Episode 188 - September 11th Recall Part I - The Before Time
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, Max and Aaron have a 2 part discussion to combine personal recollections with some light historical research. This part covers the key differences between life and the news cycle in 2000-2001 and today along with personal experiences leading up to the morning of September 11th.
Links
2011: Death of Bin Laden at the Phillys Mets Baseball Game
NYT, Sept 5 2001: Don’t Panic over Shark Attacks
NYT, Sept 11 2001: Massoud Assassinated in Afghanistan
Super Mario Brothers (1993): Twin Towers Treatment
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 188.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. This episode—I almost feel a little bit awkward having video for this episode. I think the subject matter—I almost want it to be audio-only so I can hide my face. But here we are, in person doing this.
Aaron Bell: Nothing to be ashamed of.
Max: It's not that I'm ashamed of something. The thoughts in this episode, and maybe even partially—the emotions, but also like trying to reach deep into my memory banks in this episode. Might require me to scrunch up my face a little bit more than normal. I often see this episode as us laughing and having good time. Maybe we'll get to that a little bit on this episode. But it's the 911 episode. So I don't know how much of that we're going to do.
Listen, it's been 20 years since 911. I'm not very good at dramatizing things. I'm not going to give you a play-by-play. I don't want to make a huge political statement here. I'm not good at doing a memorial. Other people are good at that. You're going to see on the TV over and over again, all sorts of documentaries and stuff. But I did want to talk about it because it's an important event in history, but also in our lives.
I think it's important to mark 20 years, and I thought we can combine some personal recollections, with a little bit of research as well to try to explain to people who maybe are under 25, what going through that was like. Maybe to explain to future generations what going through that was like. They have tons of stuff on what going through that was like. But hey, the personal perspective, and where we grew up—what our recollections might be a little bit different than the stuff that you're going to get in most dramatization. I thought that might be a worthwhile thing to do.
Aaron: Absolutely. A lot of people have made the comment that after 911, everything was different, starting on September 12. It was a different world. It was a dividing line for our lives, for our generation. It was maybe the equivalent of the Kennedy assassination.
Max: Sure.
Aaron: We’re going to try and unpack that a little bit and give some clarity to what that “everything was different” really means because it's an easy thing to say, but a little bit harder to really understand.
Max: One of the things that we cover on the show—which I wasn't really expecting to cover when we started. But now it seems inevitable now that we do it is sort of thinking about change. Just changes in the world and how to anticipate them, and how to think about them. We've actually gotten pretty good at that. We can cover some of that.
Now, 20 years is a long time. I want to start by taking us back only 10 years, and just remember the day that bin Laden was finally captured and killed by seal SEAL Team Six. Already, 10 years it's a different world, 10 years ago.
Aaron: Do you believe that was a full decade ago?
Max: So do you remember that? Because there's pretty there's an interesting video on YouTube that I just don't think what happened today at a baseball game like Mets and the Phillys—where this was happening on the news. They put it up on the screen people shouting, “USA, USA” after basically 10 years of a manhunt for a single person basically—the number one terrorist in the world.
I have a few memories. That was when Foursquare was getting started up. That was when Foursquare was hitting its inflection point. I did not work there yet. But I remember that Foursquare users created a venue down at the World Trade Center called “Osama bin Gonathon”. Everybody was checking into that. There were like random parties on the streets of New York. I don't know if you remember this.
Aaron: I don't remember that specifically. My only distinct memory from that was the not quite literal, but figurative—mic drop speech that Obama made when he announced it. It sticks in my memory. But in retrospect, it seems like a weird thing to celebrate the…
Max: The death of a person. It really does.
Aaron: Even if it's a loaded term, but ostensibly the assassination of an individual. Not that he didn't have it coming, but we didn't capture him and put him on trial. They didn't try to exfiltrate him. Maybe that was the mission. I haven't done a lot of detailed reading up on that. But it seemed like that was extremely low priority in terms of what they went there to do.
Max: It's crazy, but that was 10 years ago. Now, we're almost as far as that as that was from 911 itself which might be a little bit of a way to explain some of the events happening more recently. I'm not sure. But maybe I'll throw that out there. We went to 2011. That doesn't happen. That crazy situation doesn't happen unless 911 happens.
