How a Blind Man and His Dog Survived 9/11 from the 78th Floor

27:31We were on the 78th floor on the south side. The last time I checked, Superman and x-ray vision are fictitious. We couldn't see through 18 floors of steel, rebar, and concrete. The fact of the matter is that we didn't know. No one knew, and I'll prove that more in a little bit. But when the plane hit and was doing what it was doing, David and I finally said goodbye to each other because we thought we were about to take a 78-floor plunge to the street because the building had tipped so far. but then it stopped and slowed down and it stopped and it started moving back the other way I remember letting out my breath and finally the building got vertical again and as soon as it became vertical I went into my office from the door where I was standing and I met Roselle coming out from under my desk I took her leash I told her to heal which meant to come around on my left side and sit which she did and about that time the building dropped straight down about six feet Why?

28:29Because the expansion joints were going back to their normal configuration. Most people wouldn't know that, but those are the kinds of things that I learned. When I was getting my undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics, one of the things that physics professors constantly drummed into our heads was pay attention to details. You know, you can't just get the numeric answer right if you're calculating something and the units are wrong or other kinds of things. If you're going to do a solution to a problem, every part of the problem has to be able to be solved. So like acceleration is feet per second squared or meters per second squared.

29:07And if you're calculating the acceleration and you get feet per second, you did something wrong. Pay attention to details was always extremely important to be able to do. And that lesson has always been with me. And that's why I learned so much about what I did. But also because I knew being the leader of the office, I needed to be responsible for everyone who was in there, and that blindness doesn't have anything to do with that. Bottom line is, the building dropped, and then immediately David turned and looked out our window and started shouting, oh my God, Mike, there's fire and smoke above us.

29:42There really is a piece of burning paper falling outside our window. We got to get out of here right now. We can't stay here. Slow down, David, I said. No, we got to get out of here. Well, I could hear debris rushing by our window. I didn't know it was debris until David told me that he saw millions of pieces of burning paper and they were coming outside our window. So I knew what was going on and I kept telling him to slow down. Our guests began to scream and they started moving toward the exit. And finally, David used what I call the big line. He said, you don't understand. You can't see it.

30:09Well, excuse me. What have you been describing all this time, David? I didn't say that, but that's, you know, kind of what I was thinking. The bottom line is I knew what was going on because David was telling me. The problem wasn't what I wasn't seeing, it's what David wasn't seeing. Namely, a dog sitting next to me, a dog who I knew what she was like when she was afraid. She wasn't afraid, she was yawning and wagging her tail going, who the heck woke me up? I was sleeping real good here, sports fans, what happened? And clearly wasn't bothering her, and I wasn't smelling smoke. And I made the determination that at that point in time, we could try to evacuate in an orderly way.

30:50And I finally got David to focus and I said, get our guests to the stairs. Do not let them take the elevators because I knew that in an emergency, especially where there's fire, that if the fire got into the elevator shafts, which it likely would have done and in reality he did do, anybody in the elevator cars was doomed. So I didn't want that to happen. So I said, David, get them to the stairs. Don't let them take elevators. Then come back and you and I will sweep the offices and we'll go. So he took them to the stairwell and I called my wife, Karen. She was still asleep. I woke her up. The media hadn't gotten the story yet because this was now 8.47 or so in the morning, so it was only like a minute, a minute and a half after it all occurred, I told her there had been an explosion or something and we were going to get out.

31:42And she said, well, what's going on? I said, I don't know any more than that. When I learn more, I can tell you, but I don't know any more right now. David came back. We swept the offices and we went to the stairs and started down. As I said, when I called Karen, she had no clue what was going on. I love to say I scooped Charlie Gibson in Good Morning America by eight minutes, and I don't get any credit for it. Nobody's giving me a Pulitzer Prize, so, you know, forget them all. But seriously, we got to the stairs, and we started down, and I began smelling an odor. And it took me a while to realize.

