some of them i don't fault them but they they had a few folks they won't show it anymore because they say i don't know why i defend some people but they had a couple folks that took umbrellas and they took garbage bags because they thought that it would slow down their except their acceleration rate to the ground and maybe just maybe they wouldn't be killed and that's to me a true sense of desperation for humanity to say i'm going to die either way but let me take my chance and i don't know the exact number of those folks who did that but our first member of the fire department killed firefighter daniel surf from edge 216 was struck by a jumper and one of my dear friends was ordered to help take him and they knew he was passed away because he was hit by a flying missile i mean you know 120 miles an hour body lands on you those those two bodies are now crushed and they were ordered to take that firefighter and bring him across the street to engine 10 ladder 10. it was literally a firehouse less than 100 yards from the facade of the trade center from the trade center complex they literally right there and there was plane parts that went into that firehouse landed into the front doors onto the roof but the building itself was not destroyed so it was used as as a mini command center for quite a while so my friend was ordered to take daniel's body in respect and bring it over to this firehouse and give it some semblance of dignity and lay it out on one of the bunk room the bunks we have in the bunk house and just cover it with a sheet and put a sign please firefighter kill do not disturb and then we'll get to him later because obviously this operation is going to go on for days and my friend who's such a great great wonderful guy is so still to this day filled with guilt because if they weren't taking his body out with the respect and dignity that they did it took a while because you know just it's a tough situation his ladder company it's coming over the bridge there's a famous picture of ladder 118 you see this tractor trailer fire truck it's the one where the guy in the back also drives and it's a zoomed out shot and you see the brooklyn bridge and you see only the fire truck in the middle and you see the two burning towers in the distance well his engine company was just ahead of them on the bridge and the only reason that engine company lived is their initial duty assignment was to take that firefighter and bring his body over it's like the military we don't leave anyone behind these are our guys as we some guys say it's all about the guy right next to you and nothing else really matters when that guy right next to you goes down it stops you get that guy to safety or if he's dead you get him out so in that time frame that saved his life but that's a heavy burden to carry now for the rest of your life because you say if i wasn't helping my dead friend i'm dead yeah what did it look like at ground zero what did it feel like what did it smell like what you said it there's a sense that it was almost like a war zone but can you paint the picture of how much dust is in the air how hot is it how many people are there and and again how did it feel like it was just it was scene of control chaos control because there was a semblance of command and we were just trying to do our jobs but it was such a frantic pace because we're now digging frantically knowing that there's life underneath this pile and this is throughout the afternoon this is this is yeah i mean this was non-stop you know uh just non-stop really for for days but for my particular crew we literally kept going we initially were dispatched over towards number seven had just gone down and we were searching the post office that was there there was reports of people trapped and we painstakingly searched every single inch of that building to make sure no one was left in there and then we were deployed to the pile and the pile was sort of ambiguous because it was just such a vast vast pile i mean it went for city blocks and we were we were assisting in the retrieval of two port authority police officers were lucky enough to survive but they were trapped they were deep down into a crevasse and they had to be physically dug out and extricated so there was a couple hundred few hundred guys involved in that process of bringing in equipment jaws of life airbags to lift steel you just you know to cut pieces of steel it was just a huge operation and we were back toward the logistics end of it shuttling in gear and and bring it bringing in stretchers bringing in oxygen you know whatever whatever was needed and you were trying to climb over this this jagged pile of debris it wasn't like you just walked 100 feet on a street with something you were trying to climb over this i-beam and then down into this hole and then i'll back up that hole i mean just to run one piece of equipment took a half an hour to get 100 feet 200 feet you know mind you some of these pieces of equipment are 100 pounds you know generator for rehearse tools this massive motor on a frame unstable ground unstable ground just just horrible conditions fires are still burning aside you beneath you and at one point i kind of veered off to the side and i was with this other fireman from my father's old ladder company 172 and it was strange because we were down quite a bit down like 70 feet down into this ravine of debris and he says brother what do you hear and at the time it was like dust it was like sand just falling down a pile and it was hissing from gas pipes and water pipes and and i said i hear i hear the gas lines i hear the sand i hear the concrete he goes no no what else do you hear and just the side of us was a lady's pocketbook and a high-heeled shoe and someone's sneaker with nobody with it and i said i don't know i don't hear anything he says me neither he goes no one's coming out of here and i said no no no this there's got to be someone coming out of here i mean there's thousands of people in here and they're coming out he says brother we would hear him calling for help they're gone and i still at that point thought there was a chance and and after about the fourth day they just said this is a recovery now there's there's no more there's no more life there's no more chance and on that first night we we went full tilt to my crew my specific crew of 12 15 guys and four in the morning we just we just couldn't breathe anymore we couldn't see we were caked just with it was like if you took flour and just kept dousing yourself and and the lieutenant just said look guys we're gonna go back we're gonna get some medical aid and then we'll come back in a few hours and uh we we took a city bus back through the battery tunnel you know unbeknownst to us that morning this off-duty firefighter stephen siller from squad company one he he raced down there with his pickup and he couldn't go any further because the traffic was stopped up because they had a report of a bomb so everything was held up and he grabbed his fire gear and he put it on stuff weighs about 60 pounds and he ran through the tunnel two and a half miles got to the end of the tunnel fire truck was coming in from the other way he hopped on the back got him up to west street jumped off tried to look for his his company where they were and he was never seen again he just ran through the tunnel ran through the tunnel and he he got there to help his his team right it's all about the team so about the guy right next to you and he's the tunnel to towers foundation stephen his his brother frank decided in his name in perpetuity he's got a fund that that now builds a home for every gold star family for every seriously battle wounded warrior for every seriously wounded first responder or killed in a lighting duty first responder if they had a home that paid a mortgage if they didn't have a home they give them a home and especially if it's if it's a severely battle wounded they give them a smart home because these poor guys come home with no limbs and so the beauty of the beauty of stephen and his selfless act was that he's now helped thousands and thousands of people i mean tunnels of towers is incredible that's part of our part of our mission is to bring awareness to these great people at tunnel to towers what they do they've raised 250 million dollars to help to help protect the protectors to rescue the rescuers in in a what's become unfortunately is somewhat ungrateful society but they will not forget these great guys so you uh tell steven's story he's one of the 20 people that you talk about in the new ireland labs 2420 podcast series if you can just linger on his story a little longer what does that tell you about the human spirit that this guy you know the tunnel couldn't couldn't drive through so he just puts on that heavy pack and runs what do you make of that that shows the depth of a man's soul he didn't have to do that he could have turned around and went home to his family and nobody would have shamed him but he's one of those beautiful brave people that take a job and really doesn't pay a lot of money and you become a cop or a firefighter or nurse or an emt or a medic or soldier a marine an airman sailor when you take these jobs you don't do it for fanfare you definitely don't do it for money i mean those those 13 brave souls we lost you know week or two ago in afghanistan they're brand new soldiers and marines they make 22 000 an hour but they don't work 40 hours a week they work 80 they work 90 hours a week so they're making about six bucks an hour and you know what they sign off and firefighters and cops and medics and emts nurses emergency room doctors they don't really make a lot of money i mean they're starting salary right now for a new york cop i was in new york cop for two years first i made 12 25 an hour back in 1989 to get shot at during the crack wars if you made uh 11 an hour with a family of four you were entitled to welfare back then so i was just above the welfare level risk of my life and these are the guys that are getting ripped up now right and and look i won't get into any politics but like that says something about someone's soul that they're willing to take a job like that and get now get zero respect so a guy like stephen what that shows is the depth of that man's soul and courage and determination it's hard to be selfless in this world anymore but i still know a lot of selfless people that just just put on equipment every day bulletproof vests fire bunker gear stethoscopes you know flak jackets military helmets and they go in and they do it smiling that young marine that passed last week she was photographed and quoted as saying i have my dream job but she was holding on the left got any baby and she was dead a few days later she was so thrilled to be making seven dollars an hour helping people right isn't that huge like that to me says that's a true sign of character right there and it's important for our society to elevate those people as heroes let me ask you about firefighting what do you think it means to be a great firefighter and a great man a great human being in a situation like you were in in 9 11. you know that's that's kind of a broad term like some you know you can go to different firehouses and they might have a different definition of what they consider a great firefighter but i think in the industry as a whole if you're willing to put everyone else before you especially your team you know it was we said ain't no i in team right it's t-e-a-m and there's no i in there it's all about those guys and girls next to you if you can do that that makes you pretty great you you put everything else second and you just run in and you run in with that team for strangers you know i i've had the honor of i spent almost 25 years of my adult life serving humanity my country my former city and the people i worked with were giants and i don't mean that in height i mean but i mean that in spirit and in soul i saw some of the most heroic selfless acts and then i saw some of the behind the scenes that were so impressive you know we'd go to a fire around christmas and a family would lose everything and even when i was a cop same thing you come back either to the police precinct or the firehouse or the ems station and someone would put together a collection and say hey guys hey lex 50 bucks a man you know the smiths down the street just lost everything we're gonna go get some presents for the kids and some turkeys and not one of those guys questioned that and they were making 12.25 an hour and they still came up with 50 bucks for that family but see that's the stuff the press won't show you right they don't want to show that humanity that soft edge see when you're a warrior you need to have this rough shield this rough exterior because if you don't you die but a true great firefighter or responder or a cop or military personnel they have that rough exterior with that soft on their belly that that you know like this is that heart right it's there and and that's to me the true great ones yeah some of them they just have a hard time doing that you know there's no shame in showing your soft side you know well you got your dad to say i love you back no all right that was huge that was that took that took me 22 years so you were a firefighter for 21 almost 22 years yeah what what why did you become a firefighter oh my dad i mean i i i was five years old and i went to his firehouse and there was these you know at the time they looked like giants to me with mustaches and they you know and the trucks the trucks smelled like smoke and the gear smelled like smoke and the tires and you know the diesel fuel and i was like alright this is this is what i'm gonna do and then and then they bring you in the kitchen and they stuff you with ice cream and cake and everything you know and then i go home to my mom you know shaking with a sugar comber and she's mad at my dad but yeah it was just oh i was like i gotta do this it was like they were like a baseball team in a garage with a truck and these big tools and big coats and helmets and they were just laughing and having fun and i'm like yeah man i'm doing this and i knew i was obsessed with it i mean i i was so pissed the fireman's test came out when i was 14 and i couldn't take it you had to be 18. and and it was done you know you know test was graded and whatever so my dad you know now there's a copy circulating because it's it's old now and he goes hey this is what you're in for and i took it i and i you know did it like it was real and i got a 99 and i was so pissed i said i want to get hired he goes you can't you're 14. like but i wanted i just wanted to do it so bad and and i just wanted to help people i just wanted to be like my dad you know like he'd come home smiling as tired as he was and he fought fires in the 60s and 70s when the city was burning and he's still as exhausted as he was he'd still be smiling i wanted to smile at work and i used to i got paid to