Let's rewind, and let's talk about what was life like in America pre-11. I have so many things I could talk about on this. I kind of racked my brain a little bit. Maybe I can go through my list, you can react. In terms of technology, we just had broadband internet. That was like brand new. People were getting it in their homes. It had at the universities in the schools for a while. We just had Wikipedia.
It wasn't like you can go on Twitter and break news on Twitter, but there were definitely lots of journalists out there—different. That would break news on the Internet pretty fast. Email was kind of the Twitter of its day because we went on these long lists, and people were sending jokes back and forth.
Aaron: All the chain emails. We weren't yet in peak blogging, but it was kind of the precursors to that.
Max: Well, blogging was a big deal during the Clinton scandals and all that. It was just getting going, and the internet was brand new. When that was happening, you have to call it to get online. Really, that's how new it is. It was probably a lot of people—I don't know. I think I was still on broadband at that point, or on dial-up at that point.
Aaron: I'm trying to remember when we replaced the dial-up in our home. It must have happened in, at some point, in high school. But I couldn't put my finger on when.
Max: At this point. But you can go online in the library, and then in the school very fast. I know people who don't remember this might be like, “Wait, what? Like why? That sounds crazy.” But it was actually kind of easy. I don't know. It felt kind of easy at the time to do it. It didn't feel like a pain at all, but there weren't that many websites to check. You didn't really have to do that much when you went on it. You just check your email and—I don't know—a few chat rooms, news stories at the time.
The Millennium “Y2K” Bug, that was always a big joke to me. Some people say, “Oh, people really thought the world was going to end.” Even in the ‘98–’99, I always interpreted that as a big joke. I don't know what you remember of that.
Aaron: I think there was some legitimate concern about certain systems crashing. End of the world is was definitely hyperbole. I was watching with anticipation and curiosity like, “Is something going to happen? What's it going to be? I wasn't hunkered down in the basement with cans of soup, and lots of D batteries.
Max: I have an amazing home video of that night that I took with me and my cousins on celebrating the millennium. We blew up like 100 balloons and put it in one room so we can kick them around. I had the camcorder. We did a little pretend thing—I know maybe I'm a little too old for pretend. I was 15 at the time. No, but we did it. We did a whole thing where we were like simulating a terrorist attack.
That was actually something that people talked about a lot at the time. There are a lot of terrorist attacks that had been thwarted. There were a lot that were successful. There was the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. There was the Oklahoma City bombing, and there were school shootings just like today. I'm not going to get into the whole it had to do with “someone who was in the bathroom” and I'll let some of that be private stuff. But it involves poison gas, but let's not… But it was kind of a big joke.
Aaron: Well, one of the other things you have here in the notes is cell phones which I can’t, for the life of me, remember when I got my first cell phone. It might not have been until I got to college. But it may have also been like senior year-ish. These were not smartphones. These were barely even dumbphones. They were just this side of Wall Street brick size mobile phones.
Max: Look at the “Osama bin gonathon”. 10 years later, people still had dumbphones.
Aaron: I remember in college, some people—they didn't have unlimited texting on their plan. They said, “Don't include me on your text chain because it costs me a nickel every time someone sends me a text.”
Max: That’s so ridiculous. No, I didn't get it through college. But I feel like cell phones were becoming very common among adults, which I was not one yet.
Aaron: And I think that played into some of the events of the day. I'm getting a little bit of it ourselves here because there were certainly a lot of adults trying to get ahold of folks. I believe the cellular system was overloaded significantly.
Max: Right, right. Also, people were using cell phones on again, jumping ahead on Flight 93 to call their relatives. That's how they found out that this plane was not being hijacked to be taken to some country and negotiated. This plane was being hijacked as a suicide mission.
Aaron: That's another way that this was a huge game-changer in terms of kind of the threat matrix that hijackings were not unusual. Maybe they’d gone down in frequency since the 70s. But they were kind of a known issue. The way you dealt with those, it was a very different nature of threat than what we saw unfold that day. Again, getting ahead of myself there.
Max: Getting into pop culture now. On one hand, this could just be “it seems this way because people often have positive recollections of their youth, but I honestly don't think I would feel this way if I were in high school in 2021.” Pop culture and the media actually seems pretty upbeat at the time in 2002.
Aaron: Maybe shallow.
Max: Absolutely shallow. I mean, when wasn’t it shallow?
Aaron: I don't think it's just nostalgia there. Where does this fit in terms of the dot-com boom?
