Hey guys, welcome back to the Conspiracy Podcast. Yes. What’s up guys? This is uh the continuation. Mhm. And then just want to quickly just quickly shout out our patronons and then we’ll just kind of get we’ll get jamming because it’s uh another uh another another big. These are all going to be pretty big big boys. So we’ve got Jake Tillis cuz he said say the name. It was actually Jake say the name Tillis. Nice. So, here with a yearly founding crew, my guy, I love you, Jake. We got Chance S with a founding crew membership. We got Skate God. Oh, Skate God. We know you.

You know us. We love you, brother. And I’ll see you around. Don’t don’t don’t act like I won’t say hi every time I see you. Uh, then we got Daniel S., another Over the Ponder with a with a founding crew membership. Hey, and then we’ve got Luke P with the founding crew. Last but certainly not least, our good man Boo D coming back. Nothing. He was a rich guy. Left, came back to be a rich guy. Give us your You didn’t give us the episode before. So Boo, if you’re listening, brother, give us the episode. You deserve it. Absolutely. We’re getting a lot of from over the pond.

I say very international. Uh we broke um we broke through in in Ireland. Yeah, we’re one of the top top podcasts in Ireland right now. I love Ireland. Thank you. Me, too. So, if you wanted to support the show, uh if you like the content and you want extra content, go to patreon.com/theconspiracy podcast. There’s many levels uh all the way from $2 to $25, etc. And there’s a lot more content including the after hours that is after every episode. Uh, so for you Patreons, stay tuned for the end as we do after hours. Okay, so let’s complete the day. I mean, mother I know. A quick recap because it’s been a week, right?

And obviously go back, listen to it. This is a a in sequence situation. And and I want people to know too, it’s like most of us listening live through this. Yeah. Mhm. But me along with most of you didn’t know the stepby-step sequencing. Oh yeah. Of everything. Yeah. Like the minuteby-minute kind of play. I I I did not know. I knew what what occurred and how it occurred, but I didn’t know like the step by step. So I think it’s important that we as a as a nation really fully understand the situation cuz I think it’s important and it it’s in in a way it’s we need to remember that this occurred.

Yeah. Because it’s important. Yeah. And like those people’s lives are important. And then there’s so many heroics heroic stories of like, you know, one of Eric’s favorite phrases is is the ingenuity of man, but it’s really the resilience of man and like the things that people do because you always ask yourself like what would you do in the situation? You know, like I think we had to talk about this on another episode. You talked about the on the plane. Yeah. Like Yeah. Like what what what would you do? Like I you know, I can think what I would do, but I don’t know. So I’m not in that situation.

But like these people, if I would have the balls or the wherewithal to go back up and try to people, that’s heroic. And like those people deserve all the recognition in the world. Well said. Okay, so 19 hijackers, four planes, two towers hit, the Pentagon hit, and a fourth plane put into a field in Pennsylvania by its own passengers instead of whatever target it was actually headed for. And down in Sarasota, Florida, President Bush had just stepped in front of cameras at an elementary school and for the first time called it what it was, a terrorist attack on the US. By 954, Air Force One is wheels up out of Sarasota with genuinely no fixed destination in mind.

The Secret Service and VP Cheney are both pushing back hard in real time against the idea of him flying straight back to Washington because that’s not a good idea. Yeah, doesn’t seem smart. At that exact moment, absolutely nobody in the federal government knows how many more hijacked planes might still be out there or more chillingly where Air Force One itself now sits on the unknown list of targets. It’s such a logistical nightmare. Oh my god. I need ah the plane turns west around 10:20 a.m. Word comes back that the nearest genuine safe option is Barksdale Air Force Base out of Louisiana and Air Force One lands there just before noon.

While on the ground, Bush tapes a short public statement deliberately held back from broadcast for a period, meaning it wasn’t live. He taped it. He taped it. Yeah. and he condemned what he called at that moment an act of terror. Aboard the plane during this stretch, staff are also told incorrectly that possibly six planes have been hijacked, not four. Okay. Okay. So, that’s what they’re operating on. That’s Yeah. Yeah. And at one especially chilling moment, the crew receives a radio call using Air Force One’s own code name warning that Angel is next. An angel was the code name for one at that moment. Yeah. Later though, that was determined to be an exaggerated outright false alarm.

Separately on the ground at Barksdale, a report of a fastmoving aircraft headed toward the base sends a jolt of real fear through the security detail. It turns out, and we went over it in the last episode, that it was nothing more than a crop duster. Yeah. It can’t be moving that fast. Yeah. Like, let’s be real. But we’ll come back to where Air Force One goes later on. Right now, there’s a lot happening in New York City. Oh, yeah. And so, this is where we’re going to go back to New York. Okay. Yeah. And this time, all the way back because while Air Force One is still sitting on the tarmac at Barksdale, the actual story of this day has already begun unfolding in lower Manhattan.

The North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m. The South Tower at 9:03 a.m. That’s well before Air Force One even took off from Sarasota. It was before Cheney was in the bunker, before any fighter jet was in the air. So, we’re going to stay in New York for most of tonight. And so let’s start with the actual moment itself because before anyone was evacuating anything. There was just an impact and almost nobody who lived through it describes it the way you would suspect. Both planes were Boeing 767s about 156 ft wide wing to wing. Yeah. Yeah. Nearly half the length of a football field. And both had just taken off for a full cross-country flight.

Meaning each one was still carrying roughly 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. Okay. Yeah. Now, I’m going to pause there because I know our conspirator listeners want to dive into the jet situation. Next episode, we will dive into Exactly. We will dive in in the next episode. I promise. And it’s just a point that we need to bring up is that what we do on our show is a little different than most conspiracy conspiracy podcasts, which is that we want to get all the data first. So then we are we have all that data and then we can decide as opposed to just running out the gate with a bias, theories.

It’s not just like, yeah, we could just just go in like here’s what’s wrong with this situation. But it’s like, okay, here’s a story. Mhm. Cuz it’s also like if someone ever you never like a buddy tell you like a story like, oh man, I was with this girl, right? And this and that and you’re like, okay, but I’m missing a lot. I’m missing a lot. I I you missing the context. Yeah. So like it’s good to have context before diving in. So I promise next episode we’ll be going into this. Yeah, that’s right. And I mean, how how great can you argue a a theory if you don’t know the whole story?

Exactly. Yeah. All right. So again, each of those planes estimated carrying 10,000 gallons of jet fuel. American 11 hit the North Tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. It was estimated at 440 to 490 m an hour. United 175 hit the South Tower nine floors lower between the 77th and 85th floors. And United 175 was actually going 590 mph. At those speeds, a fully fueled jet doesn’t punch a clean hole through a wall the way it might in a cartoon. It behaves more like a bomb. The fuel ignites into a fireball on impact and investigators estimate reached upward of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in places. And the kinetic force alone before you even factor in the fire was enough in the 9/11 commission report to sever steel.

Sure. Okay. Okay. in the report. Well, it’s also to sever steel is is a very broad, right? Yeah. Like, sure, you know, the steel in my car, airplane hits it, it’s going to sever that steel facts. Yeah. So, that’s what hit the two towers. And here’s what it felt like from inside. And this is based on a couple books. This is based on specifically a book. It’s a fantastic book. If there was any book that you were like, I’m going to read one book on 911, I would suggest reading this one. It’s called the o only plane in the sky in oral history of 911.

Okay. And the entire book is written only from witnesses. Oh, interesting. So, it’s just little blurbs of witnesses as the timeline goes. What a cool what an interesting concept for a book. Yeah. So people below the impact zones dozens of floors down mostly described a jolt or a lurch. The entire building sway a little bit some said by several feet hard enough that people grab their desks to stay standing like an earthquake. Mhm. This no like these buildings are structurally made to move. They have to move. Yeah. Obviously like they’re built to like they do sway like they’re huge. They’re monster. They’re way up there and you’re like in floor 12 or something, you know.