laugh and joke i got paid to cry sometimes but man we laughed a lot we really it was the the chop breaking is just it's just on ending and it's great if you don't mind can you tell me you were really kind enough to give me uh one of these shirts with 114. can you tell me the story of 114 um i where proudly i served eight years in that command and i i didn't finish my career there um i i i passed the lieutenant's test and once you do you have to leave the story behind tally ho is um back in world war ii there was this gentleman named bad jack carroll and jack was an airborne ranger and uh my father-in-law was also on a department and he knew jack and jack came home jack jumped normandy and uh stormed up through the battle of the bulge in bostonia and uh he came back greatest generation as they all did and they they got jobs they went right to work and uh they were treated better back then vets right and uh he got on the new york city fire department and he got assigned a lot of 114 and they first got um radios back then and when jack he would drive the truck you're up there with the officer either lieutenant or captain so if the boss is off the truck you you operate the radio for them as the driver so when they call them and they'd say you know a lot of 114 responding to 52nd street third avenue structure fire you're supposed to get back and say aladdin 114 10-4 but he refused to do that he'd say lana 114 tally ho because that's what they yell when they jump out the plane so all these years later it's stuck and it's a little bit of a bragging right but uh out of 350 engine and truck companies in the whole new york city fire department we're pretty much the only one that's uh called by their nickname on the radio not their number so it tweaks some guys off in other places you know they may f you italia you know but it's it's just uh yes it's a great great heritage and we're really proud and uh you know the shamrock was you know he was irish and a lot of the guys back then were irish immigrants from the area from the neighborhood and they would actually take the the fire truck to church on sunday and park out front and and one guy would stay in it to hear the radio in case they got a call so uh yeah that's the proud history and you said that if i wear this around new york am i getting a little bit of you you might get a guy from the bronx go ahead tyler will screw you you know but i mean it's it's all that good rivalry you know we like to you know we like to kid each other back and forth you know uh guys from manhattan was like yeah you guys in brooklyn yeah short buildings tall stories like yeah but you guys in manhattan tall tall buildings no stories you know it's just all that it's all that i love jocular ball breaking it's good stuff you know um let me ask a i guess a difficult question if we just step back in the events of 911 on the side of the people that flew into the towers what do you take away from that day about the nature about human nature about good and evil how did that change your view of the world i i witnessed evil firsthand um i remember later on well into that night when we were uh trying to help get those police officers out i remember looking up at the building century 21 the store runs along the east side of the towers and it was still there and you know the debris had come down right almost to the edge century 21 is this old story department store in new york city and the sign was was there and it was still lit up like some of the neon was broken and but i think some of it was actually still lit up and i just looked around and i was like this is this is a war zone like we're at war and and you know we knew we were attacked we heard the fighter planes and you know back then it wasn't uh the extensive communication network and we had cell phones but they were the old school flip phones and there was no news on them and so plus we we didn't have a signal down there anyway i couldn't reach my family for like 12 13 hours and my dad had deployed down to the ferry terminal to retrieve bodies uh he was retired but he still went and they deployed him to go be basically the morgue transport guys they expected to be sending hundreds and thousands of bodies across on the ferry and they set up these tractor trailers as a mobile morgue and uh that never happened because there were no bodies to take they were all buried um so i saw evil first hand i i don't know how someone can inflict such vent revenge or or eventual act for in the name of anything in the name of a religion and a name of a cause and a name like what the hell you know were you ever able to make sense of that why men are able to commit such acts of terror in the days and the years after no lex i haven't i you know my mom's from ireland and um i still have a lot of family there and and you know my my great uncles one of them was dragged out and shot no he lived but but just based on a rumor that he was in the ira and i wasn't happy to see what happened to my mom's people because they they were victimized and brutalized by england at that time but blowing up bombs and and killing innocents and the name of that it doesn't make it right i couldn't justify something like that i i can see you know i was a cop i was a soldier and you never want to take life and in those jobs but sometimes you have to but you don't do it with a vengeance you don't do it with a thirst you do it because it's necessary for survival when you do it out of a bloodlust out of a thirst out of a cause that's evil there's something wrong with you i i have no i i respect life to the highest level i i mean i'm very life is sacred to me it's precious it's beyond it's not a commodity it's a gift but to take life just so randomly so there's something way wrong with that person and and maybe i'm a conflicted soul but i would have no problem seeing someone like that put to death because they do not deserve life um there's there's many uh many children around this world that are being taught to hate someone who's different than them just because the the person who's allegedly teaching them says so i don't understand it well that starts with just having a basic um respect and appreciation for the other human beings and yes that starts with empathy so yes and one of the reasons i love this country why while joking that i'm russian maybe you could say the same as you being irish you're actually truly an american and that's why i consider myself very much an american and one of the reasons i love this country is it serves as a beacon i still believe it serves as a beacon of hope and that empathy and love uh for the rest of the world that like hate is uh not gonna get you far that love will get you a lot farther and i i still think you know sometimes it's easy to um see the press uh mainstream media you can see social networks because you can make so much money on division sometimes uh because it makes so much money it's easy to think like we're really divided i honestly don't think we are it's just like oh i think the very surface level thing that we see on twitter it's that you're abs you're 100 right there's people out there that are maximizing off this whole division right they want us divided they want people angry because it sells you know a lot of these people that are in charge of certain organizations well they all seem to have nice cars and nice houses and nice vacations and they're constantly trying to convince everybody that we hate each other yeah to me i'll use a fireman analogy right it's like a little campfire and if you just let the embers flutter they'll they'll go out but if you take a little cup of gasoline with those embers it'll blow right up in your face and that's what a lot of these politicians and a lot of these media folks are doing because there's something in it for them and i i think they're it's possible to defeat them with great leaders with great spokespeople with great human beings having a voice one of the powerful things of the internet is more and more people have a voice and i ultimately believe in certainly in america but in the world the good people outnumber the assholes oh i agree though and you know there's days when i think the assholes are you know are overrunning us but you know what um i think what the downfall of the world is is ego and arrogance and people that think they're better than that other guy my parents raised me you know to be this way my mom is such a sweet gentle soul she's an immigrant she came here at 16 years old she helps everybody but herself right she's just one of those people she's sick she's got parkinson's you'd never know it and she's still flying around her condo complex helping everybody because that's what she does she loves to help people but she's been in their shoes she's been poor she's sick her husband was sick she's had all sorts of suffering and loss in her life my grandad died when my mom was 10 and she was one of 10 children that survived out of 14. she knows hard times but she so appreciates the good times and the goodness of this country you know the fire department and the police department military told me a lot about empathy and and trying to really feel for someone and put yourself in there their situation um i remember years back i was a much younger fireman at probably five years on a job and uh i was sent down to the next firehouse over to fill in you know we would get sent around randomly when they needed an extra guy and someone came banging on a firehouse door and in the tenement apartment next door they said there was an an older woman that was unconscious so we dispatched ourselves and we ran over with the medical kit and it was an elderly woman laying there on the bed and she was obviously not breathing she was obviously in cardiac arrest and an older gentleman that was holding her hand just just un inconsolably crying and it turned out it was her husband and they were married for 65 years and um normally we would just respectfully ask the family members to just step aside and let us do our work and i realized that he wouldn't leave her side so i kind of gave the crew a wink and they were doing cpr and what they had to and and i just let him keep holding her hand and i said sir if you you know could you just come over just a little bit so we can work and i held his hand as he held hers and and i said sir i said do you do you have faith and he did and i said would you like to pray with me for your wife and he said i would like to so we we said the lord's prayer and and you know i just asked god to protect her and bless her and i think he realized that she didn't have a chance but we still gave her that that chance and we you know got her in the ambulance and maybe maybe it was wrong to try to make it look like we could save her but you know you can't really not not try but the one beautiful moment was he thanked me and he was almost okay with it at that point like he wasn't as upset he wasn't as distraught because i tried to just humanize that situation of what we were trying to do we were trying to do our best but we also tried to be compassionate to his sadness and it just i walked away just feeling so good even though it was a tragic situation and she did pass that you know he he came by to you know thank us days later and um just heartbreaking but you know there's there's just it's just happens many many times throughout the country every day people get that opportunity as a responder to be that last bridge to the family and the loved one and you only get that opportunity once sometimes and you really have to to me it's like your moment to shine you know you could just be very very dismissive and very rude or you could be compassionate and just show hey i've i've i have a mom i have a grandma i have you know and and just in your mind pretend that that's who you're working on and that's who you're with so that moment of compassion that moment of empathy even if it's brief can be the thing that saves the person from suffering make the difference between suffering and overcoming in the face of tragedy yes like i felt that even though obviously his loss was still huge it just made it a little more bearable and um you know tried to just take his grief down to a lower level and uh i it made me feel just feel really good about doing it that's a powerful way to see the job of a first responder of course you have to deal with certain aspects of the tragedy but it's to provide somebody with that moment of compassion yeah and you know i i made it a little habit because sometimes with faith it's a little bit of a tricky subject so every time i had someone who died which unfortunately was many many times i would i would just touch their hand and just say a little quick prayer and just say look you know i hope you're moving on to a better place i hope if you did have faith that it's it's it's strong as you depart and if you didn't have faith i hope maybe at your last moment that you found some and and you just found some closure so that was just my little my little ritual i think i just you know i felt it was important that that that person even though they were a stranger just had someone there it's just sort of hoping for the best for them in their last moments you mentioned cancer you had a rare leukemia due to um all the work that you did at ground zero can you maybe talk to the experience of just breathing through those days and what that was like being unable to breathe being overwhelmed by all of the dust in the air yes um the the first day especially um we we didn't have equipment we ran you know we didn't have breathing apparatus and we were handed little 69 hardware store dust masks you know those little thin paint masks that would just get sweated up and you know sticking to your face within 30 seconds so you would you just they were useless and what what you wound up feeling like was that you you swallowed a box of razor blades because there was glass and there was cement and it was just so caustic and uh i remember that night you know when we went back just to get some medical relief uh for the few hours we were walking up the hill to the firehouse because they dropped us off like a block away down at engine 201s and quarters and uh one of the older firemen as we're walking up the block we're all struggling we're all having a hard time breathing and just just i mean i felt like i was dying literally it's it was pretty bad and just remember the one guy going now we're all dead and i said no no we made it we made it he goes no you don't get a kid he said we just breathed in poison after poison for for hours and then that went into days and it went into months he says we're all dead men this is going to take us all and i i i thought he was crazy and then now years later like starting in 0.304 guys just started coming down with these really rare and advanced cancers and then it just it just stopped being a coincidence with the number of guys and they were young one