Max: Just before. Sorry! During—just before…
Aaron: The economy was chugging along strong. We got through the Y2K scare with no significant issues there.
Max: And the dot-com boom affected people in tech. It didn't cause the same kind of economic PTSD, for lack of a better term that the 2008 housing crash caused. Definitely economic PTSD. people in the tech industry…
Aaron: I wasn’t even thinking about the crash that followed the boom.
Max: That was like coming off the boom, and it was a real boom. It was a real boom in terms of applications. The internet was a game-changer, and it was still so new. This lasted probably until 10 years ago until basically 2013–2014 when the internet reached its peak and started its downward dive into the depths of despair.
I have written down here. I remember the 2000 election really well. It might sound similar. If you read it in a textbook, years from now. It might sound similar to 2020. But it really was not living through it. Looking through it now it seems like it wasn't really a culture where the struggle was among politicos. I picture the people protesting and like, buttoned-down… It seems like…
Aaron: It was a big deal at the time.
Max: It's like who's gonna get the job?
Aaron: It was unprecedented. But I'd say it was an order of magnitude less—bitter is not the right term for it but…
Max: It also was a lot like, “Oh, this is a very fascinating case.”
Aaron: There was a certain element of this was a battle between gentlemen that there was a certain—even though they may have disliked each other personally or opposed each other politically—there was a certain amount of respect among all the parties, which did not exist in the last two presidential elections.
Max: Sure! That was going on. I went ahead and looked up some of the top 40 music that was playing on the radio. I saw some JLo, Mary J. Blige, and TLC?
Aaron: I know that those are names of artists, but I think I'd say there's at least a 70% chance that I would not have known that in 2001.
Max: I was into that, yeah.
Aaron: Yeah, that was pretty obvious.
Max: So that happened. No, but also that was Britney Spears was coming up, and Eminem, and Christina Aguilera. It was like—yes, Eminem is kind of more… I feel like he's more of the 2000s. A little more downcast type situation. But you had that. Okay. Now people say, “Well, airports before 911.” This one is a little bit puzzling to me because I flew a few times before 911, and I don't remember that big of a difference in security. But it could have been because I wasn't really trying to get through, and I wasn't trying to bring a big bag of food through or whatever. You could definitely get more through security then. You still had to go through the metal detector and put your bags through a thingymabob. That's kind of the thing that I do now. Now I have a TSA PreApproved. Maybe, that got me back to where it was. I'm sure if I go, you still have to stop and take off your shoes, if you're not.
Aaron: I have a couple of thoughts on that. I don't know that I’ve done any air travel pre-911 that I can remember. There was a trip to Florida when I was like two that I have absolutely no memory of. But I don't have any distinct memories of air travel.
Max: You went on the middle school trip to Washington DC, right?
Aaron: Did we fly for that? I didn’t even remember.
Max: We did. We did fly.
Aaron: Shows how crisp that is in my mind. I think the pop culture reference that goes along with that is you had so many romantic comedies where somebody's love interest is going away to college, or for a big job in another city.
Max: Towards the end of friends.
Aaron: And they have to run through the airport to tell them, “Don't go! Don't go! I choose you!” That was something that you could actually go to the gate in an airport when you didn't have a ticket to get on that plane. Maybe you had to go through the metal detector. That's something that just doesn't even make sense. It’s like seeing movies from the 90s or pre-90s, and people today saying, “Where's everybody's cell phone? What are they doing in the small glass box to call somebody?
Max: That almost reminds me. I didn't even have this written down the notes. But do you remember the movie, “Meet the Parents”? At the end, he gets on the plane, and he gets into a fight with a stewardess, and he says, “Bomb”, and like, “You can't say bomb in an airplanes!” He’s like, “I said I'm not going to bomb!” And they take him out. That was kind of too on the mark because that was 1999. Then, they take him out, and it's actually Robert De Niro.
Aaron: Like I said before, the hijacking threats were a very different beast back then. Maybe there was a bomb on an airplane. But it was usually because that's the threat to get you to do this other thing that I want you to do, which was usually like, “Fly me to Cuba” or “Fly me to Libya” or wherever the place that you wanted to escape to. That was beyond the jurisdiction of the Western Power you are currently in. The playbook was usually, “Just do what they say.” And there were subtle ways of notifying air traffic control that you were experiencing hijacking, and they would do things on the ground.