Yeah. So, this was followed by a boom. Some described as an explosion and some others described as a dull thud. I guess it depends on where you’re at where you’re at on. And again, this is witnesses. Yeah. So, like you’re closer to obviously it’ll sound more like explosion. Like Cory said, if you’re on like floor 12, you’re like, “What the was that?” Yeah. Exactly. Ceiling tiles came down, lights went out, sprinklers kicked on in places. A lot of people that were low down had no idea a plane hit. Yeah, cuz you’re so far away from like impact. The first thought for many was an explosion, a bomb, maybe gas, some similarity to the 1993 bombing that we had went over in an earlier episode.

Uh because a lot of those people who were working there still were working in 93. True. All right. So you would be like, “Okay, man. That’s what’s h that’s what’s happening right now is another garage bomb.” So how unfortunate is that? Like like you’re having to fear to go to work. God damn. Like again. I quit. Like I’m I’m done. Like I’m out. broken remote. In the north tower’s lobby, jet fuel started pouring down the elevator shafts. Interesting. Okay. And some reports of a fireball blowing doors off and injuring people who had no idea seconds earlier that anything was happening 70 floors higher. Closer to the impact, the accounts turned harrowing.

Floors instantly filled with smoke and jet fuel. Ceilings collapsed inward. Temperatures spiked in seconds to something that was just not survivable. And in the south tower specifically, there’s a detail that makes the second impact stranger to sit with because the first plane had already hit 20 minutes earlier and it was all over live television. A lot of people in the south tower were standing at their windows watching. Oh my god. They were watching the north tower burn when their own building was then hit. I would, one would think if you saw that in the other tower, you’d immediately be like, “I’m getting the out of here.” Like, but they didn’t know cuz I remember I I heard a story of a guy that was in the second tower.

And then he calls his wife and he’s like, “Oh, we’re okay. I think, you know, there was just an accident.” Oh, yeah. They all thought it was an accident. You know, I know you’re seeing it on TV probably. Blah blah. It’s just an accident. I’m okay. You know, blah blah blah. And so you didn’t you didn’t really think it’s not going to happen. Yeah. Like what are the odds? It can’t happen again. They didn’t really know that it was an attack at that at that moment. Yeah. Some of them were on the phone at the exact moment as as describing what they were seeing across the way when the call simply went silent.

Most retellings skip straight to the collapse and that those skips over the largest successful high-rise evacuation in human history. Not a lot of people know that roughly 17,400 people were in the towers when the first plane hit. In both 17. Yes. 17,000. By the time it was over, close to nine out of every 10 of them and virtually everyone below the impact zones made it out alive. That’s incredible. That’s actually unbelievable. Yeah. And that’s a that’s a like that’s a lot of people to be in two buildings. Yeah. You think of like when you think of 17,000 people, think of you go to a sports game and know at some of these games like you have, you know, 35 40,000 people.

You know, obviously at the bigger stadiums there’s a lot more, but like you know that’s think of half of a half of a like moderately sized sports stadium full of people. It’s a shitload of people. And if you had to get them out really fast and and they’re and they’re spread out between 10 and something stories like that’s that’s a lot of work, a lot of effort. Now and and in my research I I don’t think it’s luck that they got that many people out. Um training training systems in place and I guess and if if you listen to two episodes ago we did the 1993 bombing.

Mhm. So, you know, after that they were like, “New SOPs are going into place.” Like, “If this ever happens again, we have to be they we learned that they put in the lights and the staircase like that.” So, so in 93. Okay. So, in ’93, the Port Authority put glow-in-the-dark strips on the handrails. That’s what you’re talking about. They added immersion, too. Yeah. They added lighting. They trained the floor wardens. And they ran drills. Okay. Good. Yeah, that’s what it was. It was a battery backup lighting. So they weren’t tied to the hardline power. Like they were, but if that hardline power goes out, they still have can operate.

So to give you comparable information, in ‘ 93 it took 4 hours plus to empty the buildings. On 911, most of the south tower emptied in 70 minutes. That’s impressive. Wow. And the north tower in roughly 100 minutes. So people came down 80, 90 flights of stairs, single file in places, in heat, in smoke, and in darkness and in freaked outness. Yeah. But by every account that that survives, they did it without panic. That’s unbelievable. I’d be panicking. Straight up panicking. Firefighters climbing up, passing, thousands coming down, kept saying the same thing afterward. How calm everybody seemed. People held doors open for others. People carried other people.

Strangers who couldn’t manage the stairs got walked down floor by floor by people who’d never even met them before that morning. And mo and in most cases, they never saw them again. Now, that calm evacuation almost didn’t happen in the south tower at all. After the north tower was hit, a lot of people in the south tower started moving on instinct. Yeah. Get the out. Yeah, that’s what I was saying. I was like, “Get the out of there.” But most people don’t know this. Over the PA system came a voice, told them to stop. A Euro Brokers executive named Brian Clark on the 84th floor remembered it years later, almost word for word, and I quote, “This is the PA.” Yeah.

Yeah. Building two is secure. There is no need to evacuate building 2. If you are in the midst of evacuation, you may return to your office. No. My god. Repeat. Building two is secure. All right. This is like the blunder of the century. Who the was this guy? A Fuji Bank executive named Stanley Premnath had actually made it down to the lobby, but a security guard told him, quote, “No, your building is safe and secure. go back to your office. He can wait. He’s not allowed to leave his own office. I’d be like, “Peace out, bro. You don’t own me.” No, he’s probably allowed. They’re just saying like, “Hey, don’t panic.

Just Nothing’s wrong here. Everything’s fine. Come back.” No. I’d be like, “No, I’m out of here. I’m like a peace.” And what’s crazy in Stanley’s story is he went back. Oh, no. Well, he survived because he’s telling the story. He went back up 81 floors. No. And he was at his desk six minutes later when United 175 hit his building, dude. And Stanley actually lived only because Brian Clark heard him yelling through a wall of drywall and dug him out with his bare hands. Oh my god. And he had to get s dude. And we’re not going to dive into that specific story, but like it’s a great story if you wanted to look up um Brian Clark and and um Stanley Pref.

Anyway, homie is like, “I’ll work for you forever, brother.” But the the announcement wasn’t necessarily a lie and it doesn’t really fall into what many conspiracy theorists think was like a cover up. No, no, no. I just think I think that they’re just trying to like I think in their minds they thought it was the greatest good to like calm the people down like, “Hey, everything’s fine here. You can go back to work. Don’t worry.” I don’t think they were trying to like keep them in there to kill them. Yeah. I just think it was just a it just happened to be the worst possible advice to give at the time.

Yeah. So, it came from a real philosophy from the 93 bombing, right? Which was that only the building actually hit should evacuate since emptying an entire skyscraper next door. Oh, this causes a lot of chaos and tens of thousands of people. Yeah. On the street causing chaos. That’s a good point. But still, I I’m I’m still But like I get the logic behind it. I would say that if I was in that scenario, I would have I would have left. Oh, 100% left. There’s no way I would have gone back up. Not over like I’d have been like, I don’t care. Here’s my badge. Like, I’m gone.

So, in the uh 911 commission 2020, hindsight 2020. Yeah. I thought you meant 20 like COVID 2020. That’s literally what I talked to you and then I was trying to see if I can make a joke about CO and I was like, nah, I just let it be. So, the two Port Authority officials most likely responsible for that announcement both died in the collapse. Oh, that sucks. That’s I feel bad now for talking So, we actually will never know exactly what they were thinking or like what the I’m sure I’m sure I’m sure there’s like a manual like here’s what you do in case of emergency.

Yeah. Calm the people down. And that building wasn’t hit. Yeah. So like indestructible, you know, like and the first plane we didn’t really think that it was a terrorist attack at first. Yeah. And nobody nobody thought the towers would come to town, dude. It’s like the Yeah. It reminds me like the Titanic. They’re like, “Oh, like let’s keep playing the music. Everything’s fine.” You know, and like lo and behold, like you guys are It’s like crisis. Yeah. Um, what we do know is that somewhere close to 600 people on or above the 77th floor of the South Tower never made it out. Yeah. And an unknown number of people who like Stanley were told they were safe and believed it.