one of the first guys john mcnamara he was 33 or 34 and he came down colon cancer and it took him quickly in 2000 it was in 2005 and i i kind of said to you know friends and family i said i feel like i'm running through a minefield and i wonder when my i'm gonna step on my mind because everybody's gonna get sick and i wasn't feeling well from 2008 on just i just i couldn't put it and i couldn't put my finger on it but it just wasn't right and in 2011 uh i i failed my medical my bloods my bloods came back horrifically wrong and they pulled me off the truck but uh they strung me out for a month the doctors in the fire department one of them said my spleen was engorged because it was probably drinking myself to death like as he said most of the guys did after 9 11 which was pretty wrong of him in stereotypical you know just to stereotype and to categorize and guy couldn't have cared less he just he was so crude and nasty and then my one doctor who was my doctor on the outside my blood pressure was 240 over 140 my spleen was about to rupture she didn't even show up for my appointment and i went down i passed out the paramedics responded she got into an argument with a paramedic because for big ego and basically telling him there wasn't really anything wrong and he's looking at my paperwork going this guy's got leukemia and he overrode her he raced me out of there down to brooklyn methodist and uh the doctor the charge physician the er physician he says you're not leaving because uh you're in a bad way and i said what is it he said i need four he goes i need i need a little while to figure it out he goes but you probably have one of a few different types of leukemia he said i'll drill into your hip take your marrow and find out and he said uh but in the meantime we'll get the swelling on the spleen down like some sort of rapid medicines and whatnot because my spleen is about to rupture i had no blood platelets left which is your clotter so i basically would have bled to death and uh i found out from my team of doctors that i had about 48 hours to live um and that really set me off i was infuriated because i was telling them for a long time that i was sick and the doctors failed you the few doctors in the beginning failed you i felt very betrayed and and other guys had died and uh i i had a i had it out with that one doctor i basically told her she was fired from my case and she's pretty politically in charge person and i didn't care i i jeopardized my my job for it because it was my life and i got the sense that she didn't really it didn't really matter to her she didn't have any empathy as you say it was exact so why for her why for a few others was there not a a special care special compassion for first of all all humans but human beings in your position especially a firefighter a first responder you know alex i think what it is in the department their title is just to get us back to duty as quickly as possible when we are either injured or sick because what happens then is your replacement is now in overtime so you're out being paid on medical eve but then they need to replace your spot and then that costs more money so i think it's just behooves them to get as many personnel back and especially during the summer time you know they look at it like oh maybe you want a few extra days off to uh you know go to the beach and uh this one doctor he tipped his hand back as if like i was drinking an alcohol beverage he says hey busy summer because i asked him to look at my spleen which was sticking out of my abdomen like a football and i said excuse me sir i said how dare you assume that i'm i'm abusing alcohol because you know alcohol abuse sometimes will present itself as the spleen is engorged and having an issue so you automatically just assume that that was my situation wouldn't even give me an exam and i was horrified i was i was so angry i mean i wanted to punch this guy out and i literally was screaming at him and an executive officer came in to defuse it and sent me to another doctor and when i showed her my paperwork she was horrified she was like what did he say and she said oh okay go go to your regular doctor tomorrow who was one of the department doctors and and she just it was just an indifference it was like i don't know i i was shocked at the lack of compassion but you know what that being said i'm past it i you know it life moves on the team of doctors i i ended up with a methodist and my subsequent oncologist dr peter mincel uh world class just incredible human being my dr pete is just i love him i just i love him like a friend like a big brother like a father like a my primary oncology care nurse mike nunez was just incredible human being and and he knew i was frightened because i had to get two and a half years of chemo uh compressed into seven days or i was dead um these massive bags of chemo that never stopped and and uh they they burned the minute the minute they went into your body you felt like you were burning to death from the inside out and mike when mike came in to hook me up he said um look i have to wear a hazmat suit this stuff is so caustic that if it if it drips it'll burn whenever it touches and i was like but mike you're gonna put that in my body how how the hell is it not gonna kill me he says no no this is exactly what it's supposed to do trust me so when he prepped the iv tube to get it flowing it spilled onto the tube and the tube started to smoke and burned and i i went i said no f and way mike you're not putting that in me no way no way and he goes listen let me get another one let me start it over and here he is wearing a hazmat suit looking at me and i'm going this is this is insane and he goes he looked at me he took my hand and he says nils if you don't take it you're dead he says you got those three kids i i'm sorry i have no other option you're dead and i said all right mike okay and he hooked me up and you know what it was it was like you know if you do drink alcohol and you have like a shot or want you know strong type spirit and you start feeling that burn well the minute he he hit me in the vein it just started going up my arm burning and then up my shoulder across my neck into my head across the rest of my body within a minute down to my feet and i was riding in pain for seven days and i was praying to die i was the seventh rescuer in six months to come down with the rarest leukemia there is there's only 500 cases in all north america a year and seven of us came down in six months two guys died during treatment seven responders police fire two guys died in the first couple days of the treatment because it's so vicious your liver your heart your kidneys something will fail and i was praying and i was praying but i wanted to die i was in so much pain and i wouldn't take a painkiller because i know people with some issues and i just didn't want to go there and finally on the last day i gave i gave in i said please i can't do this anymore i was literally like jumping out of my skin and they gave me something but it had burned out my mind it burned out my body i couldn't hear i could barely see it was vicious but it worked and my nurses especially they just they were so dedicated and devoted and i was not an easy patient because i was in a lot of pain it was it was bad it was drove my friends my family crazy it was just it wasn't good but on that first night i had a quick vision of all these people that i loved that were dead that died a lot of them in the trade center and i saw johnny i saw i saw friends i grew up with the last one was my my mother-in-law who had passed six months before and she died of she was in a coma she had a stroke she had a horrible horrible last six months of life and she wasn't fair because she was so religious she went to church every day devout catholic woman and all of a sudden i see her and she's smiling and uh we used to talk a lot you know it's the irish thing like the gab the gift to give and uh she used to call me a boyfriend because we'd sit and talk for hours and talk about books and about movies and about food and i love her she's my friend and she'd say you know my boyfriend's here and all of a sudden she's smiling and she goes hi my boyfriend i said dad no no wait what are you doing she goes he's not ready he doesn't want you you got to go back got things to do and i'm like no no no it hurts so much please please take me and she left she goes no no not yet i'll see you and she just faded away and one of my doctors on my team she she was she had she had a problem with religion and that's okay i understand that you know i'm not a i'm not a preacher i have a faith but i don't preach it i don't push it i just you know live and let live so she sent in this shrink to see me and i and i was messed up from the chemo but i i knew what i was seeing i knew what i was saying and he was he was a jewish gentleman he was a rabbi also in a synagogue and i actually had responded in that district and he he knew 114 would run into borough park oh yeah i see tyler oh they come down the street you know and he asked me to tell him the story and i did and uh he started laughing and he scared me now i said doc am i really crazy he said no no he said i believe you my friend he said we we share the same god he goes we we work in the same corporation but in different departments and he says he says you did see your mother-in-law he says your faith is that strong he said i've had many patients express the same sentiments he said so i want you to listen to her and fight and be strong and he said so what else do you want to talk about i said well i don't know daca my dad messed up he goes no no he goes they're paying me for an hour it only took 20 minutes so we watched the yankee game together but but it was just again it showed the human condition here here's these two men of two totally different faiths and yet we shared that that bond of faith and he had empathy and he had sympathy and he he's he saw me and many other patients so he just didn't assume and he and he gave me a fair shake and i will always be grateful to him for that through any of this the the pain you have to go through with the leukemia but also the the days of 9 11 after did your faith get challenged you know lex it was strange i it was times it was so angry you know there's that range of emotions the anger the denial the depression the this to that and this is the weirdest thing it was it was mostly i knew my career was over and uh they retired me out of the job that that i got sick in august and that october they told me i was out and by the time i was processed and you know used up my my leaves and whatever you want to say it was i was i was officially retired in january of o2 and uh in less than six months and i'm there walking my dog one day my rescue greyhound who i miss she was such a soul god she lived to be almost 13 katie and uh we were walking in the snow and i got the call i was retired and i looked at her and i'm like katie what am i going to do and she just looked up and said we're going to go on a lot more walks you know and i was so sad and i was so sad i was so angry because i lost my priesthood i loved helping people i really alex i would have done it for free i would never tell mayor bloomberg that right he's all about the book right but like you know honestly i would have i would have been a new york city farmer i would have paid them to do it yeah you know and uh i wasn't allowed anymore that's it you have over 20 years and you have cancer you know back when my dad got sick they'd let you hang around for 10 12 years in an office but not now now it's all about the bottom line and uh but i was more depressed about losing a job than almost losing my life like as crazy as that sounds you know and it just uh it's more than a job i mean it's uh it's a way of life man yeah it's it's also as your family your father you're you're carrying torture your father's oh my friend i love my friends i love we work 24-hour shifts together you cook you clean you break each other's jobs relentlessly i mean it was i love those guys so much i mean i i hope that my kids and anyone that i know and care about i hope they can experience the bond of that brotherhood that i experienced in my life it was so god i i would give anything to have it back just yeah i can ask you about new york so when i i've uh unfortunately have never lived in new york i visit i've always wanted to live there for a bit obviously it's a very different experience to have really lived in new york for many many years but there there's a few friends of mine that are from they got similar accent as yours yeah that uh that are a little bit saddened perhaps it's temporary but perhaps not they don't seem to think so of what new york has become especially with kovid it's losing some of the spirit of new york um do you have that sense do you have a hope for this city that has been so defining to what is america you know i my heart's broken i had moved to new jersey many years ago and but i still have close attachment to new york my parents are still there many many family members um and i've since now moved to tennessee i needed to go somewhere quiet i wanted to heal my fractured soul and i'm in the middle of a beautiful farming rural area in middle tennessee and um so they probably call me a sellout back in new york for leaving but it's not the same city and it's sad um you know i'll refrain from the politics and the um finger point but it's a mess compared to what it was and um you know i did broadway theater security for many years and i started to see it slide like like with stuff that was happening like you know public urination and defecation and just like you know tourists don't want to see that right and and um i i had an unfortunate incident um two years ago i was jumped by four teenagers coming off the subway and they were pissed off because i was wearing an american flag hat and i um i don't know i i i'm not really sure why but that it left me i got out of it um okay but i was taken back they were literally videoing it and the kid was just throwing shadow punches at my face wanting to beat me up and i finally looked at many eyes and i was like oh boy i'm a little too old for this body's a little broken down for chemo and i finally just said all right all right i i just i had enough i wanted to go home just work the 17-hour shift as a stagehand and i was so taken back i was so insulted i'm saying you know i spent my life protecting this city and now i'm getting attacked like for nothing and i just i gave up and i maybe i should have given it a little more time but it's um i don't know it's turned into an angry place it's turned into i think there's a lot of people that aren't getting the resources they need in a sense there's a lot of mental illness there's a lot of homelessness there's a lot of violent people just roaming around the streets and it's not good it's not safe and and tourists are not