There was no concept of they're gonna crash this thing into the ground. Actually, all the lives are… It was very much like bank robberies. If you do what they say, then nobody's going get hurt, and everything's insured, and it'll turn out fine.
Max: Actually, I don't remember any specific hijackings that occurred in our lifetime before that. I know some occurred in the 70s.
Aaron: Yeah, I'd say it was going out of style as a common activity. But I haven't looked up what the stats are and how frequently it actually did happen in the 90s.
There was one other thing I would have mentioned of that airport. I was not a stellar Spanish student. I did take Spanish in high school. If you were more dedicated to your foreign language than I was, there was an opportunity—I think it was over spring break—students could go on a trip to Spain with one of the teachers. One of the things that, invariably almost all of the boys who went on this trip would do, is they would purchase a sword in Spain. I don't know if they actually went to Toledo, the city that's famous for the manufacture of swords. But they would purchase a sword in Spain.
In this pre 911 world, yes, you would have to—you could bring it through security. You could just bring a sword through security. It was in this package and you would hand it to whoever the security person was, and they check it and say, “Okay, yep! That's a sword.” And they hand it back to you when you walk through the metal detector. When you boarded the airplane, you would hand it to the flight attendant or the chief steward, whoever, and then say, “Okay, we're going to put this up in the cockpit with the pilot, and you can get it when you disembark.” That's just so bizarre in the context that we're in now with armored cockpits. Once that door closes, it will never be open again.
Max: That reminds me. I got in trouble with a sword at TSA once in 2016. Did I ever tell you about this?
Aaron: I don't know if I've heard this one.
Max: I was in Africa. In West Africa, in Ghana in 2016. Before I left, they were trying to sell stuff to us. Someone's like, “Buy this sword.” I'm like, “Oh.” It's pretty cool to have a sword, but I don't think I'm getting through security. He's like, “Oh, no! It's not a problem. Just put it in your check bag. Just put it in your check bag.” Well, yes, I forgot to put it in my check bag. It was in my backpack. The security in Ghana didn't catch that. I went on that 10-hour flight all the way from Ghana to DC. Then, I didn't sleep a bit on that flight, so I was just completely delirious. I had a long bus ride from like—what's one of the DC airports to Reagan airport?
Aaron: There's Reagan and…
Max: Dallas, I think?
Aaron: Dallas is the other one right in DC.
Max: I had to take a shuttle with all my bags, and it just took forever. Then, I finally got to like Reagan airport. It was like—I don't know—maybe like seven in the morning. I tried to go through security and they flagged me. I couldn't go through several times. The guy was very nervous when he was opening my bag, and he said, “Do you have any weapons in here?” I'm like, “Nah, nah. I don't have any weapons. It's all cool. Just check whatever you need.” He's like, “If I put my hand in here, is something going to hurt me?” No, just look through my stuff. Let me go.”
Then, he pulls out a sword, like, “Sir, what is this?” And I said, “It's an Ashanti warrior sword.” They said, “Well, you can't take an Ashanti warrior sword on the plane with you.” Fortunately, I was able to check the bag. I didn't get arrested and stuff because I would not have been. When you're up for 48 hours, I don't know how I would have been under questioning. I don't think I would have remembered to not submit to questioning because it was a domestic flight still because I already went through. It was a separate flight. I set it up, one of those things where it wasn't even a connecting flight. I set it up as a separate flight.
Aaron: That would not have been a good time.
Max: No. So it wasn't a border crossing. They let me go. But I could have gotten we got in big trouble for that.
Aaron: I guess the other…
Max: It was not a very dangerous sword. I mean, maybe it was? I don't know. I just don't know how to use it.
Aaron: You don't sound very convincing with the words in that statement.
Max: Come on. But it's not a dangerous sword.
Aaron: I mean, there's the stereotypical story of a young child on an airplane for the first time and the flight attendant asked, “Do you want to come up to the cockpit and see what it's like? The pilot will show you around during the flights.” No way that happens anymore.
Max: They still do that before flight sometimes.
Aaron: That's good to know. I haven't seen that.
Max: If you get your kids on a small plane, they might be able to do that pre-flight.
Aaron: I'll remember that next time we're flying.
