lying down he's taking a line down because that's kind of guy he is yeah i'm and we're going to do a kind of a serious show today aren't we i don't know i'm lying yeah you know if i say that it's serious and i'm lying do you believe me i always believe you you're lying i believe you ok good that's always the way it is so ok well what seriousness do you want to we want to do a show about september eleventh do you remember that day and what you do very clearly what was it like for you i was home sick and tara sitting there and i watched the second one hit and at which point it became clear this was not a mistake right and then we'll watch to collapse and yeah it was and since i was home sick that's all i had to do that day is just watch that one and so it was quite you know and i had friends who work in the towers and the close friends that i had happened not to be in it at that  minute one of them was a couple blocks uptown so for me it was not as devastating personally for i was and thousands of people but still all right erica we're going to talk about that today we're going to start out with  everybody welcome back we're talking about september eleventh i totally remember it because i was supposed to perform that day or dixie the band is supposed to play at work so i was loading equipment when my neighbor came out and told me about an amount that's weird so i went to work and  when we got to work i think it was before the second building came down i know they'd been hit but they hadn't fallen down you know and so somebody crossed the hall was watching it on t v we all watched it and on and then after the buildings fell down we project number do you charge that they sent us home they did they told us all to go home from work for a couple days we were we were home and which was not necessarily the best thing for me  home and i watched everything on t v i completely can see some stuff that i saw that day that i never saw again and interview and things like that that i had never i never really pictures i remember seeing on the internet that day from the inside the hallways and stuff that i never saw those again and it was it was pretty amazing thing and it was very traumatic for me and i remember later in the day they had one of those interview that president bush was on v and they had with those little kyron things on the bottom that you know live from camp david or something like that that kind of expands across the screen and when that thing expanded to cross the screen i thought oh my god it's blowing up and i remember thinking that you know because i was just of traumatized by the whole day and i remember thinking that well that's an odd thing for me to have felt at that point when i had an odd feeling watching the plane hit and then the towers fall that  recognized that joel years of say violent movies have all have trained me to look at things like that and go oh that's no big deal right you know yeah buildings blow up and collapse all the time human and it was really interesting to notice that you know it took effort to get past that desensitisation to recognize you know the truth of the horror of what was happening wow all right well let's let's play another song this is a happy show after show princeton t v and on that show i had a contribution that was a song and one thing we don't people might not remember is that after september eleventh they had a lot of people were donating blood and donating money and things like that and what happened was is that people gave a lot of money and so much so that like maybe a month and a half later people were saying whoa what was i thinking and then people were saying whoa they were started complaining to the charities that they wanted the money spent in a particular way because most charities what they did after september of they increased their endowment which was actually the wisest thing to be doing but people thought well no they should be spending that money on some random thing going on right now because that's what i thought that was going to go to so people were sort of having these weird connection to the money so i wrote this song about the money after september eleventh we're back from that that was a little weird little song that i wrote shortly after september eleventh for part of a poetry program in princeton and the video for that was sort of the forerunner of those that we did later on for for i told a you were telling me that you actually submitted an idea for what to do in rebuilding yeah i was i was obsessed with the whole thing i guess i still am a little bit i was obsessed with holding and it was a contest about how to really develop the site  d i had an idea and i thought my idea was great and my idea revolved around the idea that we think that forgiveness is something that only sissies and wimps do but i was trying to  weaponize the idea of forgiveness and just say that forgiveness itself is a concept that stings harder than both and so that's sort of what my piece was about it was like a bird and i think we could you  on the internet is that there's a there's a eagle and has a space in the space was an empty left empty and and there was a little place and i think there was a little slogan you know underneath it there is no weapon greater than the power of  forgiveness there is there's no weapon more powerful than forgiveness or something and i submitted it of course and of course they didn't accept my my my my idea you have a long history of that yeah right but they're well i didn't win an award or anything but you know i have recently found out that there's a reason why they didn't accept mine is because they had to build the same amount of marketable office space in the new site that they had in the old site or else somebody was going to lose out there so they needed the any site that design had to have that in it the same amount of office space space so i feel slightly better at you know what interests me about this and i believe there's a video  if you if your archives go back far enough that you once entered a contest what to do with the new york harbor yes and the whole concept you had if i recall correctly is that and the idea is you know that it kind of been rican rundown and was not usable space and how should we was a little manhattan yeah and your idea was paint it red yeah well that wasn't really my idea but i embraced it which was kind of fun and that actually won an award and it was shown at the whitney art museum in the late eighty's i guess it was what it was is three architects came up with the idea and they got me involved in the help to make the video three architects to come up with the idea to paint something red yeah kind of yeah it did but it was kind of fun because i got to go all the parties that they had for the museum and stuff and it was funny because i was the one who was most aggressively setting this plan forward and defending it you know whereas i really had no part in  creating the plan but i sort of embraced it is more my own and it was it was a fun thing to do and the idea was that let's not confuse new york city as a place to live here we might as well just force an order on the west side of manhattan where there is none so that was sort of the idea that that they had not to change and then just paint it red and which was fun it was a lot of fun with time paint fades and the living desires of the surface the waters need to lap the shore the tall grasses need to grow the fishes need to survive our desire to integrate the rivers needs with our own our desire to allow the river to restore its balance so that we may once again swim in the hudson our desire of a purely public lyrical waterfront each blank blue slate and insubstantial vapors hold space where towers stretched bright torsos far up into the those around parts rose dual great populist squares we can daily beneath the sun in fiery stroke death dispatch as if an evil sorcerer had aimed a res in defiant dedication right works to fill in part that ghastly space and now back to the tom and doug show well we're back and you know tom tom is still mulling over the importance of september eleventh well you know there is another coda to this story go go ahead because although i was my idea of there was nothing more powerful than jersey a particular brick it'll say there is no weapon more powerful than forgiveness so that is your everlasting legacy yes it's a little br which is almost the same as redeveloping the site for the world and you know what it's it's more than most of us have yes i paid my twenty five dollars and i bought a brick so thank you for joining us today and we're really happy you did and you know you remember you know everybody remembers their little story of what happened on september eleventh where they were at that time you know memory or flashbulb memory really when something traumatic happens you generally remember all sorts of little details about it which makes a lot of evolutionary sense right if something you know was traumatic it probably is really important you pay attention that's the psychologist speaking to you right there you go yeah so we think that this show wasn't traumatic but we think that maybe you're going to remember us maybe not this show but more most of you know most of our other shows are and yeah than this one and you're going to enjoy it enough to want to come back that's what we're thinking yeah we hope yeah and we were expecting that and we're looking forward to that all right all right so we'll see you guys next week here on the show you guys have fun yeah bye