going to come back even just leading up to the covet i had some tourists say to me i won't be back and now i can only imagine that it's just gotten exponentially worse but i hope there's a chance it'll swing back because it is it's the gateway to the world i mean my grandfather came you know from denmark he landed in ellis island in the 20s you know american success story 25 bucks in his pocket didn't speak the language had a sponsor family in bay ridge brooklyn and he made it you know he ended up dying owning a bakery at one point and then an apartment building and he did pretty well for himself for an immigrant who was poor and my mom my irish mother landed in the same neighborhood bay ridge brooklyn uh 16 years old worked as a cashier 50 60 hours a week in the supermarket and finished school at night married my father to firemen and uh you know lived the american dream and it was all it was all from new york and my my father's mom was from irish immigrants and uh they all landed in ellis island well my mom didn't because it was closed at that point but it's it's there's people breaking down the doors to come to this country right there there there's no one breaking down the doors to leave and this is this is a problem i have with people that aren't grateful for being here and this again it's not political just straight down the ball straight down the middle fastball if you don't like it here i'll show you the door i'll get you the plane ticket i mean would you want to live back in russia compared to here would you you might because of family ties but i mean if you had no ties to russia or would you want to go to china right now and possibly end up in a labor camp or right there's people busting down the doors to get to this place it's not perfect it's got its flaws it's got its blemishes you know um but it's a damn great place it's the best country in the world yeah and some of it so first of all i have hope for new york i i think that culture is very difficult to kill i think it will persevere and i think ultimately the same story with new york as with the rest of the united states um it has to do with leaders and yes i'm always hopeful that great leaders will emerge i agree and and the the kind of leadership we see now and the kind of conversations we have now i think it has to do with um prosperity and comfort and in the face of hardship i think great leaders will emerge and yeah um yeah i i just think ultimately in the long arc of history well leaders shouldn't become rich they shouldn't become rich in the process right you shouldn't go into political office as a you know an alleged you know lunch box kind of guy and then come out uh you know eating at the best steakhouse in the world i mean that that's the problem of politics right my irish grandmother god wrestler used to say oh those politicians they're all like dirty diapers they're full of shit and they stink and it's true i don't give a crap what party they're in yeah greed in power we had to beg these guys beg them for federal legislation to cover our medical bills right there's a gentleman john feel from the feel good foundation this guy is a lion of a man a general but with a soft big great heart and john john is a former construction worker who came to the 911 site the day after he was one of those guys cutting the steel with torches and craning it out of there one of those hard hats that just that never got the credit and the praise that that we did as responders and and i don't mean it as a knock to responders right i mean we lost 37 port authority police officers 23 nypd officers about a dozen emergency medical technicians and paramedics three court officers from new york state courts and two federal agents and i hope and 343 new york city firefighters we lost a ton of responders but the recovery workers thankfully weren't killed in that process but there's hundreds of them now who are dead from illnesses because they came down to recover our people and the civilians and the poor lost souls that were killed at work that day and john literally almost lost his foot in a construction accident at the site an 8 000 pound i-beam tore off half of his foot ended up with massive sepsis six months in the hospital hundreds of thousand dollars in medical bills and then no one wanted to pay him so here's a guy who's gonna lose his house lose his life lose everything and now the never forget it started quick right and he went on a mission formed his feel-good foundation his last name is phil f-e-a-l fieldwood foundation and this man literally went to washington dc with his army as he called it and i was honored and blessed to be with him a couple only a couple times i wish i had dedicated some more time to it and what it was with john is he set out on a mission to get and initially what he did is he got funding to take care of responders who were in that limbo who couldn't get their medical bills paid who couldn't make their mortgages who couldn't make their car payments who couldn't make their child care payments and john just took it upon his own to get donations and take care of you while you were suffering right i got a call when i got out of hospital you okay you need anything i said who is this it's john phil i said aren't you that constructor yeah you need anything i'm pretty good right now i i appreciate it phone ring again a few weeks later hey it's not feel you need anything i'm like this guy's incredible but there's people who needed stuff and he was getting it done yeah and he with his army had to chase these politicians through the halls of congress to get funding to cover the medical bills i was getting sued for 125 000 my month stay in the cancer ward and i couldn't believe it i said well wait a minute i have insurance they're like oh no no this is this is terrorism related we don't cover that so usually then workers comp will cover your on-duty injury or illness oh no no leukemia is not covered under that we don't cover that so then the ping-pong game starts and i'm literally have people showing up taking pictures of my kids in front of the house and i went and grabbed the guy in one day by the caller i said who the hell are you sort of a private investigator they were putting a lien on this property due to a non-payment of a bill i said okay i understand do your job let me bring my kids inside take all the pictures you want don't step on my front lawn and i went in a house i closed my room my door my my door my room and i cried i said i can't believe this i spent my entire adult life trying to help people give of myself and i can't even get my medical bill paid well john field got my medical bill paid he finally got these politicians with his team firefighter ray pfeiffer who has since died fought with terminal cancer for nine years in a wheelchair literally at the end came out of hospice to go finalize getting us this coverage detective luis alvarez who testified days before he died in front of congress and a bunch of other guys that were really really sick and we had to shame these people into signing on and luckily we had jon stewart come on and literally just just hound these guys and and shame them and embarrass them and what it all stemmed from was in 2006 the first of death that was determined to be linked to 9 11 there was others but the first one that was officially linked was a new york city police detective who initially the city said he died of advanced lung disease his lungs were protruding out of his body and he was on painkillers and it was so bad at the end that the doctors said just grind them up snort them drink it whatever you need to do to get instant relief so when they found the talcum from the pill lining in his lungs they said oh no this is opiate abuse you didn't he didn't die of lung disease so they said and the mayor was quoted as saying he is not a hero well shame on you mr mayor he was a hero and his father who was a retired police chief married up with the feelgood foundation and jon stewart and ray pfeiffer detective alvarez and they got us all covered but it took so long lexi was so heartbreaking these people who were lining up three deep politicians three deep to catch a picture with a responder so they can tweet never forget and hashtag look at me and hey how am i doing all that bullcrap but they didn't know they were nowhere to be freaking found i phys i i literally witnessed them hiding in cloak rooms running down hallways away from us those freaking cowards that's cowardice can i just linger on the jon stewart thing the comedian actor jon stewart uh his testimony before congress over the benefits for 9 11 first responders i mean there's a lot of important human beings in this story but he has a big voice yes and he spoke from the heart what do you make of that testimony oh it was heartfelt i mean he spoke look i mean john john was a you know a polarizing guy right there's certain things like over the years he he was cutting edge and i might not have agreed with all of his oh yeah you know well you know some stuff i'm not right you know like we all but but i tell you i found him as funny i i enjoyed his humor i would love the two you'd have a conversation no but but again i love a guy where you can have you can have a difference in opinions that's the beautiful thing about the firehouse kitchen i mean it could get raucous and la and now i don't know it's a little different situation but i mean back in the day some funny stuff but yeah john john literally just took his talents you would think he was speaking from the heart of a fireman or a cop or a soldier or a marine or you know someone who was there but i think he especially got to know ray so well and ray had this stack of mass cards from you know the funeral cards they give out it looks like you know a larger business card that's laminated and ray had a stack of them he would carry around i think it was close to 100 cards and john saw it he said what's that he says these are my cards he said for what he says for my brother's funerals he was like oh my god you've been to that many funerals he goes yeah this this is just the ones i made like like you know and john i think was was just stunned and like john actually had that stack of cards after after ray passed and like said look this look at these look there's gonna be more of these cards we have one guy a week or a girl one one responder or or recovery worker or someone who actually resided down there there's more than one a week dying it's one a day dying on average and on average two people are diagnosed with a 911 cancer or disease right now this the worst part is there's autoimmune diseases flying off the graph and they're not covered under the legislation by the grace of god my cancer is covered if my if my cancer comes back i mean i'm in remission it's technically incurable but i'm i've been blessed i'm staying ahead of this stuff going on 10 years but if it comes back with a vengeance tomorrow and takes me you know at least my my wife will get my pension and be able to live her life without fear but my friends who are suffering from these advanced autoimmunes their wives get nothing their pension dies with them and we're hoping that that you know john and his army can can shame these politicians once again to have the kindness and decency to cover these autoimmunes you know they're throwing a lot of money around at a lot of things lately and this is one that they won't and and these are lives in the balance who really need it and john had this strong line they did their jobs do yours talking to the politicians yeah and it it it's a strong wake-up call that um it's not about the twitter or the social media or all that kind of stuff it's you have a job to do and you have to it's that compassion uh implemented in form of money of helping people oh yeah that were there for you when you needed help well we had a guy i mean i might get audited out of this one but i hope not but we had a congressman from out west i won't say where but he prided himself on saying he was a retired cop yeah busy cop 22 years yeah he said no on the legislation i witnessed a cop who was dying get out of his wheelchair and said hey brother i got a half a million dollars in medical bills and i'm a short timer i got a few months to live who the f is gonna pay him do the right thing you say you're a cop you show me you're a cop and you sign that paper and the guy started tearing up the congressman and he signed it but he had to be freaking shamed and you know what he said well this doesn't really confront me this is pork as far as my district's concerned he goes oh yeah do you know there's 10 guys from your district who came across the country to help us that are also dying he had no idea yeah he had no idea and that's the sad part about alex there's there's it's a failure in leadership you know i mean i think some people would vote for mickey mouse just because if he ran i mean no offense against mickey mouse i like him he's a good guy right i mean but like like allegedly allegedly supposedly yeah yeah you know but seriously like i i he i look at i look at some of the leadership sometimes and go we're in trouble and also you lose uh i think the way government is structured is um people who are senators or um people who are in congress they they start playing a game between each other and they lose track of the connection to the to the to the people to the basic humanity so you forget even when you think of yourself as a cop uh you forget what are like the cops and uh the other people uh servicing the community are actually experiencing all the the troubles they're going through and how they can actually be helped because you lose touch that because you're not actually living you're not talking to them you're not living among them and i mean that's a natural part of the system but i think that's why character and great leadership is important is you say you leave the game of congress and you go back to the people i mean that's what the the country you know it's like the george washington ideal is you're not playing a game of power you ultimately see yourself as somebody who's servicing this country service in the community and that requires talking to the people in their time of hardship well you have some people some people serving in in congressional districts don't even live in that district yeah i mean so how are they going to empathize they're not even driving through there on a daily basis and and you know again if when anything becomes lucrative from a financial standpoint it blurries people's vision you you have to take the potential of becoming rich out of politics politics is public service police and fire and ems are public service but cops and firemen and medics don't walk out of their career with gazillion dollar contracts with this company and that company on that board of directors and this board of directors they walk out with a pension and that's it and and you have to wonder the