Aaron: Just knock on the cockpit door and be like, “Let us in!” No! It's usually open before the flight. I actually had two big flights that year. I went on the school trip to France. Unlike the Spain trip, you didn't have to be a very good French student to go. I went to France. Actually, I like the trip to France. I didn't know too much French. Well, I took French so I guess I knew some French, but not enough to get around. There was that airport thing. It was still a hassle to go to the airport. It’s still a hassle doing international flight back then.
My second flight was to Michigan. This would already be in August of 2001. I went to a program in the University of Michigan. Let’s call it Math camp. It was a two-week thing where you learn about the concept of infinity from a Math professor at the University of Michigan. Some of which I've actually shared on this program, some of the same things that we went over there 20 years ago which is hard to believe. When I went back, I actually struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me, which is now I think about, it would be pretty rare for me now and would be very rare for me at age 17.
It turned out the guy next to me was a Muslim guy who was a student. He literally had a like a book about Islam that he was reading. We were talking. I remember on the way and I was just showing him because I'm very good at like Maths and stuff. I was showing him all the sites in New York. I remember saying like, “Oh, look! There's the World Trade Center. There's the Twin Towers.” I don't know if I want to give that story, but that's just something that I really remember very well because that was just right before.
Later on, in the summer, I went to—I think the guy was from Morocco, by the way. So that was really interesting. Then, I took a trip to New York City before 911 as well. I think it was coming in and out from one of the college trips. You probably remember this. We went on one together. It was a college I never applied to. Do you remember what that was?
Aaron: I do not. Do you remember what state it was in?
Max: Williams, Massachusetts. Was it Massachusetts?
Aaron: I definitely visited Williams at some point. Yeah, no, that wasn't
Max: I guess I tagged along. I guess I don't. Did you apply? I don't think…
Aaron: I think I did. I applied to at least a dozen schools. This is, like you said, like 20 years ago.
Max: I think I was in New York City for a college trip. At the time, my grandparents hadn’t moved to New York City yet, but my uncle was in the same building that they would be in. It's in that building and in the pool, you could see the Twin Towers very well in the distance, just like now, you can see the World Trade Center in the distance. That was some time that summer I was there.
Another thing during that summer was—it wasn't in New York City, but I was crossing Canal Street. It might have been one of these trips where it was like, “Okay, we, for some reason, have to take the Brooklyn Bridge.” This doesn't make a whole lot of sense now that I think about it. You have to take the Brooklyn Bridge, the Holland Tunnel and cross Canal Street. I've done that before, but I don't remember why we were doing it. Maybe we're visiting people on the island, and then we're going directly to a college and either in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or something like that. That probably makes a lot more sense.
I think right there, you pass right by the World Trade Center site. Maybe not right by, but pretty darn close. Canal Street is maybe like a quarter mile away or so—five blocks or 10 blocks. But it was like—I remember looking up and seeing them above me, not in the horizon. This must have been two, three weeks before 911.
I'm going to go into post 911 after. We have some things written here that's like post 911 stuff. We'll bounce that out until afterwards. First of all, I want to go to a UN document—not just the UN document, but a whole UN trip. You remember this trip that we took. I found this in my parents’ basement. We actually were given this pamphlet. This exact pamphlet. This is how I wrote my name back in 2001. Why did we go to the UN? Do you remember that? Why were there so few people? Like who got to go?
Aaron: So we went—I think this was our AP US History class, right? Does that make sense?
Max: Yeah, I think so.
Aaron: I think Mrs. Bennett was the orchestrator of this. I don't know if we applied for it, or if she selected her most promising students and asked if we were interested? But it was like—were there maybe a dozen of us who went? Something like that?
Max: It was fun.
Aaron: I guess it was something run by the United Nations International School, which…
Max: I had never heard of it.
Aaron: I assume that if you are a UN delegate, or on the UN staff, then when you move to Manhattan to work there, your kids go to the school rather than going to the New York City public school system. It's a very international group. They were inviting groups from schools around the country to come in for this—I think it was an annual event that they do. I did not ever do “Model UN”, but my impression was that it's kind of like Model UN on steroids with the—I thought the coolest part of the whole trip was that we actually got to sit on the floor of the General Assembly.
Max: At a country. I don't remember what country we sat at.
Aaron: I think it was one of the African nations. But you saw that there full of microphones. and the buttons for voting there. We got to speak on the floor of the General Assembly.