Now go the other direction because while thousands were heading down, there were people going up. A New York City Fire Battalion Chief named Ory Orio Palmer was an elite athlete and one of the department’s foremost experts on high-rise radio communications. He got a stalled freight elevator working partway up the South Tower, then climbed the rest of the way in full gear. He reached the 78th floor sky lobby inside the actual impact zone. One of the only Yeah. one of the only known responders from either tower to have made it that high. Yeah. Seriously, like I Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t slowly walk up 78 flights of stairs like let alone in full gear.

20 20 stair 20 floors on the stairm floor. His radio transmission survive pockets of fire. His team believe they could knock down with two hose lines. He and Fire Marshal Ronald Buha, right alongside him, worked to free civilians trapped in a stuck elevator on the same floor. Neither made it. The South Tower then collapsed. In the North Tower, Port Authority construction manager Frank de Martini and Inspector Pablo Ortiz did something similar. Once their own floor, the 88th, was cleared, they went back up. floor by floor, prying open jam doors and elevators with crowbars and whatever else they could they could find, freeing people with no way out on their own, and estimates run as high as 50 that they saved.

Neither of them made it. Damn. Then there’s Captain Patrick Brown of Ladder 3, a decorated Marine Vietnam veteran up around the 40th floor with badly burned civilians who couldn’t move. When the order came to evacuate, his response is actually recorded and on tape. And he says, and I quote, “This is the officer of ladder company 3. I refuse the order. I am on the 44th floor and we have too many burned people with me. I am not leaving them.” Every member of latter three who responded that morning died. dude. And I want to be honest here because it’s part of why some of those men never made it out.

The radios that day genuinely failed a lot of people. And this is part of the story that not a lot of people know. FDNY and NYPD couldn’t talk to each other on the same channels at all. So if you could imagine the first responders were police, Port Authority and fire department. Yeah. All three of them had different separate communication lines. Like there’s no like continuity between them, right? That sucks. That seems like a terrible There should be like one like frequency that everyone can like broadcast on. Mhm. Maybe there is now after probably an emergency frequency. There probably is. Should be or there’s some sort of like central command where like they can patch them into other I mean technology is probably progressed enough to Yeah.

where it’s like you’re facetiming like Yeah. FaceTime. Inside the north tower stairwells, a repeater system meant to boost signal barely even worked. And when the evacuation order finally went out after the south tower fell, it didn’t reach anyone. And that’s part of why this day is still argued about. not necessarily a conspiracy, but negligence or deadly technology or bad organization on the technology and the financial support of the NYPD and the FDNY and the Port Authority. Okay? But before we get to the collapses, I need to tell you something a lot of retellings leave out, and we’re not going to skip it. When American 11 hit the North Tower, it severed all three stairwells above the 91st floor.

Everyone above that impact zone was trapped. Somewhere around 1,300 people, including close to 200 at the windows on the World Restaurant, had no way down. None. And like we told you the last time, the roof was never an option either cuz the doors were locked. That’s right. Those doors were kept locked as standing port authority policy was in place well before that morning. So that door was never going to open. The stairs were gone. The roof was sealed. And temperatures in parts of that impact zone are estimated to have gone north of 2,000° F. That’s extremely hot. So, starting minutes after 8:46 a.m. and continuing for the entire 102 minutes that the North Tower stood, people up on those floors began falling from the building.

Yeah, I remember those images. So upsetting. Some lost their grip. Some were pushed almost accidentally by the crowds at the windows. You can see it in the footage. Yeah, it’s got to be pure. It’s pure chaos. It’s just chaos. Pure chaos. Many people jumped on purpose because what was their alternative? To be burned alive. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I I I understand the logic. I wouldn’t want to be burned alive either. That sounds terrible. The most cited estimate is that roughly 200 people fell or jumped that morning. Almost all from the North Tower since its fire was more concentrated and it stood nearly twice as long.

It’s an estimate. It’s not an exact count. Nobody could track every person who fell. One horrible story is that one of them struck and killed a firefighter named Daniel Su on the ground on his way to help. And Daniel Su is actually the very first firefighter to die that day. He was killed by somebody who jumped. Damn. Now, I want to be exact about the language here as we go forward because the medical examiner’s office was exact about it on purpose. They refused as official policy to call these people jumpers. Well, now obviously. Yeah. Because they’re not like that’s not they it’s not the same.

It’s not the same. Is that usually what you would call like au suicider? Yeah. Yeah. So in those reports and they created they made a policy that nobody was marked as suicide. Yeah. I think that’s that was that was the right thing to do. Like obviously there they have no like in their minds there wasn’t a choice. Yeah. Yeah. A spokeswoman put it this way. A jumper wakes up already planning to end their life. These people didn’t. They were in her words forced out by the smoke and the flames. Exactly. Mhm. And every death connected to 9/11, including every one of these that we talked about, was officially ruled a homicide.

Good. Not a suicide. Yeah, man. I I I cannot imagine being in that situation. It’s the worst situ where you have to choose between what? walking down a firefilled stairwell or or either that or it’s like you’re trapped or it’s like just being consumed by the flames that are you Yeah, cuz the stairwells didn’t even exist. Like they were all crushed. You can’t like how do you Yeah. It’s like it’s an impossible. It’s it’s what we call a zero sum game. Like every answer is the worst. Yeah. So you try to pick like the lesser of infinite evils and you’re like it. I’m just going to like I honestly like I would probably I would realistically probably do the same.

Yeah. Like try to hope try to hope for a quick end as opposed to burning alive. You were above, you know, but then it’s like, dude, oh, how do you God? It’s like the worst situation I can imagine. Uh you’ve you’ve probably seen a photograph from this uh in some I mean I don’t know if it’s an appropriate name but some call them like well AP photographer Richard Drew which strangely enough and we had done a series on this but do you remember the photographs of Robert Kennedy being shot in the the hotel kitchen? Yeah. Remember those like like he was being held by somebody.

This guy took those photos. Jesus. Oh yeah. Yeah. So he took a photo caught in a single frame timestamped at 9:41 of a man falling perfectly vertical upside down, arms at his side. And some people call him like he just looked like almost like a superhero like he was Well, I don’t know. It’s just a It’s a crazy photo. I know. I think you know what I’m talking about. You know what he’s doing is doing what I would do is like gaining speed or Yeah. Or just trying to like try to make it as quick and painless as possible. Mhm. Because there is a there is a theoretical situation where it’s like you land and like your legs get obliterated and like you you stay alive for a period of time.

Yeah. So like if you go pencil dive Yeah. You’re going to odds are that it’s going to be instant. Like it’ll just it’ll just be an instant. Yeah. And then it’s like the best you can hope for in that situation is like no pain. I don’t you know. Yeah. So it ran once on page seven of the New York Times the next morning. The backlash was exting. I mean come on. Like readers called it exploitative ghoulish. Uh and it vanished from print for years. No, for sure. Like why? It’s like you’re literally like you’re making money off of like the suffering of like your own people.

Nobody I mean there are theories on Reddit and theories on on different things, but nobody’s officially confirmed who the man was. By 9:50 a.m., people watching from the street started noticing the building, trying to tell everybody what was about to happen. the exterior steel columns visibly started bowing outwards and Sean had talked about it where the buildings were meant to move a bit. They have to if you can’t you can’t have uh because it’s almost like new development in architecture where the building if it’s just a full rectangular structure it it’s not as stable as having some sort of uh it has to have give.

Yes. Same same with bridge, right? Like bridges that’s built. They’re meant to sway. They’re meant to move because a fluid object can it can disperse you can disperse the weight. They also have now there’s buildings have like these really insane not all buildings but like some buildings have these insane like uh gyro scope things in the basement the way they’re built and they can it’s it’s all about like absorbing the pressure because if you think like obviously we’re on earth like it’s in motion and like the earth does move it’s like it’s just what it does. run tectonic plates. Like there is subtle shiftings and when you think it’s that high, there’s obviously wind and variance and like there there is a it’s meant to they’re built to have some sort of give because otherwise they would just break.

Right. Right. So there are witnesses stating that the it became obviously like it was bowing outwards the way a wall like bulges a little bit right before it’s about to do something. Firefighters started hearing sounds of creaking and strange groaning, something shifting under its own weight. And some officers started pulling back from the base without waiting for any order, but they just had an instinct, like a I don’t want to say a premonition, but like a gut feeling of something’s wrong. Something’s wrong here. Something’s happening. Then at 9:59, 56 minutes after being struck, it happened. Survivors described a sound like a freight train or thunder that didn’t stop and the top of the building simply started coming down.