intentions of people getting into politics are they truly going into to help to help the human condition or are they trying to help their own damn condition with their wallet in their pocketbook and i try to lean toward the latter lately you know with what i'm seeing well some of them are the good ones and that's our job as a society to elevate the good ones that's that's it and and then uh and that has to do with the ideals that we elevate there are a number of conspiracy theories around the events of 9 11. do any of these hold true to you or do they just frustrate you even angry you i've been asked this by a few different people in my life this is my take on it right you're a man of science and a man of education so you allegedly allegedly but yes but you you know you're a very very intelligent man and what i believe took place is this structural steel will fail at a sustained temperature of 1500 degrees fahrenheit and i don't know exactly how long that would have to be sustained but that's the temp right diesel fuel kerosene fuel kerosene based jet fuel which was the ignition there burns at 2200 degrees fahrenheit so that continued burning of that diesel that jet fuel but kerosene based you know it's all kind of similar exceeded the temperature needed for that steel in the structural members of the trade center to fail in my heart of hearts i would hate to ever think that somebody affiliated with our government with some sort of agenda would perpetrate that crime and that tragic just destruction of humanity and property for some other form of gain those planes rammed into those buildings 450 miles an hour they were loaded with thousands and thousands of gallons of jet fuel number seven trade center had the backup for the emergency management system for the city and it was an emergency generator in that complex which had a 25 000 gallon tank of diesel fuel to continually run for weeks to keep the 911 system the backup system going in the case of a catastrophic event well that tank in seven heated up from the fire that was already going on from the aircraft debris coming into the building so once that diesel became ignited in seven now you had enough temperature to fail that steel in that building so i would like to truly believe what i've learned from the minimal fire science knowledge i have from my career that it was just a matter of it burned too long it burned too hot and it failed i mean if you look at the way it came down it came down as it was designed to in the god forbid event that it was to collapse it it came down pancaking upon itself if it had failed horizontally and just sprayed out side to side those buildings would have dropped for a quarter half a mile up to canal street but you know lex fighting and the destruction that could have resulted in oh my gosh it could have been so much worse i mean it you would have taken out every building you know from that point all the way up but in my heart i'd like to just believe that it was just a fire that burned too long or too hot you know these these planes caused structural damage upon impact in both buildings and it was just a matter of time and then you think about it you add all the plastics all the carpeting all of the stuff that was burning on those floors you add that to that fire load i think it just had enough to collapse it and you were in uh building seven for part of that day i was just after it came down as well we were excited and we weren't in it or next to it when it actually did come down but moments after we were there and again i i would like to believe that it just it was just that that fuel was going and it just took its physics took its course in it and it failed so physics and science aside it's hard uh it's both i would like to believe and it's hard to imagine that anybody would be so evil as to orchestrate parts of this from within the united states government that's very difficult for me to imagine yeah you know what though lex there's people and i and i won't elaborate i won't get into it any any any controversial subjects but what have you there's some people that don't have any problem at all perpetrating any level of evil people like you and i who have hearts and we have depth of soul we couldn't imagine it but there's other people wouldn't even be a second thought i mean i've seen some horrific incidents in my career that i go home shaking my head at night going human beings are just they're not wired right you know i mean i look at animals i love animals i love dogs especially right and i and i i see this dog park when i uh i train to fly airplanes now and something i wanted to do and there's a dog park across from the airport and there's 60 dogs and there's bones flying up in the air and chewed toys and sticks and they're running around having a time of their life right and they're all getting along and they're not hurting each other they're not violating each other they're they're not canceling each other that and and i'm going we really need to learn from these dogs like right and like i just yeah i mean sometimes it sounds crazy but i think they're better they're a better species than people unless they're rabid they don't hurt on purpose they don't you know they don't cut you off in traffic and throw you the middle finger and you know just these they just don't do these these acts of humanity that sometimes are so vicious why do you think these conspiracy theories of which there's a lot uh take hold why why do you think so many people believe some version of different conspiracy theories around 9 11. well you know like many things in life it leaves me a little conflicted i i have to say this i am at the point now i don't know who to believe anymore so i could see that lending a hand to someone who's already a doubter going oh yeah look that exactly that's what they're doing right i mean you know look at this whole virus like who do you believe like where'd it come from uh you know like and and and you know if you plant that seed it's like that little campfire we're talking about earlier right you just toss a little gas into those embers you got a fire now i also think there's a lot of people with a hell of a lot of extra time on their hands right and they're really bored you know the two are combined alex yeah man you know like look i was a three job charlie right you know one guy used to say to me you know anything but but home i go no i i got deadlines responsibilities you know like that's that's what it comes down to is like i mean look we all we all have our hobbies and things we like and you know little nuances and that's what makes us special we're unique every person is a unique being but i also think some people just just they want to cling to something like we all want to feel accepted and belong to something so all of a sudden you you group up with these people and you all believe this fervently like yeah yeah you know they did it they took it down they took it down and and now you start going yeah and i think what happens is when you're in company of people and you start telling each other the same thing often you freaking believe it i mean if you keep telling me i got a great head of hair i'm gonna go you know what i do but no i don't i mean right i got that waving bye bye dude but like but you know i think when you start hearing something often you stop believing it but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna doubt their intelligence i'm not going to doubt their intentions but i just don't see it as being plausible i just i it would be too too big of an operation to to successfully happen i you know i mean look there's other things that you know i i won't say it on the interview there but like i have my doubts with certain things uh you know that that i mean conspiracy theories take hold for a reason because some of them are true no yeah the hard thing is just to know which ones well when you don't have facts right you don't know who to trust sometimes when you don't have facts when you don't have figures and you don't have science it's hard to take someone's word on it you know i had a conversation with someone a while back right and the guy is like just just dedicated atheists and he thinks i'm an idiot for believing in god and he's like yo you're one of those jerks who believes in creation and i said well i i do well what about the big bang theory that he's going on this diatribe about the science and the gases and the chemistry and i'm going dude i barely got through high school chemistry slow down and he went on a tangent and also when i stopped i went uh who who created the gas and the molecules and the stuff you're talking about in the collisions and he was furious and stalled off and i got him and again i had no facts i had no figure he didn't either but but i stumped him but sometimes when you can't show some people need to see something yeah tangible they need to see it in their hand to believe it and that's that's the real hard thing about faith i see it in action people restore my faith and then i say to myself well there can't be that many dummies in this world if there's so many billions of us believing in this higher power that's higher right i mean and and you said that you said earlier like you you believe most people are good and i do too the bad outshine the good because the bad get the press right if it bleeds it leads that's just you know like think about it how many more damn zombie apocalypse movies can we make right i didn't even know there was that many zombies yeah and it just seems like every other show is just guys like you know bashing each other's heads in with bats with nails in it and it's like after a while it's like all right gosh you got to get a new boogie man here you know right like but seriously like but meanwhile human civilization is getting better and better we just like making hollywood movies that just we're getting better and better but we're treating each other worse and worse you would think with all this technology and all the knowledge and all the it's like what the hell is going on sometimes like i really want to see the good and i think maybe maybe the level of bad that we're seeing was always existing it's just now everything is instantaneous news and flashes and tweets and this and this like like you know well with the technology we have it's also come to the light so you you get to see all these fights it almost i think it's step one of uh dealing with the problem is revealing it in its full beautiful light oh yeah how much of a bickering species 50 years ago a guy like me who loves to talk how the hell would i have gotten an opportunity to have someone listen to me and have it right i love this right and i think it's cool but like but you didn't have that arena you didn't have all these things my grandfather nells god rest him he died in 1979. i mean that dude didn't even want to have a checking account he would walk to each store each the phone company the gas company this company and and pay the bill in person he didn't trust the bank and it was like he he now atms this that he would be overwhelmed he'd be just like i mean i love my dad but to watch him on his ipad is comical right he's he calls my niece's boyfriend who's a tech guy matt matt if you listen he's the greatest he'll have this poor guy in a phone for like hours like the second you'll walk in to see my father my kids hey uh do me a favor you fucking straighten out this pant and and then and it's it's comical because i'm looking at my dad i'm going he was born when hitler started world war ii yeah wow and i'm going he's seen all of that oh my wife's grandmother was born in 1900 czechoslovakia and she died in 1998 i'm going holy the stuff she saw in the span of her life just it's just incredible but but what troubles me sometimes is with all of these advances and all these devices this is what i say to my kids look up from the phone and look up right because we don't talk anymore i i saw a girl literally and i shouldn't say girl guy whatever i saw a person literally just about walk into an open manhole cover texting and i'm going that's scary because your your awareness is is gone and and it's i've been at restaurants with you know groups of people and they're texting and they're texting each other just sitting on the other side of the table i'm like just put the freaking thing down and have a conversation and that's the thing we've lost the art of conversation you know like like you know my wife runs she's just running jokes there's a lot going on up there and i'm like yeah because i i really i'm inquisitive i'm excited about life i love to meet people i love to learn i love and the only way you can do that is to have a conversation the hilarious thing about this so you're obviously very charismatic you got great stories you're a great human being and you're talking to a guy who spent most of his life behind a computer hiding from people no no and i i don't know but we're like trying to bridge this right but i don't mean that as a rip but you know i would never know that really i would never know that because you're very engaging you're very like i would not know like you don't have any impediments to your social skills your personal and and that's and again i don't mean it as a knock to you and these youtubers no but this is me trying to look up from the smartphone is having these conversations talking to people i think it's it's important i mean some of it could be it's always hard to know some of it could be just you and i being old school like because uh you grew up before the internet maybe there is joy and deep human connection to be discovered inside the smartphone we don't know it doesn't seem that way yeah because the smartphone's so new maybe we just haven't figured out those uh those things because there's a globalizing aspect there's a opportunity for you to connect with people from across the world oh yeah in ways that uh i have cousins in ireland and england yeah i love it i get a facetime or whatsapp and it's like holy crap that they're you know three four thousand miles away and i'm having a conversation now i used to send my grandma in ireland a letter i i adored her she passed when i was was 10. and uh no i'm sorry i was 11. and uh i sent her a letter emailed and and i'd wait and i wait and about two weeks later this this airmail letter would come back and she called me master nils william jorgensen and i would be so excited to open up that letter and written just like and like like and then i'd write her another one and i just couldn't wait for letters from granny yeah and now it's like you know that's kind of faded away yeah i still write letters by the way handwritten i do too the way the way this all came about was i i i wrote a letter to someone to say thank you for cancer research i'm blessed to be alive my chances that's a good starting point for any story i'm blessed to be alive and my cancer was one that if i got it 15 