Max: It was like a giant classroom. Now I kind of felt out of place. I kind of felt like our little delegation was a little out of place there to do. Like, I felt like there were all these UN school people who were on a whole different level of—they were basically kids of diplomats and stuff.
Aaron: There was some of that, and maybe part of it was that folks from the other schools who were there were involved in Model UN-type stuff. They were a lot more steeped in this kind of thing. But this was a very new experience.
Max: That was back when I was kind of impressed by that stuff. Then, I think after I went to Yale, I was like, “Okay, I don't need to be impressed anymore.” So I found the trip to be eye-opening, probably not eye-opening in the way that they intended. I sort of feel like some of the speeches were like, “Oh my God, some of this UN stuff is a little cultish.” Especially the speech by Harry Belafonte.
Aaron: I was going to say that's the only name I remember from the day.
Max: It's like, “Oh, wow! This guy has a famous song about bananas, and now he's telling us that we need the global government. What's going on here?”
Aaron: I was impressed because it enabled me to name-drop him. I think I had a similar reaction to the actual content of his speech.
Max: What's interesting, if I go through this booklet today, it's like all of the problems they list. Most of them are still problems we haven't—it's been another 20 years, they haven't solved most of them.
Aaron: Maybe, we don't have the time on this episode to get into our deeper thoughts on the UN as an organization.
Max: But some of the problems have gotten worse, I think
Aaron: I would say that not having solved any of the problems that we were facing 20 years ago is very on-brand for the United Nations.
Max: Could have guessed. There's actually one of the most interesting things about this is that there's a huge section on Afghanistan, which was in the news then. It was in the news a few months later. And it's in the news today. It's the news coming out of Afghanistan is not much different.
Aaron: Definitely some deja vu there.
Max: There's actually two sections on Afghanistan. The first—and they seem like they're written by different authors. But the first kind of urge is a peace deal between the Taliban in the Northern Alliance. They were having a bit of a civil war there at the time which I think they are still. That section was not as negative toward the Taliban. It was probably a little bit more trying to be more objective, but not as negative towards the Taliban as the US Publication would be.
Aaron: It was very much I mean—not that this publication was being sent to Taliban officials. But it was written from the perspective of someone who very much wanted to bring them to the negotiating table, not to shame them and drive them away.
Max: But it's also like written for kids or for teens. They did say that if the Taliban is accused of harboring all these drug lords and terrorists, but the focus was really on the drug lords. The focus was on the drug trade.
Aaron: Which is interesting, and it's possible that at the time that was written. They didn't have all the stats on this yet, but I think it was the year before that. In 2000, the Taliban had actually put in a ban on the farming of opium poppies. Stats that we have access to now, which, like I said, may have been collected later on, showed that there was actually a 99% reduction in the cultivation of opium poppies and it was heralded as perhaps the most effective anti-drug campaign ever.
Max: I mean, the Taliban can crack some skulls.
Aaron: At the time, I think they may have mentioned that the Taliban has claimed that they're cracking down on this, but there was a lot of skepticism. It was very much, “Okay, yeah. We'll believe it when we see it” kind of attitude because I think the Taliban had a history of promising things and saying that they're going to do things a certain way, and then not necessarily shaking out that way on the ground.
It wasn't unreasonable skepticism there. But it's an interesting factoid that they drove down the production on poppies for opium so dramatically. The depressing follow-up to that is that—and then the Taliban was kicked out. In 2002, opium production shot right back up to its pre-banned levels in a similar area today. In fact, I think there may be more opium coming out of Afghanistan today than there was in the pre-2000 period.
Max: That's surprising. We haven't heard about the Taliban's new opium policy.
Aaron: I think they're still anti-opium production. But I don't know that that cracking down on that has been a priority of the new administration there. Yeah. I mean, it’s to be seen.
Max: I don't know. They talk a lot about the opium trade. They say, “Yeah, there's some terrorists.” They don't mention bin Laden. They don't mention Al-Qaeda or anything like that. Then, there's the second section is on the women in Afghanistan. Here, this is written—the Taliban really sounds quite brutal here and on some of the things they're doing. I don't want to get into the specifics mainly because I don't remember exactly how it was written. But it wasn't just like…
Aaron: There's a lot of real oppression there. We're not talking about the gender pay gap being the issue. Again, a lot of the same things that we're concerned about happening today in the new Taliban administration.