Floor pancaking on top of floors faster than you or I could run. And that’s that’s one of the big that’s the big if not the biggest conspiracy is that the building was falling at freef fall speed. That’s right. Which is not what’s supposed to happen like in physics when a building collapses on its own. Yeah. It’s not supposed to be at freef fall speed. Yeah. free because freef fall speed is indicating that there’s no uh there’s like when a building is supposed to is collapsing from the top down it it’s running into its own mass slowing it. So at freef fall speed the mass is being ejected from below.

Yeah. Therefore it’s allowing it to continue to go at the same rate of speed. Mhm. So if you think about it like if I fall down like there’s only air resistance and so I will fall at freef fall speed because there’s only the air stop me eventually I’ll reach terminal velocity which is the fastest speed I can go with air resistance but with a building it there’s mass in the way and it’ll fall but the mass in the way is slowing so so is the important thing too at the beginning to go what what defines freef freef fall is you’re following your you’re right like cuz that would be the starting point of going like so so to give you the information it took 11 seconds that’s it yeah that’s freef fall yeah no freeall I mean what I what I got from I guess Sean’s going to look it up but like you’re just you have no resistance right so yeah so so in physics freef fall is the motion of an object when gravity is the only force acting on it while air resistance and other forces are ignored.

Obviously, there is no on Earth there’s not a vacuum. So, there’s no such thing as like pure freef fall because there’s obviously air resistance. There’s always going to be air resistance because we live in a in an atmosphere that has air. Well, we’re also going to Yeah, we’re going to like we’re going to unpack that. We’ll unpack that later. We’ll unpack that later because that is that’s one of the biggest parts of it. Yeah. Yeah. Including building seven. Correct. Yeah, that left the North Tower standing by itself, burning. And for the next 29 minutes, everyone who understood what had just happened was operating under one unbearable question.

How long does this building have? This time, the warnings were real. At 10:04 a.m., an NYPD helicopter radioed that the top 15 floors were glowing red. Four minutes later, the same pilot said flatly he didn’t believe it would last much longer. Some firefighters, having just watched one tower disappear in 11 seconds, got everyone out that they could. Others were still inside, still working because the order actually hadn’t reached them because of the radio situation. At 10:28, the North Tower followed 102 minutes after being struck, nearly twice as long as its twin. Its rooftop antenna, a landmark New Yorkers had used to navigate the city for 30 years, stood straight up out of the smoke almost the entire time.

In the final seconds, witnesses watched it lean, then tip, then drop into the building a second or two before the rest of the structure. By 10:28, both towers, a combined 9 million square ft of office space, the tallest buildings in the city by a wide margin, were gone, replaced by a 16 acre field of smoking wreckage in a dust cloud that had already reached Brooklyn. Jesus. Now, again, I just want to say this is an audio podcast. It’s hard to really share what happened without video footage. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It’s a little difficult to It’s much less much less impactful. Yeah. Exactly. Without like a visual representation.

I think us as a society, especially nowadays in 2026, we’re very visuallyoriented. Yeah. Unless it’s an audio book, then I’m like, I don’t need to see that I don’t need to see Yeah. Yeah. I know to your point, I remember back then like the images of people just covered in white. Oh, from head to from that dust from the dust cloud or whatever you just said, you know, it was like pretty shocking, you know, to say like they were coming out of like the d like the the cloud or whatever and obviously everybody’s disoriented, bloody just and it’s so like apocalyptic. Yeah, it’s very apocalyptic.

Yeah. The human cost among the people whose entire job that day was to run toward the danger is almost impossible to fully understand, 343 firefighters, 37 Port Authority police, the single largest loss any police force in American history had suffered in one day. 23 NYPD officers, eight EMTs and paramedics, 411 emergency responders gone in that same 102minute window. The deadliest day for American law enforcement and firefighting in US history. I mean, and we like look like you can feel however you want to feel about, you know, these people, law enforcement, whatever. You got a bad rap. They were a sometimes. Like look, the world is full of They don’t know, but like like this is their job and like they’re these people were willing to give their life to try to save people.

Yeah. Like so like despite anything it’s like if you’re a police officer, if you’re a first responder, if you’re a firefighter, they don’t get enough credit for every day is you’re potentially putting yourself in the in that you’re putting your life on the line for people you don’t know. Yeah. It’s not like, oh yeah, obviously I’d run into a burning building for my kid and my wife, for sure. But like, would I run into a burning building for a random person I’ve never met? Probably not. I’m not even I’m not trying to I’m telling the truth. Like I probably wouldn’t because I would be like I need to be there for my family.

I I can’t risk it. Like so like we got to give these credit where credit’s due. Yeah. Absolutely. And they do. And it’s not just like on these tragic events. This happens every day. Absolutely. Like these people are So like despite whatever like I get it. Some people are dicks. I understand. Especially in today’s climate. Of course. It’s a little more charged up today, but like Yeah. Like take a little perspective. Just take that for what you will. That’s all. Just like have a little perspective of like what these people have to go through. And like you know, most of us don’t have to worry about that when we go to our 9 to5.

Like we don’t have to like worry like fear that like maybe someone’s going to shank me or like I’m going to have to run into a burning building. I don’t know. I’m just saying like take that for what it’s worth. Give these guys give these people respect. Absolutely. Absolutely. Of the roughly 2700 people who died at the site, historians estimate around 1,600 were in the north tower and closer to a thousand in the south, though these are very approximate. Yeah. There’s it’s it’s hard to get exact. Yeah. Yeah. Now, um I thought it was appropriate that we tell you some of the stories. Um there are hundreds of stories There are so many stories that if you wanted to really dive in, I I I really do think it’s worth doing.

Um there are so many stories of heroism, um of sacrifice, etc. And and we pulled out a couple to give you guys a little bit of like just a sliver of how many heroic actions there were. Um we also, just so you guys know, we’re going to be releasing in between episodes. We’re going to be releasing short stories of these heroic acts, um, like short little 10-minute episodes that will be released throughout the parts. But here are some of the ones that I just we pulled out as like incredible stories. Um, so one is Rick Rascora was 62. He was a decorated Vietnam veteran and he ran security for Morgan Stanley’s roughly 2700 employees in the South Tower.

After 93, he was at 93, the bombing, he had become almost obsessive about drills, evac drills, to the point that his own employees complained about how ridiculous and over overdone they were. Yeah. But that this guy was like, I’m going to be prepared. Yeah. The second the North Tower was hit, he ignored the stay put announcements and started evacuating Morgan Stanley floor by floor. All the while singing God Bless America through a bullhorn. That damn next level. My guy Rick is credited with saving nearly all 2700. Please tell me Morgan Stanley like gave this dude like a serious bonus. Jesus. Mid evacuation, he called his wife, Susan, and he said, quote, “Stop crying.

If something happens to me, I want you to know that I’ve never been happier. You made my life.” Then he went back in to search for more people and for stragglers, but Rick never came out. Oh, man. Yeah, that one gave me goosebumps, dude. What a G. But only third I I say only it’s ridiculous but out of the 2700 employees uh 13 died that day at Morgan Stanley. But I think of like the lives he saved though like I know right and like dude that’s why he was probably happy cuz he was like you know what like what I was like all all my effort wasn’t for not like I was able to actually make a difference because I I put my mind to it and I was so good for him.

yeah. What a legend. actual hero. Yeah. Actual hero. Legit hero. Yeah. Deep in the north tower stairwell be 14 people survived the total collapse around them. 12 firefighters from ladder six under Captain J. Jonas, a Port Authority bookkeeper named Josephine Harris, who they’d been half carrying because she couldn’t move fast, and officer David Lim. Harris’s slow pace, the thing that should have gotten them all killed by keeping them too high, is almost certainly the reason all 14 survived. Because at a normal pace, they’d already have reached the deadly the deadliest zone in the lobby when when it crashed. And Jonas described it as the following, and I quote, “The tower came down like a peeling banana, and it peeled around us.