years prior to 19 excuse me 2011 i was a dead man right 15 20 years before there was no drug to treat i was gone going home to see him so there's this wonderful gentleman that donated hundreds of millions of dollars to cancer research mr david koch he since god rest his soul passed away and he's a controversial guy big time business titan and and you know there was the press was just brutalizing him one day over some something to do with his politics now i'm a union guy um proudly served in union still in a union you know and and he was not you know most business guys don't like unions right but you know most guys like me don't like working for three dollars an hour so we like our unions right and i reached out across the table so to speak and i sent him a ham written letter to thank him to say we may not agree on everything but i can't thank you enough this is this regular dude out there who is now living his life watching his kids grow thanks to generous people like you who believe enough in cancer research you've saved my life maybe i can't see his exact dollars but people like him and he reached back out and his secretary said oh he'd like to talk to you on the phone i go well he's kind of a busy guy he wants to talk to me he's a billionaire and he got on the phone he was like the greatest guy in the world invited me up to sloan kettering to dedicate a new cancer wing it was like i was hanging out with my dad yeah and and the sweetest man just so kind so empathy because he was a cancer survivor but now he's got the means to help people who suffered his fate to a better place and he was so real and it was so beautiful just to get to know say hey you know what this guy is is a big time guy but yeah he's just a regular human like you and i you know i'm a guy who went to night college and i went to the army and i'm a blue collar kind of dude and here's this guy who went to mit like you and he's a wildly successful billionaire a genius but yet he can sit down and mix it up with me and know that i was truly grateful and that to me was just like one of the coolest little you know relationships i've ever had it wasn't like we were hanging out having barbecues together but like you know it was just i was so touched by his decency well the basics of the like cancer reveals you know it's like fundamental to the human experiences trauma is is tragedy it's like money who gives a shit about money education all that is like weird new inventions you know life is short you suffer with the various diseases and that is a reminder that life is short and a reminder of the basic human connection and that's why you can bridge that gap oh yeah all sparked by a handwritten letter which just is makes for a hell of a story and you know what lex this is the commonality between us a guy with three jobs two a billionaire yeah we both had that sense of a sledgehammer to the chest boom you have cancer and you can't breathe for like 30 seconds and then when your heart's just about to kick off and you you take a breath and you go i'm sorry what'd you say doc you have cancer and it don't matter what kind one of my one of my best buddies bobby's going through right now prostate and i got way too many of my buddies with cancer right my buddy hugh who became a vet since his first cancer he was a fireman he's now veterinarian right he diagnosed me actually over the phone by the way um when they couldn't figure out what was wrong with me well dr hugh he nailed it to the t and we talked and the same thing that the dozen of my close friends that have cancer the same thing we say is the fear so mr coke and i we shared that same sledgehammer to the chest and that same fear and it didn't matter how much money he had and how much i didn't yeah and you know it's just like the morning of the trade center there was big time brokers who went to their demise right working in these firms god rest them and there was dishwashers excuse me dishwashers up on the windows on the world restaurant on 107th floor making five bucks an hour and they died together it didn't matter it didn't matter if you had an armored car loaded with bills you were done that day and that's i think where people need to humanize each other just because you're driving around in a nice car and you got your own jet and you got this and you got that don't mean nothing when you're going when you're in that vulnerable spot it you could have you could have more money you know than than the u.s reserves federal reserve or you could have a welfare check you're going i learned that in a cancer ward i had people on my ward that died on me i was going around as a little bit of an ambassador because i was trying to i was putting on a fake i was putting on a fake like i got this i got this i was so scared but when i got past that that seven days of torture and the days leading up to it i'd go around and try to comfort the other cancer patients i had this one older african-american gentleman he couldn't talk because he had such advanced throat cancer he was my roommate for a little while but then he got worse they had to put him by himself and you couldn't understand what he was saying because his throat was just so radiated from the radiation but if you put your ear down to him you could make out what he was saying and i'm not faulting the nurses for maybe not wanting to do that right it's it's they're busy they got a ton going on they can't spend you know so if he was in need i'd put my ear down and i find out and i go get it for him so when they moved me down the hall they asked me to come down with my iv tower he needed me and uh i knew it was bad because he just his look was was gone i said sir what do you need and he whispered call my sister i'm going he had only one survivor in his whole life and she was in north carolina and he wanted her to know she couldn't get up she was elderly and i got the nurse and i got on the phone i called her sister and i said bam i i explained who i was and i said he he can't really verbalize too well right now but he wants to say he loves you and i put the phone down and he told her he loved her and he said i'm going home and and that was it and i hung the phone up and i i just said ma'am i'm so sorry i said you know they'll notify you and and i stayed with him for a while holding his hand and then you know they wanted him to rest and then i left and then i got the tap an hour later and they said we're sorry he's gone and then there was another girl and she was a young young girl from one of the areas i worked young african-american girl where i used to respond but i didn't know her but i knew her neighborhood and uh she had what i had but they weren't sure which one you know leukemia is there's an elusive beast there's 49 of them right and each one of them is like they got their own little nuances his own specific treatments so if they don't know what you have they don't know what to do for you and she refused to let him drill into her hip to take the marrow because it's vicious it hurts so much it's like someone's born into your hip with a wood drill and and it's no joke and they asked me to try to convince her to let her let them do that or she was going to die because if they couldn't figure it out it was advancing quickly she was so i i talked to her and she said i can't i can't i'm too scared i said but are you more scared to die and she said i am i said okay i'll stay with you i'll hold your hand you squeeze it as hard as you want i said if if you want they'll give you like a towel or something to bite on whatever i said but you get that pain out but you need to do this so you can get saved and she said okay and they came in and they this huge thick needle they just bore it into you and she's screaming for her life and she's squeezing my fingers so hard and so hard and i said it's okay honey you keep going you keep going we got it it's just 10 more seconds 10 more seconds they got it they figured out her treatment and they got her onto her road to recovery and then i spent a long time asking god why why do i have cancer but then i stopped and i went wait a minute i didn't die that day with my friends shame on me for asking them why i have cancer i 10 years after 9 11 with such great years and i got to watch my little girl being born when john never got to see his son so it was all gravy after that and i said but now i know why i have my cancer because i can i can empathize with people who have it and i can try to be their voice when they can't talk be their shield to try to take that pain because i can understand i can walk their walk and now i thank god for my cancer because it's made me a better human being it's made me i'm not gonna lie i brought a lot of anger for a while and my family suffered it but i really tried to go past that and heal and and part of living out in the country it's very very healing for the mind and the soul but i now thank god for the cancer because it humbled me i didn't really need humbling i wasn't i wasn't a arrogant puffed up type of person at all but you know maybe i was running away at myself a little bit working on a tv show i'm fine man 30 at the time while i was 42 and got sick you know life was cruising man it was great and then all of a sudden it was like a blowout on the highway in the middle of the night and you're just veering off towards the guardrail yeah you remembered uh you're reminded that you're mortal and that's oh yeah ultimately a connection to all the rest of us oh yeah it's it's a good thing though when you you know because that's the problem i think there's a lot of people running around and thinking they're immortal right you know when you look at it lex right you look at the heartache in a lot of segments of people and any time like someone that's got fame and wealth and success and and and they they die tragically a lot of times it's from substance abuse or just you know just just some just some horrible death and i used to say to myself how the hell would someone with that much money and that much fame and this freaking mansion and you know i oh i love cars my son and i were just big car heads you know and i'm like you know this guy's got a collection of cars and this and he overdosed because he was sad and i'm going how the frigger you said but then i stop and i go okay because maybe he doesn't have any idea who loves him he's got a lot of people clinging on to him because of his success and and he just he can't fill that void you know and and then they fill the void with something destructive and i'm not i'm not bashing people that have substance abuse problems or alcohol problems i don't mean it that way but what i mean is it's just said that that their level of despair is so high on the surface they look like they just got everything going on it's all great right so humans the guys dealing with the same yeah exactly because they want love right they want love and they and they can't they can't really find it like well first of all that's true for all of us i think we're deeply lonely and looking for love when we find it that's what friendship is that's right absolutely and then that's true for whether you're super rich yeah or super poor it's all the same journey my dad said all times kid you're going to end up working with hundreds of guys and you know you'll love a lot of them but he says when you when it's all said and done and you're all like me and if you still got two or three of them that you talk to and you love and i tell you what i mean i i i have thanked the lord more than two or three of them and i i have my six i call it my six it's six guys that are gonna carry my call from when i'm gone right yeah because i know this cancer is gonna come back i i know like we get multiples right my friend yvette just got his second my friend mike said five of them my other mic is two but i'm i wasn't ready to accept it in 2011. it was so much more to do it was so much i was so scared i'm like wow who's going to take care of my kids and who you know they were little you know 9 11 and 14 right it's like what the hell i have two girls and a boy between and they're beautiful kids they're such good good children the adults now i mean but you know my wife's a drill sergeant she she's tough you know mess you know she's this this big but like so you're the softy in the family well you know it's funny because my son said to me my son's 21 now he's a good kid you know and uh he says to me back when he's like 12 he goes dad i don't want you to be offended but i'm really scared of mom i'm not really that scared of you and you know like i i cracked up because it's true like she's got a step she's got to stand on like a milk crate to reach him because you know she's tiny and he's tall but it's true but you know but she was hard but fair but loved that see this is the thing you take any child anywhere from any background if you love them you nurture them you teach them and you guide them you have a successful adult and see that's the problem in our society it's not judgmental i'm not judging anyone but we need to try harder as parents as as siblings as friends but especially when when we're blessed with a child it's like you you got to put that child first it's like being a military person or responder it's not about you anymore now it's the team so that little child is is now the team and you know your wife or your significant other you know like it's not about you anymore and see that's the problem is people have a hard time not making it about them you know like now it's really weird my kids are 19 21 and 24 and they hardly want to hang with me because they're busy in their life we love each other they're probably tired of hearing me go on and you know preach and whatever but like but but they're adults we we we did pretty much the crux of what we had to do to to put them into adulthood and i look back and i was like wow i wish i didn't work so much and i wish but then i say no but it was okay my wife stayed home good lessons good you know just just ultimately like you said it's love it is it's the common that love is the most important ingredient on this earth and now and that's that's the problem what's going on right now like take politics out of it right take polarizing each other against each other take all that crap out of it and just airdrop a bunch of love right right like like i when i worked on rescue me right yeah i love those people so much they were such great we had such a great crew and they worked so hard you're a celebrity no no no not at all if i was i it didn't really it didn't really work out so good i went on to being a stage hand that way no i'm not pretty but uh they don't want old guys waving waving by by hairdos but uh but but it was funny we the crew we became really tight we had like shoot like 80 90 people on us on a set right and you know the first few episodes everybody's trying to feel each other out because you know you work with different crews different