Max: I'm like thinking, “Is this relevant to the episode? Do I want to get into it?” Here it is—women in Afghanistan, Amnesty International, victims of violence, religious strife, hostilities, women have been treated as spoils of war, and subjected to rape and other forms of torture. It sounds pretty bad. We weren't like most Americans completely unexposed to what's going on in the rest of the world. I feel like there's…
Aaron: It wasn't something that was being covered up by any means. But it also wasn't something you were hearing about on the news.
Max: Let's talk about what was in the news in the summer of 2001. We're going to need a lot of water today. Then, we're going to wrap up Part I, which is going to be about the pre-911 world. Part II is going to be about the actual day, which people you should hang on for. That's why you want to subscribe to this podcast because this is really interesting stuff.
The summer of 2001, that was a very quiet summer—a very quiet year. It was after The Millennium, after Y2K. After the election, there was not much going on. There are two stories that I remember from that year, and they were both very—well, I guess the Gary Condit story was not that ridiculous. Here you had a congressman whose intern, 21-year-old intern, went missing. Apparently, they had some sort of relationship. We found that years later that, you know, she was killed and buried in the park—Chandra Levy. We still know that that happened, but it's not exactly world-changing stuff. Then, the second story, he really got the media off him when 911 happened. I don't think
Aaron: I hesitate to call it a silver lining.
Max: I mean, it didn't work. I don't think it worked out for him anyway. There was a bunch of news articles that summer about the scary rise in shark attacks, and they called it the summer of the shark. I'm going to read this from the New York Times archive. The title is: Scientists Say Frenzy Over Shark Attacks Is Unwarranted. This is the first sentence—it's pretty funny.
“With a summer season framed by a shark attack on a boy in Florida two days after the Fourth of July, and the death of a man on Labor Day on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The danger from sharks could easily be seen as rising dramatically.”
That almost sounds like your shark attacks was one last year, two of this year. It's like exponential growth.
Aaron: Don't you know about exponential growth?
Max: Then, they go on: This is being seen as the “Summer of the Shark”, as Time Magazine puts it in the July 30 cover story, bristling with images of razor-sharp teeth.
This was in all the news fit to print in The New York Times—September 5, 2001.
Aaron: Was “Shark Week” a thing back then? Because if so, the sharks done got scooped.
Max: No, I think “Shark Week” was a derivation of this. One of its descendants of this shark scaring us. Because then, we had the “Sharknado” movies.
Aaron: And I have still yet to watch one of those.
Max: I've watched one of them. It is quite an experience. Maybe I'll have you over here. We'll do a watching. It is quite an experience. Before we get to the day before 911, movies that seem to foreshadow 911. People forget about this, but the World Trade Center, in particular—the Pentagon too—but also the World Trade Center was featured in a lot of movies and pop culture before 911. There were even a lot of like symbols of the city, it’s either the Twin Towers—their silhouette being like a symbol of New York City.
Aaron: Right up there with the Empire State building.
Max: Probably still should be. But I have written down some things I remember. There's the Mario Brothers movie—which was not taken well by critics. I'm sure I saw it on TV, and I loved it. It was in 1993, and they actually had a scene where the World Trade Center goes from lovely day to like, kind of desolate and half-destroyed in an instant when the bad guy almost snaps his finger—almost like a final snap, but not quite that. They were in “Back to the Future” too because that was about the wild and wacky future world of 2015, where you could have a window, and that window could show whatever you want. One of the options was a view of the World Trade Center.
“Independence Day”—not only did it have the World Trade Center getting destroyed by the aliens in a scene where they're blowing up, but also it has 911 on the clock of how much time the President has left—Nine minutes and 11 seconds as he gets on his plane to escape DC. The Simpsons had something—I don't know what— but I feel like The Simpsons have just done everything that no matter what happens, they've predicted it. There was the Spider-Man trailer that—you remember, why don't you talk about that?
Aaron: I don't remember this at the time, but I remember hearing about it afterwards. Spider-Man movie didn't come out until 2002. This was the first one with Tobey Maguire. The trailer they dropped, I think it was on like September 8—trailer for the movie coming out next spring. It had a shot that involved the World Trade Center towers. I believe the original version of the film actually had the finale battle between Spider-Man and the villain.
Max: Willem Dafoe, the Green Goblin.