Those firefighters called Harris their guardian angel for the rest of her life and served as her pawbearers when she died. Meaning they were protecting. She couldn’t move down the stairs cuz she was injured. Yeah. So they slowly went and then they were and then when the tower collapsed they were protected in this stairwell. Interesting. Wow. So these people survived and they called her they you know what I mean because of the situation of the situation. It’s like a strange happenstance story. Yeah. It’s like a coincidence. It was like, “Oh, like this.” You know, they’re thinking like, “This sucks.” I know. They’re like, “Oh my god, thank god this happened.” Like then there’s Wells Crowther, 24.

He was an equities trader on the 104th floor of the South Tower, and he was an off-the-clock volunteer firefighter. M after the plane hit, he made trip after trip, carrying and guiding survivors down the 78th floor sky lobby, and he had a red bandana over his mouth. Later, survivors called him the man in the red bandana because none of them knew his name and they took years for them to actually learn his name. What a boss. And he was credited with saving 18 people. He died in the collapse after going back up one more time. Dude, what a dude. Equities trader. Like I know this is, you know, this is the one time I’ll give Eric credit where where credit’s due.

Men will do miraculous things. Yeah, true. Like man will do like unbetold things like just for just because it’s because it’s the right thing to do. Yeah. Because it because it’s the right thing to do. Yeah. So once both towers were down, lower Manhattan became a trap. Every bridge, tunnel, and subway shut at once. Hundreds of thousands standing in a cloud of toxic dust with nowhere to walk. A Coast Guard lieutenant named Michael Day put out an open call. Any boat that could reach Manhattan, help. In under nine hours, an improvised fleet of fairies, tugboats, fireboats, sightseeing boats, anything that floated moved roughly half a million people off of the island by water.

Holy They did not know about that. Yeah. In a single morning, some say they rescued more people than the evacuation of Dunkirk. Holy Remember that story of Dunkirk? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a little unknown story of like, you know, just more heroism, dude. Yeah, I had no idea that happened. Same here. Okay, so now let’s rewind the clock a bit back to the morning because while all of that was happening at the World Trade Center, a second emergency was unfolding at almost the exact same time, 400 miles south in Washington. While the president was somewhere over the American South with no fixed destination, the VP was underground underneath the White House.

Around 9:37, right as the Pentagon was actually being hit, Secret Service agents physically grabbed Dick Cheney and moved him, practically carried him by some accounts, down into the emergency operations center, the reinforced bunker built underneath the White House during the Second World War. It was activated now because word had come in of a possible unidentified aircraft inbound directly to the White House. From inside the bunker, Cheney conveys authorization to shoot down any hijacked commercial aircraft that refuses to respond to radio contact. Okay, I was going to say like, how do you know it’s hij Okay, the refusal? His own chief of staff at the time, Scooter Libby, would later describe how fast that specific decision got made.

Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolton watching all of this unfold in real time from inside that same bunker suggests that Cheney actually confirm this authorization directly with the president before it’s formally passed down the military chain of command. Sure. He was like he’s like this is what I’m doing TD. He’s like okay. Yeah. You see the chaos. It’s kind of like who’s in charge. So, at around 10:18 a.m., Cheney gets Bush on a secure line aboard Air Force One specifically to relay that shootown authorization. Now, I have to be completely straight with you about this because this is one of the murky parts of the day.

The 911 Commission’s own final report states in its own language that there is quote conflicting evidence about whether President Bush had actually authorized the shootown order before Cheney or whether Cheney made the call. Uh let’s be honest, Cheney made the call. Like who are we kidding here? Yeah. Like that all the evidence you need is look at George W. Bush. He did not make the call. like he did it did not it never happened he probably was like what’s happening like he he doesn’t know what’s going on so adding to that murkiness when the commission the 9/11 commission eventually tried to formally interview Bush and Cheney about the sequence of events both men insisted on being interviewed together oh yeah in the same room at the same time off record with a 100% no transcript kept of what was said.

Yeah, cuz you know what’s happening? Jub’s like looking to Chenny and Ch like he’s like, “Yes, that’s what I said. T terrorizers.” And let’s just be honest, like we all know Bush is a puppet. Like Bush wasn’t like the sharpest tool in the shed like in general. And but especially with Cheney. Oh, okay. Chen there. That’s why I love that movie that that Cheney movie VP or VP like that was a good one. It was good. It’s also precisely the kind of unresolved decision that has fueled 25 years of speculation of who exactly was in command of the United States. We were just saying, let’s be honest.

Yeah. Here’s what we do know as a fact. Both men sitting in two completely different secure locations that morning briefly and genuinely believe that United 93 had actually been shot down by an American fighter jet. Oh, the one that crashed in Pennsylvania. Yeah, it had not been there was no fighter anywhere close at the time. The passengers did that. Mhm. While the White House itself was scrambling to sort out its own chain of command, the people directly responsible for the entirety of America’s airspace were dealing with completely different situations. In some ways, even impossible. And one of the single most important people managing that response started his job on 911.

That was his first day. It’s his first day. Oh my god. I’d be like, you know what? I’m I’m good. Call it. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? I’m I I’ve I’m done. Yeah. So, Ben Slimey had just become the FAA’s national operations manager in Virginia. He had well over two decades of aviation experience behind him. But September 11th was literally his first day on the job. I mean, there’s there’s no amount of experience that can prepare you for this type of situation. Around 9:25 a.m. that morning, before the Pentagon had even hit yet, Slimey orders a complete national ground stop. Nothing takes off from anywhere in the country.

What? At what time? 9:25. Oh, I thought it happened more like 12. Like way after. Well, hear it out. Well, I think he was Yeah. Maybe that’s like when the order was issued. No, no, that was when nobody takes off. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, there’s already planes in the air. Okay. Okay. Four to 5,000 planes in the air. First, and then you got to and then you got to reach out to every single one of them. Be like, uh, and get probably give some like secret passcode like, hey, uh, who are you? What are you doing? What’s your name? What’s your, uh, when did you graduate flight school?

M yeah, like you probably like some secret code. Then around 9:42 a.m. immediately after the Pentagon was hit. Mhm. He goes further still and issues an order that has had never once in entire history of American aviation had been given. Every single aircraft currently airborne anywhere in US airspace is ordered to land immediately. Oh Regardless of destination immediately. Yeah. The nearest airport. And he quote and he said that’s it. I’m landing everyone. In an oral history recorded years later, Slimey estimated that something like 700 planes were already on the ground within 10 minutes and then close to 3,500 were down within an hour and you’re just landing anywhere like where it was available.

Yeah. Anywhere. And you know, I I don’t hear a lot of stories. It would be cool to like hear it. It’s probably on a deep Reddit thread. Oh, for sure. of like people who were airborne. Mhm. And they’re like landed in like Toledo. Yeah. They’re like all of a sudden you start banking left. They’re like what the Yeah. Now the military side of this exact morning was messier. And it’s worth understanding just how thin the actual coverage was. So the entire continental United States that morning had only seven active air defense sites and a grand total of 14 fighter jets at alert status. Yeah. See, it’s like So, this is confusing.

Why? America, the the the mightiest military, we’ve got 14 jets across across the US. You’re saying ready at alert status. Yeah. So, is this at like 8:30? Is this 9:30 or 10:30 or like what? Cuz that could make a difference. 9:25, you know. I mean like now and we will go into it in in later episodes. We’ll go into the the the training drill that was happening. There was a training drill that was happening at the same time for that morning. And there was even a recorded message going is this training or this or is this real life? Yeah. And we’ll go into that. But it still seems strange to me that the greatest military power Yeah.

on Earth has 14 across the United States. That means let’s let’s break it up into the United States sectors. What? East coast, west coast, southeast, north, uh, west, two or three each. Mhm. I mean, I think within right mathematically, I think the while, yes, we we are the biggest, the baddest, like we’re not really set up for an internal threat. Yeah. Like our defense system is is external. Yeah. Because if anything is going to come in, we’re going to know with more than enough time to have a dedicated response because it’s going to be like we’re we’re set up to defend from the outside, not from the inside.