32:17It took me four floors. And so it was about 8.50 in the morning. I suddenly decided I'm going to kind of keep an eye on the time, and it was 8.50 when we got to the stairs. And there were a lot of other people on the stairs. They were speculating about what they were smelling. They couldn't figure it out. They didn't know what was going on. We got down about four floors and suddenly I realized what I was smelling and I observed to all the people around me, hey, you guys, what I'm smelling are the fumes from burning jet fuel because I did a lot of travel for my company up to 100 ,000 miles a year.

32:47I knew what airports smelled like. And I was smelling burning kerosene, burning jet fuel. And when I observed that to other people, they went, yeah, you're right. That's what it is. We must have been hit by an airplane. You see, no one knew. And none of those people were blind, by the way. But the reality is no one knew. We were all on the other side of the building, or we were in situations where nobody saw what was going on above them. And there were people from a number of floors above us that were on the stairwell with us when we got into the stairwell, and then other people joined us as we went down.

33:22But we figured out an airplane hit the building, but that's all we knew because of the burning jet fuel. We got down about 10 floors to about the 68th floor, and right behind me, then a woman stopped. She said, I can't go on. We're not going to make it out of here. And I literally turned around and turned Roselle around, and other people joined us. We literally had a group hug with this woman right there on the stairs, and I said, come on, you can do it. You can keep going. And other people said, yeah, come on, you can do it. We're all in this together. Come on. Roselle gave her kisses and she was able to continue down the stairs.

33:55And let me pause you there because right around the 68th floor, it's a little after 8.50 a.m. What was it about that moment? Because this woman is thinking that she can't make it down roughly 70 flights of stairs. What was it about that moment that made her feel like she couldn't do it? Was it the overwhelming smell of jet fuel? Was it the crowd in the stairwell? Well, I don't know. I wasn't going to ask her. I didn't think of that, but it could be all of those things. It was the fear. She clearly heard us figure out we must have been hit by an airplane. She probably felt she couldn't go down 68 more flights of stairs.

34:39I don't know. the fear overtook her that's one of the things that we deal with all the time is fear we are afraid of so many things in our lives we what if everything to death and mostly we don't have any control over all the things that we're afraid of well what if this happens what do i do well you do you have any control over that happening no why are you worried about it you can be aware but You don't have to fear. And that's what I've learned and discovered maybe initially sort of intuitively, but I realized that that knowledge is power. And knowing what I knew and also knowing what I didn't know, or not knowing all of what I didn't know, but knowing that I didn't have control over a lot of things, there was no time to worry about them.

35:31But I kept listening, you know, is the building going to come down on me? And I guarantee you, I was listening all the way down in case the building started to rumble. But even if it did and the building fell, I wouldn't be able to do anything necessarily about that. What exactly caused her to fear? I don't know. But I'll give you another example here in a sec about all that. So we continued down the stairs and people were speculating. We got down to the 50th floor and suddenly David next to me suddenly said, Mike we're going to die we're not going to make it out of here now I told you I have a secondary teaching credential and I love to tease people and say part of getting a secondary teaching credential is that you take that secret course that no teachers ever talk about it's called voice 101 how to yell at students and I got my sharpest teacher voice and I said stop it David if Rosella and I can go down these stairs so can you now there really isn't a voice 101 or anything like that.

36:31But I deliberately shouted at David because I needed to break through whatever was going on in his mind. And he told me later that brought him out of his funk. He was imagining all sorts of things that could happen. He was just worried. And he was afraid that we were going to die. We're not going to make it out because that was his makeup. But me snapping at him like I did, as he said later, that brought him out of his funk. He actually wrote an article that got published in a Reader's Digest about some of that experience. He then told me after I snapped at him, he said, okay, I'm better now. Do you mind if I walk a floor below you and tell you what I see on the stairs?