Aaron: I think it took place on or around the Trade Centers and…
Max: There's a meme going around from him right now that's very popular. You know the one where he's like, “I'm a bit of a scientist myself.”
Aaron: Yes!
Max: That movie is very influential. So sorry. Go ahead.
Aaron: I believe. Two days after the towers went down, they did pull that trailer and locked it back up into the vault. I believe they had to completely refilm, reshoot, recut the finale scene— redo the special effects so that the World Trade Center Twin Towers do not appear in the movie. That would very much have been too soon.
Max: Also, it showed, the clip you showed me, he built a web between the two towers, and it had a helicopter, but an aircraft caught in that web. That was pretty—too close dead on. Another one I want to mention is a 1998 film with Will Smith—again with Will Smith because he also has “Independence Day”, but it's called the “Enemy of the State” That really was about the rise of the surveillance state.
Aaron: I was going to say that it’s much more of a Snowden Patriot Act thing to it. I didn't know it involved the towers or not.
Max: No, it didn't involve the towers, but it seems to hit on a lot of the issues that came to the forefront after 911. Now, I want to take us right up to that point of September 2001. Let's just talk about what we were doing. Do you remember those first two weeks of high school in…? We were going into our senior year, and basically, it is going to be a lot easier than 11th Grade. 12th grade is so much easier. I mean, I remember…
Aaron: I don't know that I was feeling that level of relief at that point because…
Max: We didn't have a college yet.
Aaron: I think—is it like October is when the deadline for applications? I was probably procrastinating writing my essays. I'm sure I hadn't finished filling out the common format, or whatever.
Max: The first semester was still a little bit—but they do go easy on you. We both had a free period at that point. Before that, you were going to class every single period of high school. Then in 12th grade, they're like, “We’ll let you have a free period. It's just free. If it happens to be the first one in the morning, you could sleep in. You don't have to get up at 7:20 in the morning. You can now get up for 8:00 in the morning, which makes a big difference. Although now, I can't imagine doing either. But different time.
I was going to be in a play. They had the, not rehearsal, but audition for “The Crucible”. We were doing “The Crucible” that year. I ended up getting, I was a Reverend Parris, I was putting people to death and that I guess. Very dark play that was chosen before 911. I believe that the callbacks for that—I think what happened was, and I could be wrong. Could have been the other way around. But I think we had already done the week before we had done auditions. I think the callbacks were scheduled for 9-11-2001. I think they were canceled that day. Maybe, that was one of the auditions—I'm not sure. But it was definitely something that day that was canceled. Then, it was like, “Wow, it kind of felt like this whole thing, this whole play is going to be very different now—our whole production of it because it just seems like things got a lot darker a lot faster.”
I was also planning the video that I put you in—Dictator of Easton—before we started writing it about the town next door invading our town very far. We were going to do a 20 year anniversary.
Aaron: Was that all senior year?
Max: That was all senior year. No, I hadn't really started writing it. I was just sketching it out when 911 happens like, “Oh, okay. this is going to be very different now.” I remember the day before Monday night, I went—I think Stanford for like a thing on the University of Chicago like trying to recruit. What was it like? A Q&A they would do with the kids and their parents. I ended up visiting there. I think I did apply. I was in that. We're just starting to get homework. I was just starting audition for the play. That takes me to the morning of 9-11-2001, and I had to come in for my free period because I had some class before that. I didn't get to sleep in sadly. What was your first two weeks like?
Aaron: I don't have any crisp memories of exactly what was going on in the lead up to that. I do know that that the morning of, I think I was in the school library at that point—I was probably working on a project or something. I did not become aware of what was going on until I was walking through the halls. Not during a changeover between classes, but during that first period of the morning. I didn't have to be anywhere in particular. I may have, in fact, been heading over to the cafeteria.
Max: I was in the north cafeteria, and you were heading to the north cafeteria. Very interesting. All right. And that brings us to the beginning. Why don't we take a break here? I know people are going to be like, “No, I want to get into it.” No, hang tight! Look, I don't know how Joe Rogan does these three-hour things. This is very heavy topic. Let's take a little bit of a break now. When we come back next time, we'll talk about what happened that day and a little bit more research, a little bit more thoughts on it. How’s that sound?
Aaron: Sounds good. In the answer of Joe Rogan, it's definitely performance-enhancing drugs.
Max: Sure.
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