Correct. This is a great point. It’s a great point because we are I mean we’re not we’re not like we’re not militarized where it’s like focused on the inside where it’s like military is like on high alert all the time to like quell internal struggle. It’s not it’s not really built that way. So all four hijacked planes happened to fall inside a single sector in the command which is called NADS and it’s in Rome, New York, which meant that one command was effectively trying to defend the entire eastern seabboard of the United States that morning using jets scrambled out of exactly two bases, Otis and Cape Cod and Langley in Virginia.

And the confusion keeps going because at 9:21 the FAA passes NIAD’s an urgent and completely wrong piece of information. Great. That that American 11, the first plane that hit the tower 30 minutes earlier was somehow still airborne. J, how do you that up? Get get out. Come on. And in the reports was now heading towards DC. Confusion, bro. like in the imagine in the 9/11 commission they it is never explained how they where that error originated. Yeah. But NAD takes it seriously enough in the moment and they scrambled fighters at 924 to intercept back towards DC. Yeah. Or to New York. So they scrambled they were in Langley.

Okay. So that was the air base that two of them were in Langley and they scrambled them to go intercept a plane but that plane had already crashed into the World Trade Center. Oh my god. Like how And again we went we went over that in the last episode. One of the last things we had talked about was they didn’t know where they were going. Yeah. They just get up there get in the air. Yeah. So then those exact Langley fighters chasing a target that no longer exists get sent in the wrong direction. They got sent over the open Atlantic Ocean. Who’s who’s in charge of like they literally started flying in to the middle of the Atlantic?

Like who’s directing these guys? Yeah. So because of a mixup involving a generic training flight plan that had been on fire. Yeah. You can actually hear the mission commander on the surviving tape, furious, telling his own pilots, quote, “I don’t care how many windows you break, push them back.” By the time real fighter jets are finally in any position to do anything, American 77 has already come in low over Arlington and hit the Pentagon. Yeah. I mean, this is just a like it’s just an egregious cup. like just it’s so bad. Yeah. By some estimates, the nearest jet to the Pentagon being hit was 150 mi away.

H which is crazy because they’re getting scrambled out of Langley which is in Virginia and the Pentagon is in is right there. And especially you’re in a fighter jet, you get there in like 48 seconds. his hair. Like, so there was more chaos in the system because at 9:41, Boston Air Traffic Control flags a different plane called Delta Flight 1989 and it was also departing out of Logan and it was heading to Vegas. They flagged it as a possible fifth hijacking. I wonder why they flagged it. Like it wasn’t. It was because they weren’t responding. Oh, I see. No. Like homie like went to go take a piss and then like had it on auto.

Yeah. AND THEY’RE LIKE IT’S OFF. But it wasn’t hijacked at all. Yeah. I mean, well, it’s also like at that point, everyone’s on such high alert. You can imagine like you send a call in and it’s been like 4 seconds and you’re like, they’re not responding cuz it’s scramble the fighters. And Delta 1989 wasn’t the only phantom threat racing through the system. Word moved through Washington in real time of a car bomb reportedly detonated at the State Department. There was a fire in the National Mall of a bomb at the US Capital building. This is chaos. Another report came in of an explosive device found at the old executive office building right next door to the White House.

Jesus. Another report came in of smoke pouring out of the USA today, building over in Virginia. Do you think this is also like what happens when people just, you know, you’re already in a panic state and then just randoms are just like everything’s happening. I think I see this or Yeah, exactly. Oh my god. I I heard I my buddy was talking about this the other day. There’s this is what’s happening and like they they they call a report. Yeah. The chaos wasn’t confined to American skies alone. With roughly 500 separate flights inbound to the United States from overseas at the exact moment the entire country’s airspace shut down.

Yeah, they’re like, “Turn, just land in the ocean, cuz they ain’t coming in here.” Canada’s transport ministry made a real time decision to close Canadian airspace fully. The first fully unplanned closure of its time in in the entirety of Canada’s history. I didn’t know about that actually. Yeah. That they they closed down their their airspace. By the time it was finally over, somewhere between 250 and 240 aircraft had been diverted into 17 separate Canadian airports. Halifax ended up receiving the highest number of individual flights. Vancouver received the highest total number of stranded passengers. There’s another story and it became an actually a a Broadway musical and it’s in the small town of Gander, New Finland.

A town that took in 38 separate aircraft carrying 6,000 stranded passengers and crew members combined, nearly doubling the town’s entire year round population overnight of just grounded planes. I don’t know how you make that into a musical. I’m not I’m not sure how that how that musical comes into play. But sure, Canadians. Yeah. You know what? Makes sense. It actually checks out now. Yeah. Before we close the President’s Day, we need to fill in something we’ve skipped past because right now in this telling, it’s still basically in the morning and both towers are down. And the next thing we’re about to tell you happens at 8:30 that night.

And that’s not a gap we’re going to leave empty because a lot happened in lower Manhattan in those hours in between. Through the rest of that morning and into the afternoon, what had been a rescue operation kept expanding. Offduty firefighters and cops who heard the news drove in from Long Island, from Jersey, Westchester, etc., showing up in their own cars because nobody was going to sit this one out. Construction workers walked into the pile with nothing but hand tools and started digging. Hospitals across the city cleared beds and braced for a wave of wounded. That mostly never came because on that pile in that collapse, there wasn’t much of a middle ground between walking away and not surviving.

Yeah. The dust that had rolled through the streets that morning kept settling over low lower Manhattan. coating cars, windows, awnings. Uh Jorge brought it up with this gray suit or like a ash that fell upon everything. And the whole time, one building nobody was talking about kept burning. Quietly a few blocks north of the tower, Seven World Trade Center. Mhm. A 47story office tower that no hijack plane ever hit. And this is all supposedly and this is all in the allegedly this is in the report but that building caught fire that same morning around midday when Yeah. just randomly catches fire just on a on a wh a whimsy.

So it was from debris from the north towers collapse. Okay. Get the out of here. Firefighters seven blocks away or how many blocks? Four blocks. A few blocks. Okay. Few blocks. It was in the complex, you know what I mean? Like, you know. Yeah. Firefighters already stretched to their absolute limit and with no working water pressure anywhere near it, essentially let it burn through the afternoon while focusing on the actual disaster site. By early evening, it had been burning steadily for 7 hours. At 5:20 that evening, it came down in a controlled demolition. A multi-year federal engineering investigation would eventually conclude and in this report Mhm.

that it was uncontrolled structural fire and it was an ordinary bring down. Totally ordinary. expanding steel beams, one single critical support column ultimately giving way under that heat brought the entire building down. And the investigation specifically found no physical evidence whatsoever of explosives or accelerants anywhere inside it. Was this a different uh like committee or different investigation and report than the than the official like So it was part of it. Part of it. I also want to point out and Jorge or at least it’s in the it’s in it as part of the report. Yeah. Jorge brought up a phenomenal point that the 911 commission’s budget was what you said 3 million.

Million and then how much was the the Monica Lewinsky? Yeah, the Monica Lewinsky one was like 45. Yeah, it was like in comparison, you know, it was 39 I think. $39 million on the Monica Lewinsky investigation and $3 million on the greatest attack in American history. $3 million. Infuriating. And yet they’ll literally of a BJ in the Oval Office 40 $39 million. I mean, come on. Like, what are the priorities here? So, I’m telling you that finding right now upfront because building 7 goes on to become one of the single most cited pieces of evidence in the 9/11 conspiracy. We’re absolutely going to come back to it.

Yeah. No, duh. In real depth later on. Yeah. Absolutely. Next episode. Yeah. For tonight, just hold on to two things at once. the fact that it happened exactly as described and the official engineering finding for why and just put a little pin on that. Yeah, a little pin in it. Although on on the bright side of it, regardless of if you think it’s a conspiracy or not about building seven, the good news in that it was fairly evacuated. But that’s great. That’s actually great. There was real not a lot of fallout from that. That’s fantastic. Yeah. And there’s some last minute videos and if you go to our Instagram page, you can see there’s some last minute videos of firefighters going through it and it’s pretty much empty.