people and this is going back starting in 2004 it was a different time and i love to hug people because to me a hug is a true expression of love and caring you may not know a person a long time but you say i care about you with a hug can i can i do it's a tiny tangent this is in the midst of kovid when i was in boston and it was you know masks like triple masks and when i went to see joe here when he's trying to convince me to move to austin joe rogan yeah yeah and then well the first time i see him he's like ah you motherfucker big ass hug yeah and people but people probably looked horrified you know it was just hugging it was just him oh okay but if you're doing in public now it's like it's like you committed it but that expression because i was so you forget how oh yeah how powerful that is oh i got some of my buddies i give them a huge huge hug and a big sloppy kiss on their cheek and i mean i cuz i love them these are my brothers you know but on this set i swear to god it got to the point and i'm not trying to whatever but there was people that would come up to me for the daily hug yeah and i said what are you doing and i said come on bring it in and i give him the hug and they said you don't understand it just makes me feel so good yeah it makes me feel like you give a crap about me i really do i said but it touched my heart that people were seeking me out to get that hug to start the day yeah and i remember there was a guy in manhattan he was selling hugs for like 50 cents and i think he got arrested right it was just before covered but like i wouldn't sell them if but now i'm giving them away well now i got leukemia i'd be kind of concerned of getting the covert i mean yeah but but like i i really think we need that we need hugging booths like in each city or each town like because there's so many people that just want to know someone gives a shit about them and that's the problem it's like like you know that's what i love about small little towns like where i am now in tennessee and i'm not knocking new york i'm not knocking big towns but i guess it's easier to do in a smaller area because it's just not this massive humanity but they'll stop and check on you like you're out in the road and you know like i'm cutting and cleaning or whatever occasionally i'll roll a lawnmower or a tractor into a ditch because i'm you know not a farmer too good but uh it's easier to drive a fire truck in new york but they literally oh i was worried i haven't seen you and i'm like no no i'm okay but they literally like check on you they're worried about you and i'm going these people hardly know me but yet they're so caring and and that's the problem like this is what i love about my life i spent a lot of time as especially as a young boy and a lot of time in ireland at my grandma's farm and my mom comes from this tiny tiny little village she's out in the middle of nowhere and and the childhood home she grew up and still my aunt and uncle live in and still i just love it there so much because everyone waves tennessee's similar they wave driving by and like who the hell is that i just wave you know but my cousin will point it out i got your third cousin's second removed by you know johnny like holy shoot i'm related to everyone here right but like everyone stops to say hello and how are you and i have a problem doing that because my wife goes people think you're crazy why are you talking to everybody i said like i'll literally stop someone and say how's your day going like i mean i'll randomly on the sidewalk then it looks a little nuts but like if i'm buying a cup of coffee oh that happens here in austin all the time yeah that's why i love it here on the sidewalk randomly yeah no it's just something i think they they'll say hi to me i thought they recognized me or something i don't give a shit who you are they're just being nice i was on the road uh coming back driving from my family up north down to tennessee last week i stopped in a bathroom and it just it was close the girl was was cleaning it whatever she's working so hard whatever she goes search because if you go down the hall there's a family restroom feel free to use it you know she didn't have to do that and i went down and i i'm old you need a bathroom you need a bathroom right and i walked back out and i said ma'am i said i want to thank you for being here today i said bathroom was immaculate it was it was like my army bathroom in the barracks it was spotless right and i gave it ten dollars i said i'd really like you to buy lunch with me today i said you really didn't have to do me that favor she goes no sir i said no no i said i want and it was like i gave her a million bucks and i say to my wife now i've been praying to be a billionaire because that's a sin i said no no you don't understand right she goes oh you missed me you know mister you know i said no no i said you're getting it wrong i said i'm praying to be like a multi-gazillionaire because i want to give all away we used to have a sign in ladder 114 until some other rival truck company stole it right because that's what we do you know they get sent to cover your district when you're out of fire and now your stuff's missing yeah and the old-timers had a sign that says i am content because if you got to ladder 114 that was considered such a great place such a great assignment such great guys you had to be vetted to get there you couldn't just randomly go and it was a little exclusionary but they wanted good guys and i said to myself that's where i am in life right now i am content but i'm restless because i want to really do a lot more good it's like this podcast i want to make sure that it's not forgotten and i want to make sure that these charities that are really really helping people get recognized but i'd like to take it a step further right a friend of mine runs this foundation for young folks suffering mental illness and in crisis it's for someone that we love dearly and uh he's on a mission now to get therapy dogs for really really mentally wounded warriors right these these a lot of these young soldiers are having a really hard time and now they could be out a while they may have come back in country two three years ago now it's just starting to set in and there's a waiting list for thousands of therapy dogs and he said that they can't get enough of them quick enough but he said when you see the response the way these veterans just light up when they get these dogs it just changes their life radically immediately and i said that's it god i don't know how i'm going to do it but i want to i want to be a gazillionaire and i don't i don't want i don't want any picture photo ops this that i just want to go there's a dog there's a dog there's a dog there's a dog and then i want to build veterans land for these these vets who just need a nice clean place to live so why don't we take these old army bases and marine bases and navy bases that have been shut down they're just sitting there rotting away i was in the army in alabama my old fort mcclellan is three quarters vacant it's sitting there they just did a documentary on it it just looks like zombieland going back to zombies so why don't we take that and renovate it and say the vets who are struggling hey guys you're gonna live here and they take the old army you know uh the places where they had all the supplies or you know there's massive buildings where you could just retrofit it and make light manufacturing within two weeks give these guys jobs they live there they work they'll take care of it military guys they teach you how to take care of stuff right how the hell in this country should any vet come back home and be homeless because now they now have to dedicate their lives for six seven ten twelve years five five six deployments making 7.50 an hour and then you know they spend seven years or they get a whopping 16 an hour right you know they they walk out making 35 grand and now no one gives them a job no one gives them a chance so very quickly they end up homeless by no fault in their own and i don't know how that's even possible the people in this country who have given the very most and they're struggling they're hurting that's not fair and my whole thing is if if i can have this dream of succeeding so to speak i want to try i want to try to change it you know and just just so that's why i'm praying to be a billionaire gazillion yeah well my wife my irish mother probably wouldn't agree either because you're not supposed to right well i i'm i'm the same with you uh the more the more money you have the more you're able to help yeah help people you could put smiles on people's faces i i have to ask you the us invaded afghanistan in october 2001 in response to terror attacks now 20 years later we still had a presence and abruptly withdrew all troops what do you think about this war across the world that was uh sparked by this tragedy whenever you do something quickly without thinking it out thinking it through and planning it doesn't succeed i understand that we needed to exit i mean how how long we're going to stay over there and and we've lost over 7 000 of our young souls over there for sometimes people i don't know if they're grateful for it or not right i i mean i don't know so there's the other element and sorry to interrupt that's okay one is the financial of six trillion dollars and that money is not just money it's it's education it's everything um it it's money that could have gone towards first of all the first responders oh yeah but all the service men and women of all kinds throughout this country and then there's the other side which is the over 800 000 people who died in direct uh result of this conflict so not just the american side of the troops but just people who died those humans humans yeah and those humans um many of them civilians that's spreading hate especially if you have leaders on the other side who frame the death of those civilians in certain ways that just spreads hate throughout the world and so you think about this kind of um 20-year saga and think what are the ways that money could have spent be spent better and what was the way that we could spread more love in the world versus hate and you wonder but then the the other side uh what is it i'm not sure who says this line but um it's something like we sleep at night because there's uh rough men out there ready to to fight for you um there is some sense in which we have to make sure that there's strength coupled with the love right otherwise evil men um will do evil onto the world so it's it's a very difficult decision but then you look at the final picture it's like what have we gotten for the six trillion dollars what have we gotten for this 20 years the the thousands of americans soldiers who died the uh the hundreds of thousands of uh civilians who have died you know it's it's a it's a troubling subject for me um i'm a patriot i love this country i love it so with my soul and uh i was just about to head over to the first iraqi war and we went out for desert warfare training and then it ended i was at that time a combat medic assigned to an armored cav unit so basically tanks driving around an armored personnel carrier and when it gets hit then you you tend to that guy try to save his life i didn't want to go i may sound like a coward i did not want to go to war i would have went willingly if i was sent to defend my country i took my oath i didn't join the military to kill but if necessary i would i'll use the analogy of cancer if you have a cancer and you're aware of its presence and you don't annihilate those cells and take them out quickly it's going to spread and it's going to kill you those evil bastards that flew those airplanes one of those airplanes had a little three-year-old child in it from ireland where my mom's hometown a friend of mine who since died of a heart attack from 9 11 toxins he found her shoe with human remains in it and he thought someone was messing with us because we didn't know there was any kids in the building he's his boss this this there's a baby shoe and it looks like there's something in it but but there's no kids in the trade center i went the plane it's a little girl's shoe i can never get that shoe out of my mind the evil bastards who perpetrated that needed to have missiles strike and rain down upon them and annihilate them like a cancer that they are what what just fascinates me is they'll show videos of these guys flying around and pick up trucks with 50 cows on the back it's like well wait a minute if a camera crew can get this footage you think all these freaking drones and planes and radar assisted systems can't just go good night you're gone so kill the cancer kill the cells get rid of it get rid of it quickly and go into remission like an undeniable show of force that sends a message that uh gets rid of most of the obvious centers of um terrorism and that no that's though because we offline mention a discussion with jocko and maybe a romanticized view and mentioning brothers in arms by dire straits and saying we're all brothers in arms even when it's on the opposite side of fighting which is more of a vision and growing up in the soviet union you saw about world war ii yes that it's all just kids thrown into the kids sent to die in all sides but then presenting that to jiako who was in iraq he did not see it as brothers in arms which is there's his basic statement is there's evil people and some people don't deserve the compassion you give them a few chances they don't take the chances they have to go because they're spreading evil onto the world and so it's not we're not all of us deserve a chance oh no but uh but the difference though and and believe me i i jockle i am from a way way minor league compared to him right i mean this man was right there in the firing line but i can understand his analogy because when you think about it right those young conscripts back in germany and russia and you know all the countries where they were being drafted even our guys were being drafted and thrown into this they were they were gallantly and and bravely defending their country now i'm sure the the young germans felt well hey hitler must be right right and young russians fell hey stalin must be right and you know the young americans figure hey president roosevelt must be right so they were romantically in a sense defending the honor of their country of their motherland the difference between those so they did have that commonality if you and i were firing across each other from france to germany or you know from germany to russia we're just these two kids who got thrown into this we didn't freaking ask for this right but the difference with jocko's enemy is no one was attacking their country over there right no one was taking their country over maybe in their mind they didn't want people trying to build their government this and that i don't i don't know i don't know enough about the history there