37:11And I said, no, if that's what you need to do. I said, that's fine. And he said, okay, I'll walk below and I'll shout up to you what I see on the stairs. So he left and he went down. And so by the time I got to like the 48th floor, David said, Mike, I'm on the 47th floor. all's good here, going on down the stairs. And I got down to 47. Mike, 46th floor, all good here. Walked down a couple more floors. I'm on 45. David, Mike, on the 44th floor, this is where the Port Authority cafeteria is, not stopping, going on down. Now, why do I mention that? Well, first of all, David was doing something that got his mind off of fear.

37:50But more important than that, David was shouting up to me, which meant that anyone with the sound of his voice heard somebody who was essentially saying, I'm okay, we're going down the stairs, this is where I am, and everything is good. He, by definition, had to keep hundreds or thousands of people from panicking because he was shouting up to me, but all those people could hear him. And it's something that doesn't get talked about very often. David had to have been one of the major forces in our environment that kept people focused and going down the stairs. We got to about the 37th floor, and people were starting to get quiet again, and I was a little bit concerned about that, so I figured, I got to deal with this.

38:35So I spoke up and I said, hey everybody, I don't think all of you can see me, but my name is Mike, I'm blind, I got my guide dog here, I don't want anyone to worry, because if there's a power failure, we lose lighting on the stairs, Roselle and I are here and we're offering a half price special to get you out today only. And it made people laugh, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. And we walked down a couple more floors. And then I said, you know, they're not going to let us back in this building right away. We know there's fire somewhere. But when they do let us back in, because who knew, right?

39:05When they do let us back in, let's all meet on the 78th floor at 845 in the morning and walk down the stairs together. What a great way to lose weight, huh? You know, and again, it made people laugh. And David was counting the floors as we went down. And finally, David got to the 30th floor and he said, hey, Mike, I see firefighters coming up the stairs. Everybody move to the side. Let the firefighters by. You know, he became our advanced warning scout. Well, I went on down to where he was. And when I got to where he was, I said, so what are you seeing? And he said, well, they're coming up the stairs.

39:38They've got fire axes, oxygen cylinders, heavy backpacks. And then the first guy got to us and he stops right in front of me. And he says, hey, buddy, you okay? You know, blind people can't hear. He's got to yell at me. He did. And he did. He was talking pretty loud. And I said, look, I'm fine. Well, that's really nice. We're going to send somebody down the stairs with you to make sure you get out. And I said, you don't need to do that. And I was very deliberate about saying that. And he said, well, yeah, but we're going to send somebody. We want to make sure you get out okay. I said, look, I got my guide dog here, Roselle.

40:11We're going down the stairs. I've lived away from home for a long time now. I hardly ever feel lonely. I'm really good. And he said, well, that's really nice, but we're going to send somebody with you. What a nice dog. And he starts petting Roselle. It wasn't the time to give him a lecture that would have said if I had given him the lecture, don't pet a dog in harness. The guide dog is working. Don't distract the dog. And that's a lesson that everyone should understand. If you see a guide dog or a dog in harness like that, don't pet the dog. You can ask me if you can pet the dog. And if I have time, I will say, not right this moment, but I'll take the harness off, and then you can pet the dog, because the harness is the symbol that the dog is working.

40:53And so I don't want people disturbing that dynamic. In this case, you know, he just started petting the dog. Roselle liked it. She gave him kisses. It also wasn't the time to give him the lecture. Blindness isn't the problem. mature attitude about blindness that's the real issue. So I just said, look, I got my friend David over here who can see. David and I are going down the stairs together, and the fireman turned to him, and he goes, you're with him. And David goes, yeah, leave him alone. He's fine. He said, okay, I'll let you go. And he gave Roselle a few more pats, and then he went on up the stairs, and we started down.