There’s also the my one of my favorite videos ever. Did you post it where it’s the the BBC chick? Yeah. Who says that the building 7 went down before it’s actually down 12 minutes before? Yeah. And it’s literally up. It’s in the background. Yeah. It’s literally you can see it of her thing and she’s like it’s like not it’s still there. Also, what’s what’s really annoying though is that every platform flagged that. Like we were flagged from Tik Tok for posting that video. Uh Instagram was flagged. Like we just every so funny you’re flagged for posting a news broadcast that actually happened. Like even if we didn’t say it was a conspiracy, it still happened.

Yeah. It still was the news correctly. You can’t post media. You can’t. Only the media can. A duh. Okay. Okay, so let’s go back to Bush as we we kind of wrap up, you know, the day of 9/11. From Barksdale airport, the plane moved on Air Force One to Ofoot Air Force Base in Nebraska. And that’s the home of US Strategic Command, where Bush joins a secure National Security Council video conference from deep inside the base’s underground command center, finally getting a full picture of everything that we’ve just spent the last hour telling you about. It’s not until around 6:45 that evening that the Air Force One finally lands back at Andrews Air Force Base and Bush is able to return to the White House itself.

At 8:30 that night, he addresses the entire nation from the Oval Office. It was a five-minute speech heavily drafted in the hours beforehand by his legal counsel, Karen Hughes. And just a small quote from it, “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shattered steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. And then a single line buried in an otherwise brief five-minute speech that would go on to define the next 20 years of American foreign policy. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.

M big long war after that led that led to big long war after that that led honestly to a lot of the policies and the things that we have today. Mhm. Patriot Act all the things. Around 9:30 that night, CIA Director George Tennant sits down directly with Bush and tells him plainly what the AY’s own counterterrorism center has concluded. They believe it was al-Qaeda. They believe it was Osama bin Laden. Okay. They knew it was. That was at 9:30 that night. Strong suspicion. That was 9:30 at night. 911. Okay. Telling Bush. Yeah. Directly. Yeah. Honestly, the suspicion had been sitting there unspoken for quite a while given everything the CO knew already as we did in our earlier episodes.

Yeah. What about the what is it? The the rad what was that program? The the rads. No. Um what the No, the the thing with the they got flagged. The caps. There it is. Caps. Yeah. Also, remember in the earlier episodes we went over the bombing in Kenya. Oh, yeah. Yep. Uh the bombing of the USS Cole. Yeah. Did we go over the the uh attempted bombing on um LAX? LAX. We did the Millennium Millennial. Millennium January 1. Yeah. And that suspicion firms up fast once investigators recover Satam Alsami’s actual passport lying on a street near the World Trade Center. It literally I’m sorry but like if that was the only piece of data we had I’d be like this is Okay.

So, this was recovered that day, the same day. And it was recovered. It was thrown clear of the wreckage before the buildings came down. And uh there’s, you know, we have a photo of that in But but explain to me how Yeah. how like in with within the laws of this universe that it’s inside of this plane that literally blows up like a bomb and it just just happens to get ejected and then it’s in the wreckage but then the building comes down afterwards and then they’re like what do we have here? We have this burned passport. It doesn’t make sense because a lot of that what we just went over for two to three hours was how crazy the impact was.

Yeah. The jet fuel instant burning. Let’s just say everything was above board. Yeah. Like with the plane hitting at 590 mph, the jet and let’s just say that the jet fuel brought the towers down, right? Let’s say there’s no conspiracy there whatsoever. Yeah. How did that passport survive? It doesn’t. It’s it’s it’s like hit the bottom of it open somehow so that his bag can fly out. No, but his passport was on his person cuz you don’t check You don’t check your passport. It had to be It’s inside the cabin. It had to be in his carryon. It’s with him. It’s in his pocket. I don’t know about you, but when I go Dude, I keep mine I keep I keep mine in my backpack, but my backpack is under in my legs.

Yeah. And it’s the first thing you grab. Yeah. It’s the first and then before I leave the plane, I open it to make sure it’s in there. Yeah. And we also did another post that um the United 93 outside of Shanksville, uh two more hijacker passports were recovered. It’s so convenient. How convenient. Now, uh if you reviewed the footage of United 93, uh the passengers brought that plane down at such high speed. Mhm. And upside down. Remember that? It was upside down and 500 plus miles an hour and it was incinerated. Yeah. It exploded. Yeah. There’s like if you look at like what they recovered like piece like little little pieces of the of the metal plane and somehow the passports are two of them out of here.

Two of them. Two of them. Now, uh side evidence also is that the uh two of the flight attendants IDs were recovered. Well, they got to make it believable. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I know. I’m just saying like call the playbook, right? Show you off. By nightfall on the day itself, the casualty numbers are still actively coming in and they will keep shifting day by day for weeks afterwards. But here is where they finally permanently settle. 2,977 people killed, not counting the 19 hijackers themselves. Roughly 2700 of them in New York alone, 184 at the Pentagon, counting both the building and everyone aboard the plane, 40 at Shanksville.

People from more than 90 different countries around the world, all killed on the exact morning on American soil. The New York Stock Exchange closed for the remainder of the day and it stays closed for the rest of the entire week. the longest single shutdown of Wall Street since 1933. So, I want to close tonight with what happened after the cameras stopped rolling because this part of the story runs for months, not hours, and it deserves to be told honestly, too. In the rubble that night, and for a few desperate days afterwards, there was still officially a rescue operation. crews digging by hand, by headlamp, calling out into the voids in the debris, hoping around 27 hours in, a Port Authority employee named Janelle Guzman McMillan was pulled out alive from what would be the North Tower’s 64th floor.

That’s amazing. She was the last survivor anyone ever found. I don’t know how they would Oh, cuz that’s maybe where she was. I’m like, how do they know it was on the 64th floor? It was coll. Well, she survived, so she probably That’s what I’m saying. She’s probably where she was, but that’s amazing. I’m so pleased that she survived. In total, only about 20 people came out of the wreckage alive. Oh, really? That’s amazing, though. But, dude, once the towers fell, 20. I thought it was a lot more for some reason. I mean, it’s like when you think of like that like nine million square feet of like office, it’s so much that’s that’s I think it’s a miracle 20 people survived the like inside the wreckage.

And truth be told, all 20 of those stories are incredible stories. Uh there’s um um Oliver Stone did a movie about two Port Authority cops uh with Nicholas Cage and Michael Pena. Um it was called World Trade Center. I saw that and it was just about them too. Yeah. And they sur, you know, they survived. It is an incredible story. So point being is all 20 of those stories are amazing. Are incredible in their own right, including like how the dogs helped. Yeah. Um, you know, so by late September though, with no one left to find, the mission quietly and officially became something else. Not rescue, but recovery.

And what follows was by any measure the largest and most difficult forensic identification effort in American history. Crews spent the better part of a year hauling roughly 1.8 8 million tons of steel and pulverized concrete out of that 16 acre hole. More than a 100,000 truckloads, much of it trucked out to Staten Island and sifted by hand for anything human that remained. Jesus. The operation of Ground Zero formally closed on May 30th, 2002. There were no speeches, just a fire bell rang once at 10:29 in the morning, the exact minute the North Tower had come down. A single steel column, 58 tons, covered top to bottom in the signatures of the workers who’d spent that entire year in the pit, was cut down, wrapped in an American flag, and driven out on a flatbed truck.

Behind it came an empty stretcher, also draped in flag because there was nothing left to put on it for well over a thousand people that they never recovered. Damn. Of the 2753 people killed at the World Trade Center, only 289 complete intact bodies were found. Everyone else, the overwhelming majority of nearly 3,000 human beings, exist today only by fragments. The medical examiner’s office has tested nearly 22,000 separate pieces of human remains since that morning. Some of them found years later, including hundreds of bone fragments discovered on the roof of a neighboring building during a demolition in 2006 and even now 25 years on using DNA sequencing technology that didn’t exist then.

As of the most recent update, roughly 1650 of the 2750 World Trade Center victims have been identified. Damn. It’s still it’s still over a thousand that That’s right. So what that means is close to,00 people, parents, kids, husbands, wives, people who left for work on a Tuesday morning have never officially come home. So before we let you go tonight, I want to run through a handful of facts about that day that don’t usually make it into documentaries, don’t usually make it into the headlines. A single financial firm, Caner Fitzgerald, so they occupied the top floors of the North Tower right at above where the planes hit.