to to really elaborate we didn't attack them and if a soldier attacks a soldier that's an understood concept amongst warriors but when a soldier attacks a civilian now you're after a different beast and you've written that beast off if that makes any sense yeah and then the the enemy i mean as jocko explains the the enemy uh in iraq and just uh certain parts of the middle east is um essentially terrorists who are who don't value the lives of the civilians of their own country they don't and so it becomes like this weird guerrilla warfare slash game of violence that ultimately allows them to gain more power within their country but they don't care if they're playing with civilian lives as pawns if you have a child who dies on their on um that's a civilian in their country that could be seen as a positive for them because they can use that to leverage for more and more power within that country so when you're fighting an enemy like that that's a vicious that's an evil enemy absolutely it's like snakes are beautiful but if you go pet a rattler you're getting bit and you're getting dead right yeah and that's with terrorists you got to cut the head of the snake off and and i feel no don't commit our guys to me there anymore but what we need to do is go with tech warfare if we have intel from drones or planes or whatever it is that so and so and so and so and so so-and-so are driving down in that pickup or whatever take it out and do it again tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and maybe they'll get they'll get the message after a while oh shit these guys aren't messing around instead of throwing wave after wave of our brave warriors brave seals brave you know special ops guys and god bless them for what they do i couldn't do it i could not have done it but they have to be now sitting home going what the hell my friends my body myself like they must feel so betrayed because they passionately went over there to cure a cancer the cancer of terrorism and now the cancer is back and i hate to say it but i think the cancer might start running wild we need to change our tactics up this is just my opinion i can't see committing all of our guys to to a continuous eternal war but i think what we need to do is hit surgically and hit hard at that cancer that is over there we are never going to rebuild that region it's just it's it's thousands of years of traditions that you're not going to change it's just some people are unchangeable because they don't want to and we have so many social problems here in our country i think that we need to fix first you know i heard this spoken in the past by many people it's like the garden theory you have your garden with a fence around it you tend to your garden there may be weeds on the outside of the fence but as long as they're not inside your garden your garden will prosper and i know some people don't agree to that america first and you know the whole take care of our own but it's like how are we gonna take in more people now and and i i have a human feeling for them but it's almost like the lifeboat theory how many people can we take into the lifeboat before the lifeboat itself sinks as the ship is going down so if we can't take care of our own homeless vets and our own homeless people and it's just going to become worse and and it doesn't make any sense it's just like we we need to just take a time out and i think switch our tactics a little bit and invest into helping people here at home absolutely absolutely there's very few as obvious of cases as the first responders in 911 uh that one one of the things that i really want to kind of talk about at least a little bit we've already talked about the amazing project that you're doing the 24-20 podcast um that you host we mentioned one story stephen siller is there other stories or maybe you can speak out at a high level what are you hoping to tell and all these different stories that are weaved about um that that connect the the tragedies and the triumphs the heroism of uh of that day and the and the days and the years that followed you know alex it seems like the common few themes the common threads are being selfless helping out others even though they might be a stranger in acts of kindness acts of love and it seems to all be weaved together with faith they all seem to have some sort of faith i mean we have one gentleman uh mark hannah and he he's a coptic egyptian priest and he's an is an immigrant to the united states he was a port authority building engineer and with his crew who subsequently passed away the crew did he was effectively rescuing dozens of people on the upper floors and his boss ordered him to assist an elderly gentleman who was 89 down 78 flights of stairs to get him out and in stopping on the 21st floor he figured they would just wait there for medics he came across captain patty brown of ladder company 3 who told him no sir you need to evacuate and captain brown picked his brain a little bit about the structure because he figured he found out he was an engineer and captain patty brown continued on to defect rescues and he and his crew were killed but father he's now mark was able to e effectively evacuate this gentleman they were the two known last survivors to come out of the tower he now has dedicated his life to becoming a coptic priest in st mary's church in east brunswick new jersey he did this for a total stranger and he said he was inspired by his his bosses who died and uh hit his friends you know one of his best friends was an italian man the other man was a retired navy seal hispanic man and they were part of this melting pot and no one looked at each other that day what color what race what belief are you they just said hey you're a human in need let's go and you know we have uh the story about john feel on his mission to to help the responders um we have a young lady mariah whose birth father was on flight 93. she had not even met him and she had this premonition that somebody in her family was killed that day and and her her adopted mom said no everyone's fine well three years later when she was legally able to find out who her dad was she found out that her dad tom was actually on that plane as part of the let's roll team and we have a gentleman robert burke who's an actor sweetheart of a man he's a gentleman and he's a very very popular actor in hollywood he's on rescue me blue bloods gossip girls and and bobby my friend as i call him is is a volunteer fireman now this man doesn't need to get out of bed at two o'clock in the morning and help people with a stroke or a burning garage or a burning house but he does because he wants to because his best friend is captain patty brown and his other best friend was father michael judge who was our chaplain who was killed literally blessing the victims at the site had just given last rights to the firefighter i mentioned earlier danny who was killed and father judge was in the lobby of the building giving a blessing praying to god to please stop this and he was struck by debris and he was killed and bobby goes on to elaborate about father judge's story father judge used to walk the streets of new york city helping aids patients just with whatever they needed and he was a franciscan friar they wear sandals and a robe they're just they just live very humble lives of and it's just the common denominator is loving each other and helping each other regardless if you know the person or not and really when you think about it that's how america was made we we fought for independence stranger fought next to stranger and and fought tyranny and because they wanted freedom they wanted to be able to live love pray and prosper and they fought and died alongside of strangers and it's sort of symbolic of what happened that day and then strangers from around this great country just flocked in by the thousands to help they didn't know who was in that pile but they didn't care that was another american and what i ultimately am trying to do involved in this beautiful project is spread the message of doing the right thing look at these examples these brave people who didn't have to especially to civilians they weren't paid to run back in there and help person after person and they had no obligation they could have just said hey man i'm out of here and just bolted but they didn't so we're just trying to say to people let's bring back that unity and that feeling of 9 12. as strange as 9 12 of the day it was it was so sad because it we it was the first dawn of the sun where we realized this wasn't a dream this was real and it's not going away but the beauty of it was there was thousands of people lined up along the west side highway with signs and american flags and they were from every country and every race and every creed and it didn't matter who they were but they all shared one bond love and they were hugging and crying and thanking rescuers and it brought the morale so high for a group of people that was so beaten down the day before it just started lifting them around making us realize you know what people really do give a crap they really do love each other and now i'm gonna be honest with you i've been doubting that a little bit lately i still have these examples of it you know that lady who helped me last night with the phone and just you know i know there's these shining little examples but sometimes i think i don't know are we running out of them well i got to give you some advice says uh two words that were repeated often in the days and the years after 9 11 which is never forget so might i remind you to never forget about 9 12. i mean those words uh you talked about that you know there's people what is it college freshman maybe they weren't even born they weren't even born and there's people in the 20s that were too young to remember to understand the events of that day but i think what that day as you're describing means it's not about a terrorist attack it's about the unity that followed it was tremendous lex i never felt so proud i was always proud of this country you know i remember my grandpa nelson used to walk by i'd see a flag i hear a star spangled banner and he'd tear up and i'd say grant why are you crying he said i'm not crying is the tears of joy i love this country so much and i just remember like feeling that way i felt that way 9 10 i felt that way on 9 11 but then on 9 12 i was just so proud of just the people the way they stepped up and i just want to try to see if that can happen again and i hope it's it's not necessary for us to have another tragedy to bring that about let's do that without the tragedy let's just stop and say hey you know what let me listen to what this guy has to say and maybe he's he probably won't convince me but maybe i'll go well you know i never thought of it that way stop the finger pointing the bickering the tantrums the fighting it's just not necessary it gets you nowhere right it's like you know i was two years old like stomping around because i wanted a cookie or a piece of candy i still didn't get it right you know turned blue in the face and whatever got a swat in the rear end but it didn't get the candy and that's what we got going on right now everybody's just stomping around being a baby stop just stop we're really lucky look country's not perfect right you know but it's damn good yeah it gives us all these opportunities you know like i said no one's rushing out the gates to get out of here they're they're freaking i got a cousin of mine i love him dearly my cousin tony in ireland and he said he's he's just a little older than me in his 50s he said man i should have done it i should have went to america my dad said go to america i went to england and he and he went back to ireland and you know he but he's happy in ireland it's his home but he said wow what a place of opportunity and i said it's never too late he goes yeah but you know what you get tied down and i understand that i thank god my mom came here at 16. i thank god my grandpa got on that shit but in his 20s 27 i think you know not a nickel to rub together i thank god they did it because i don't know where else i would have ended up there's no place else i want to be and uh i thank god that there's people like you who rushed towards ground zero to help other human beings and i believe that that that human spirit is ultimately represents the best this country and the best of this world you know thank you for the stories you're telling for your perseverance and that and uh thank you for welcoming me to the crew you're very welcome i'm proud and uh i'll take you any day you look like you can do the job just fine i love lifting heavy things and doing dangerous things so um it's i'm proud to be part part of this country and part of the tally now well you are you are definitely an attribute to america and we're glad you chose to come here um you know like it's it's such a beautiful place it's a beautiful melting pot you know if we're all the same it would be kind of a boring place right kind of boring it really would but it just it's just such a great place and i just want to say thanks it's an honor it's an honor to have someone to let me sound off and and it'll be even bigger on her if somebody will listen to me and just say hey you know let me just try to do something good today and you know that's that's the tunnel to towers mantra is let us do good and i just you know i uh i got a really big credit card with god a big balance right i i need to pay him back a lot and i need to pay him forward and i'm just gonna spend the rest of my days trying my best i don't know where this is gonna go what it'll lead into but i really would like to get those dogs for those vets and build them that village and and just keep going on from project to project to just say when my final day comes and i'm laying there and i say you know what i really made the most of that second chance god gave me way back in 2011. i hope it's 30 40 years from now but even if it's 30 months from now or giving it the best shot so thank you sir i appreciate it and uh wishing you blessings and success in your career keep up the good fight and you're always welcome back to texas well i love it uh it's great food and uh a little hot a little hot ah come on we don't do so good irish in the sun you know but uh well the barbecue and the people are worth it no they are awesome i was down here for some storm relief a few years ago um and i tell you what i fell in love with it the people are great it's a great state and uh yeah i'll definitely uh definitely be back again for sure thanks for talking to danielle thank you sir appreciate it thanks for listening to this conversation with niels jorgensen to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from franklin d roosevelt human kindness has never weakened the stamina or soften the fiber of a free people a nation does not have to be cruel to be tough thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you