41:29And David reassumed his scouting position to give us all advanced warning of everything that he saw on the stairs. Probably about 50 firefighters passed us that day, and they were all carrying their equipment. Why were they carrying their equipment? Why couldn't they just pick it up somewhere in the World Trade Center rather than carrying it up and down the stairs? The answer should be reasonably obvious to people. Where would you put it? Let's say you started on the 45th floor and fire broke out on the 44th floor. You couldn't get to it. The only way that they could have their equipment with them was to carry it.

42:00And they trained for that and they did that. And I knew that. But I and other people said, can we help you guys do whatever it is you're going to do. And they just said, no, your job's to go down and get out and our job's to go fight the fire or whatever is going on upstairs. And we continued down the stairs. By the way, time check again. It was now 910 at the 30th floor. At one point going down the stairs, somebody passed up water bottles. They had opened a water vending machine and passed up bottles of water. And David brought one up and he and I had a little bit of water out of it. And then we made our hands into cups and gave Roselle some, because it was getting hot, not really because of fire necessarily, just it was all the bodies of all the people on the stairs.

42:44There were thousands of people. So we continued down. Finally, David got to the first floor, and he said, hey, Mike, there are water sprinklers on right at the bottom of the stairs. You're going to have to run through water to get out of the stairwell. And then David was gone. I got to the first floor from the second for where he warned us, and I heard this torrential downpour of water. It sounded like a little waterfall. I picked up Roselle's harness. I said, forward, and gave her a hand signal, and we literally ran through this curtain of water to get out into the lobby. The water was there to either keep fire in the stairwell if it came down the stairs from up above, and that would keep it out of the lobby, or if it broke out in the lobby, it would keep it from getting in the stairs and being sucked up because the water was running, so fire wouldn't be able to get in.

43:32Well, we got out into the lobby. David was waiting for me on the other side of the curtain of water. And immediately I heard a bullhorn in the sky yelling, go this way. No, don't go up that way. Don't go that way. Go this way. Go to the central part of the building. No, no, no. Don't go outside. Go this way. They wouldn't let anyone go out through the main doors to the outside, probably because that was right below where people were jumping and where the plane had hit. Wow. But we didn't know that. Then this guy comes up to David and me and he said, I'm with the FBI. I'll take you where you need to go.

44:06And I said, what's going on? And he said, there's no time to tell you. Now, I can imagine he didn't know me. He didn't know that for me, information is valuable. And I would have loved all the information I could get without panicking. And we went out through the doors into the central part of the World Trade Center, past the Ben and Jerry's ice cream kiosk right outside Tower 1. No time to stop for a scoop, darn it. But we kept going and we went through the whole complex and up an escalator by the Borders Books over on the other side of the whole complex and outside finally. And when we got outside, I checked my watch and it was 945.

44:44So literally basically an hour from the time the plane hit and now we were outside. And throughout all of this time, I mean, while you were in the stairwell, there's no cell phone signal. No. And you can't hear anything from the outside while you're in the stairwell. No. So there's no information. No information at all. And no one was, for people who knew, they weren't saying. And I'm sure that some of the people that we passed or whatever, the firefighters and the FBI guy knew. Well, they did. They had to know. Right. But they weren't telling us. And before we move on, there was also, while you were in the stairwell, there was a point where a couple of very badly burned people came through.

45:21Right. I forgot to mention that, you know, the woman, I can't remember whether they passed us before the woman said, I can't go on. I think they passed us first. And people were yelling, burn victim coming through, move to the side of the stairs. I think that that probably is also part of what triggered her concern, but I don't know. They were very badly burned. They were walking down the stairs. I'm sure someone in shock, but people were helping them. And they passed us and they continued on down. And they were walking of their own accord. They were walking on their own accord. But with very severe burns.

45:59Because like one person, several times we've heard about it on the news, about a person who was standing in front of an elevator and fuel vapor droplets just ignited and severely burned her face and so on. You know, it's just kind of one of those things that did occur. But she was able to move and she got out. so we um got outside and the uh the fbi guy and other people said okay you need to leave the area now but before we did david looked around and he said mike i see fire in tower two i went what are you talking about he said i see fire in tower two we didn't know right we thought maybe because our building which had tipped toward tower two had tipped enough that the fire jumped across, but we didn't know.