They lost 658 employees that morning, more than any other single employer in 911. Add in the roughly 295 people lost by the insurance firm Marsh and Mclennon, one floor below them, and those two companies alone account for 40% of the civilian deaths of World Trade Center. Damn, that’s crazy. Windows on the world. The restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower lost every employee working that day. 73 people above the fire line, none of them survived. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s it’s Yeah. You know what I mean? There’s nohere to go. Yeah. In the days immediately after the attacks, the Red Cross and blood banks across the country were overwhelmed with donors.

Oh, for sure. Lines around the block, people waiting hours to give blood to the wounded. The grim reality is that there weren’t nearly enough wounded to even need it. This was one of the deadliest days in American history and also one of the least survivable days in history. You were either extremely injured or you were dead. So a huge percentage of that blood donated in good faith by ordinary Americans ultimately expired as unused blood donations. Still the sentiment behind it. In the days after the attacks, while nearly all commercial aviation in the country remained grounded, the US government authorized several flights to evacuate roughly 140 members of the Saudi royal family, including Bin Laden’s extended family who were in the United States at the time, flying them out of the country once airspace reopened enough to permit it.

The FBI has said those passengers were screened before departure and the decision remains one of the more scrutinized footnotes of the entirety of 9/11. Because clearly our screening process was flawed. I mean, let’s be honest, the CAP system flagged CAPS is good to go. Flagged 60% of the dudes. Like, yeah, it is. I I don’t understand that decision. I don’t get it. It’s that’s like a you know it’s above my pay grade type conversation. That’s that’s that also it had to have been decided by the top. Oh no. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. Right. Like let let these guys go. Yeah. Yeah. So we can go get them.

I don’t I don’t understand it. Why else would Why else do you want to put them back or send them back or or whatever? at least detain them for questioning or just like be like you’re going to be here. Not if you already not if you already know where you want to end up with with this. Well, which we’re going to get into in the other episodes. The fires burning underneath the World Trade Center wreckage didn’t fully go out for more than three months. Some of the last hot spots weren’t extinguished until Christmas of that year. Wow. So, that’s the whole day from the moment those 19 men walked through airport security this morning to the moment the president closed it out from the Oval Office.

But we aren’t done with the story of 9/11. Next time, we’re staying right there in the wreckage because the buildings themselves left behind almost as many questions as the attacks did. Building seven and why the government’s own explanation still hasn’t satisfied a huge chunk of the country. the $2.3 trillion that Rumsfeld stood up and admitted to the Pentagon that they couldn’t account for, unannounced almost unbelievably on September 10th, the day before everyone stopped paying attention. The controlled demolition theories, where they come from, what actually holds up against them, the strange thin handful of frames of the Pentagon security. If you’ve ever seen the footage, everybody questions it.

Yeah. We’re going to take all of it seriously enough to look directly at each of those points and honest enough to tell you what we actually find. And after that, we go into the specific things about the commission and the suspect andor unanswered questions that they provided. Tonight though, that’s the day. The worst single day in modern American history. 19 hijackers, four planes, thousands of people who never came home. But it’s also the day that Rick Rcora sang his employees down 70 flights of stairs. That’s true. The day half a million people got off an island by boat because ordinary civilians just started showing up with whatever they could.

The day a plane full of passengers who had never met each other, 40 minutes behind schedule took down the hijackers. The day that Congress stood together on the capital steps and they were united by being Americans, not by being parties. Yeah. For one day, whatever else was going on in this country before 9/11, politics, grudges, the noise, none of it mattered. On September 12th, people ran into burning buildings for strangers. People opened their homes in a Canadian town to 6,000 people that they never even met. People stood in line for hours to give blood even though it wasn’t actually needed. It was the worst day.

It was also, by any honest measure, one of the best examples this country has ever produced of what we actually look like when humans come together. And so next week we’re going to tackle really the the questions that are still unanswered. Yeah. Just I I wanted I I thought it was important to to go through just like the inconsistencies and like the questions of like Okay. Yeah. Because I think we obviously like we live in reality and the planes hit the building like so that that happened. You can’t like you can’t wash away the fact that that did happen. That occurred, but we watched it happen.

Yeah. But, you know, there’s a lot of people that subscribe to the fact that the planes were empty. Yeah. And like it was or it was CGI or it was CGI fake. You’ve seen that, right? Like I’ve never heard of the CGI theory. Really? I mean, this was on live TV. I’ve seen crazy theories, but like the the the planes flew into the building. Like that 100% happened. And we have so much evidence of the hijackers, what they did, you know what I mean? Like the the the airport before. Yeah. Yeah. The video, etc. The phone calls. Yeah. We have all of that stuff. So, we’re just going to get into like the other points.

Yeah. the other coincidences, the you know the the points with with the buildings like the all these other things to all right so we have the whole story so now let’s take parts of the story and kind of dive in a little bit deeper and then after we’ve gone through all the different points of that then we can have the kind of final kind of summation of like okay based on the step by step based on picking apart all the different things. What do we Yeah. think occurred? Yeah. Yeah. Because we’re still going to dive deeper into the Pentagon, right? Of course. And then the building of them.

Yeah. Each each of the points like I broke it out into like there’s the Twin Towers, there’s building seven, there’s the Pentagon. Yeah. There’s Bin Laden, Shanksville, and then the Shanksville. Yeah. Flight 93. Flight 93. That’s right. And there are outstanding questions on all of them. Oh, for sure. 100%. Oh, without without a shadow of a doubt. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, I hope you guys I don’t want to say enjoyed, but like I I hope you guys got something out of like this is the story and and I think it’s important to know the story before we can ask the questions. Of course, because like you you can’t ask questions if you don’t really know what the narrative is.

So, it’s like you question the narrative like well, what is the narrative? Yeah. Exactly. So, like know the narrative then you can question it. Yeah. And now when you’re talking to somebody, you can go, okay, this is exactly what happened. And then you can go, okay, this is these are the things that are unanswered still. Oh, for sure. That’s why we even called this unanswered 911 unanswered. Mhm. So, um, we we love you guys. Obviously, I know this is very heavy. Um, it’s a it’s a tough one to do because obviously there was nearly 3,000 people that that died and and this isn’t to make light of that tragedy cuz it’s that’s the only way to explain it.

It’s a tragedy. It’s it’s unnecessary. It’s senseless. But, you know, this is this is what we do. Like this is this is this is what we do. So far from today, training exercise of the exact same thing going down. Say this for the after. Save this for the after hours. All right. No, say I’ll save this for the after hours. We’re going to get we’re going to deep. All right. All right. So, join the Patreon. But so, next week, um, we are going to take specific findings of the 911 commission and then we’re going to, you know, Sean’s got a lot of questions. Oh, yeah.

And it’s it’s it’s going to be It’s going to be less It’s going to be less of a story narration scenario. It’s going to be more talking. Yeah. And it’s going to be more of Okay, let’s talk about building seven all the way. Yeah. Fully. Yeah. Exactly. So, tune in next week, next Tuesday and and we’ll dive further into this and we’re going to try to figure out what questions have been unanswered and see if we can answer those questions. So join join patreon.com/conspiracyodcast if you want to to listen to the after hours which we’ll be doing in probably 30 seconds here. And um obviously we love you guys and we look forward to talking to you next week.

That’s right. All right, guys. Better night. What’s up, guys? I hope you enjoyed this episode. I want to invite you to join us for our Patreon. So, what that is is an exclusive membership. We’re gonna be able to get exclusive discounts like 15% off on all our merch and you won’t have to listen to these ads ever again. Ads ever again. Plus, you’re going to be able to access our minis episodes. So, that’s something that nobody else is going to get access to. They’re just short podcast episodes where about 15 minutes long or so. So, cool, you know, extra content that you’re going to get access to.

I know. And all those other suckers are waiting for next Tuesday that you’re going to hit some minis up, you know, fill the void. That’s right. instead of, you know, having to wait the rest of the peasants for the next episode. All you got to do is go to patreon.com/theconspiracy podcast and you’ll find us. There are many different levels there, all giving different amounts of content. That’s right. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Night night.