46:47And just to clarify for everyone listening, you were in Tower 1. We were in Tower 1. You had just evacuated Tower 1. Right. So he's saying he's seeing fire in the other tower, which doesn't make any sense. Why would there be fire in the other tower? We had no clue. So we just thought maybe the fire jumped across because we didn't know. So we stood there for a moment and then we walked over to Broadway and we started walking north on Broadway on the west side of the street. So if you're walking north on Broadway, it was the left side of the street. To my left was a building, to my right was Broadway, and we kept walking north.

47:21We crossed several streets and finally got to Vessi Street, and David said, I want to stop and take some pictures of the fire I see in Tower 2 because we're really close to it, like 100 yards away. David took out his camera and was taking some pictures. I got out my phone, and I tried to call Karen. I couldn't get through, and we didn't know at the time that what was happening was that people were saying goodbye to loved ones up in the towers, and so the circuits were all busy. I had just put my phone away, and David was putting his camera away when a police officer suddenly yelled, get the hell out of here, it's coming down now!

47:56And then people just started turning and running, and I heard this sound, I described it as kind of a combination of a freight train and waterfall. You could hear metal clattering and glass breaking, and then this white noise sound as Tower 2, 100 yards away from us, started collapsing straight down, doing exactly what it was designed to do, but nevertheless, it was doing it. People ran. I literally lifted Roselle by the harness, turned 180 degrees, and started running back the way I came. So now the building was on my right, and Broadway was on my left. We're running back away from Vessie Street.

48:29I thought to myself, God, I can't believe that you got us out of a building just to have it fall on us. And as soon as I thought that, I heard in my head, as clearly as you hear my voice right now, I heard a voice that said, don't worry about what you can't control. Focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself. And I had this sense of conviction that if we work together, we'd be fine. So we kept running. We got to Fulton Street, which was the next street back. I turned right on Fulton because there was a lot of debris falling and I was hoping that maybe getting a little bit more of a building between us and what was happening would keep us from getting hit by more debris.

49:11We ran about 25 yards and suddenly caught up to David because he had suddenly realized that he had just run off and left me and he was going to try to come back and find me, but I found him first and he apologized and I said, don't worry about it, let's just keep going. The building's coming down, David. So he and I started running. Then we were engulfed in all the dirt and debris, the dust cloud of Tower 2's collapse. As David described it, the dirt and debris was so thick that he couldn't see his hands six inches in front of his nose. For me, it was so thick that with every breath I took, I could feel stuff going down my throat and getting into my lungs.

49:49I've never smoked cigarettes, don't want to smoke cigarettes, and if that's what it feels like, forget it. Anyway, so we kept running, but I also started telling Roselle, right, right, remember the building was on our right, and I wanted her to go into the first opening she saw. I didn't know whether she could hear me. I didn't know whether she could see my hand signals, but I kept saying, right, Roselle, right. Good girl, right, right. And suddenly I heard an opening on the right. Try it sometime. Walk down a hallway where all the doors are closed except one. You can learn to hear that opening and hear the open door.

50:19The sound is different. Anyway, I heard the opening and Roselle must have known what I wanted because she turned right, she took one step and she stopped and she wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle, keep going. She wouldn't move. Come on, Roselle. She wouldn't move. Remember what I said about what guide dogs do and don't do? I suddenly realized, focus on running with Roselle and the rest will take care of itself, which is part of the message that I had been given. I realized she must have stopped for a reason. So I stuck a hand along the wall and stuck out a foot and discovered that we were at the top of a flight of stairs.

50:55Roselle had done exactly what she was supposed to do. She stopped at the flight of stairs and she was waiting for the right command, which after getting a hug, I gave her Roselle forward. And we walked down two flights of stairs into an arcade entrance to the Fulton Street subway station. I heard a woman crying nearest somebody shouting, help me. I can't see. I don't want to fall down into the subway. We came down close to her and I went over and reached my hand out and took her arm. And I said, hey, don't worry. You're like 10 feet away from the stairs. You're in good shape. Because I knew the station.

51:32Don't worry about it. You're in good shape. What's your name? She said her name was Carol. And I said, I'm Mike. Just try to clear your eyes out and see if you can get more eyesight back that way. And then this guy came up the stairs from further down into the subway system. His name was Lou. He introduced himself as an employee of the subway system. And he said, I'll take you all down to an employee locker room. So I asked Carol if she needed help, and she said, no, I can see now. I got things cleared out a little bit so I can see. There were about eight or nine of us, and we all followed Lou down more stairs into the subway system to an employee locker room where there were already some other people, and there were fans running, there were benches, and there's a water fountain so we could kind of hack and cough and clear our lungs.

52:17And we stayed there for maybe about 10 minutes or so. and then a police officer came and he said, you all have to leave. You can't stay here. The air is clear up above now. He wouldn't tell us what was going on. We followed him up the stairs through that little arcade I mentioned a moment ago, then up the last two flights of stairs and we got outside. And as soon as we did, David looked around and he said, oh my God, Mike, there's no Tower 2 anymore. And I said, what do you see, David? And he said, all I see are pillars of smoke hundreds of feet tall. The tower's gone. You sure the smoke's not hiding the tower?

52:54No, it's gone. We stood there for a moment, not fathoming what was going on. And then we just turned and continued west on Fulton Street out of the area. What were you thinking in that moment? Did that make any sense to you, the tower's gone? None of it made sense. And at the same time, we were focused on trying to generally leave the area, but there wasn't really time to fear. For me, I believe, David, there wasn't any doubt about it, but there wasn't time to try to speculate why did the tower fall? We knew there was fire, but we didn't analyze it. There was no time to do it at that moment. So we walked west.

53:33We went about 10 minutes. Then suddenly I heard that freight train waterfall sound again. We were in a little plaza. And David looked back and he said, there's another dust cloud coming after us. And we knew it was probably our tower collapsing. there was a small retaining wall there we got behind the retaining wall we ducked down we waited till everything passed us by and it got quiet we stood back up david looked around and he said oh my god there's no world trade center anymore and again i said david what do you see and he said all i see your fingers of fire and flame hundreds of feet tall pillars of smoke it's gone and worse it in there thinking three hours before we had gone in just to do our jobs and then in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

54:18No idea why. Had no clue. And so we stood there for a moment and then I decided I'll try to call Karen. This time I got through. And as I describe it, after kind of tears on both sides of the phone line, she's the first to tell us how two aircraft had deliberately been crashed into the towers, one into the Pentagon, and a fourth was still missing over Pennsylvania. that's the first time we really heard what happened i'm gonna cheat and just say here we haven't talked about it but i have a podcast called unstoppable mindset and on september 11th of this year i'm going to be we've got the recording and it will air talking to bob ellis who was in the pentagon and had just literally walked out a door and was outside when the plane hit the Pentagon.

55:08So he's a Pentagon survivor, and he has a great story to tell. Anyway, Karen told us what had happened, and still, it was hard to believe. My first reaction was, how could anybody value life so little that they would do that? And I also immediately knew this wasn't a religious thing. No matter what they want to claim is religious and all that, this was a bunch of thugs, a bunch of criminals. We've seen so many times in our history where religion is used as an excuse for something, but this wasn't religious. This was just a bunch of criminals that tried to get their own way, and I am sure that when they died and went to somewhere that Mohamed wasn't there greeting them, and that wasn't the way it worked.

55:52They took lives. They took 3 ,200 lives that day. That wasn't something that any religion would condone. And they don't. But we couldn't figure it out. We had no clue. So we continued to walk out of the area. We eventually got to Canal Street. We sat on a little retaining wall, and I had a transistor radio in my pocket or in my backpack. So I took it out and about the time I turned it on, Rudy Giuliani came on. And he was telling people, if you're down south, move north of Canal Street, because we don't know if the gas lines will explode or anything like that. While we were at Canal, we thought we were pretty safe.

56:34We had no real clue what was going on other than the terrorists that attacked us. About 11.30, we got to a little Vietnamese, I think it was, restaurant. And I said to David, we need to eat something because we didn't get breakfast at the World Trade Center since we didn't get to go into the conference room and have breakfast with everyone. David ate a little bit, but he wasn't very hungry, but I ordered a big bowl of soup and we split it. And while we were sitting eating that, suddenly we heard jets outside and somebody ran out because we didn't know what was going on. And they yelled back in, it's okay.

57:11It's our guys. We have the skies. They were Air Force jets. David had called a friend of his named Nina, who lived in the university area of New York. So 17th, 18th street. She said, come over. You can stay at my apartment. with me. So we started walking, but then he saw some people in a van. They were sitting there and somebody was getting in and he went over and asked if they might be going north and could they take us to Nina's apartment. And they said, sure. And they took us up the rest of the way. And so about 1.30, well, maybe a little bit before, but around 1.30, we got to her apartment.

57:51She wasn't in because she had gone off to get food for us all. We stayed there and about 10 minutes later, she came in and we went upstairs. It was the first time to sort of decompress. You know, even so, how much can you really decompress? She turned on the National Public Radio station and we listened to interviews and so on. I called Karen and let her know where we were. Then probably about four o 'clock or so, Karen reached back out and said that friends had told her the trains were running from New York to New Jersey again. And I wanted to get back home, needless to say. David wanted to get to where he was staying up in the Upper East Side of New York with his sister who lived up there.

58:36So we left Nina and we went to the New York Penn Station. So I went to catch the train going to Newark, New Jersey to Penn Station. And David then left to walk back up to the Upper East Side where his sister lived. Was it hard to split from David at that moment? because you guys had just been together all day through a very powerful experience. No, it wasn't. Only because we knew where we each wanted to be. I got on the train. People saw me all dusty and grimy because with the water that had fallen, you know, between the stairwells and the stairwell, all of the dirt and debris from the collapse of Tower 2 and so on, I was really dirty.

59:16And a few people on the train said, were you down near the towers when they collapsed? I said, yeah, I was in one before it collapsed. And, you know, they saw the dirty suit and all that. So I got to Penn Station in Newark. I had called Karen and she said they'd come and get me because the they was a friend of hers from high school named Tom Painter, who had also moved to New Jersey. as soon as he heard about the World Trade Center without checking or anything, just came down to be with either one of us or both of us, depending on whether I was in the tower or whether I was home or what. Because a lot of times on any given day, I might not be in the tower, in the office, I might be out with a staff member, a sales guy, or meeting a customer.

1:00:02So Tom just came down. He said he would drive Karen and our accessible van to the train station to pick me up. And so at about seven in the evening, I got to the train station. And as I got there, I heard our van pull up. The ramp came down. I went down the stairs from the train and across a platform and down the stairs onto the sidewalk and across and then went into the van and finally got to hug Karen and Tom. And Roselle got some pets. and then we went back to our house. So we got home, reached down to unhook Roselle's harness. I was going to take her out. But as soon as I took the harness off, Roselle would have none of going outside.

1:00:44She ran off, grabbed her favorite tug bone and started playing tug of war with my retired guy, Dog Linny. Meanwhile, I went up and I took a shower and got out of the dirty clothes and all that and came back down and Tom had taken Roselle out. She finally decided she'd go out. And no one could make sense of it. It was just crazy. Who would think anyone would do that?

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1:04:27The next morning, I woke up stiff as a board because I had walked down 78 floors and walked all day. And as Karen said, you walk like a really old man, not somebody who's only 51 and a half. And I ended up for the next week using the elevator probably a lot more than she did. We both went down, we had breakfast, and she said, you know, you really ought to call guide Dogs for the Blind and tell them that you're okay. And I said, yeah, you're probably right, because people from Guide Dogs in San Rafael had visited us in the World Trade Center because they knew I worked there. So I called about 11 o 'clock.

1:05:07The person who answered the phone was the switchboard operator, Barbara Browning. And I told her who it was and what was going on. And she said, hold on. she transferred me to joanne ritter who was our public information officer who later became the director of public information services for guide dogs for the blind she said you know do you mind if i write a story about you because i think people would be interested to hear it and i said i guess i don't mind i wasn't thinking and she said you know i'll bet that you'll be able to be on TV. If you have a choice, what TV show do you want to go on first?

1:05:43I wasn't thinking. So I just said, Larry King Live. That was now on Wednesday the 12th. And on the 13th, Joanne called back and she said, you are scheduled to be on Larry King Live tomorrow night on the 14th. They'll send a car to pick you up. But she wrote a story and the media, of course, really did pick it up. And we started being on other shows. And then people started calling and saying, we've heard your story. We've seen your story. We want to hire you to come and tell us what we should learn from September 11th and talk to us about leadership and teamwork and other things that you think we should know, because clearly you have something very relevant that we need to hear.

1:06:29We got so many of those that by the beginning of 2002, a couple of things had happened. The first was that I had been invited by the CEO of Guide Dogs for the Blind, a new CEO, Bob Phillips, to come and speak at the annual holiday fundraising luncheon for Guide Dogs, which was in early December. Then Bob also pointed out that Guide Dogs had a float in the Rose Parade coming up, and they wanted me to be on that float. Anyway, we came back out for the float, and while out, Bob said, I want you to become our public spokesperson. So I agreed to do that, which meant we would move back to California, which Karen loved because she was a native.

1:07:12And even though I was born in Chicago, I spent most of my life in California, but I wasn't there for the first five years, so I couldn't be a native. She wouldn't let me. Anyway, he offered that, but also people had been calling and I had decided to travel and be a keynote speaker. And as Karen and I decided, selling life and philosophy was a whole lot more rewarding and relevant in the world than being a computer hardware sales manager and selling computer hardware for a living. So we combined those two careers and we moved back to California. And I was the National Public Affairs Director for Guide Dogs for the Blind until the middle of 2008.

1:07:50And then a new CEO had joined the organization and Bob had left in late 2007. And I was called into the office of the CEO in like April of 2008. And she said, nobody's interested in the World Trade Center anymore, so we're phasing out your job. And I said, well, you know, you can. I think people are interested. Well, no, they're not. I think there was a lot of politics there, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, I continued to be a keynote speaker, and I continue to be a keynote speaker till this day. I've been traveling and talking about teamwork and trust, talking about leadership, talking about resilience and so many other kinds of things.

1:08:28Because what happened with Roselle and all of my guide dogs is it's a team relationship. And I learned a lot more about teamwork and trust from eight guide dogs than I would ever learn from Ken Blanchard, Tony Robbins, all the leadership and management and motivational people and so on. Because it's really living it with a guide dog, working with a creature that speaks a completely different language and thinks entirely different. But the reality is you can learn to communicate and the two of you working together can have a great relationship. And that's what we had. You said it was important that on September 11th, when you came home, the moment that you took off the harness.

1:09:09Right, and I'll tell you that now. The day afterward, when I called guide dogs, I also said, I want to talk to one of the veterinarians. The head veterinarian came on and I told him a little bit of what happened. and I said, how do you think this will affect Roselle? And his question was, did anything threaten Roselle directly? And I said, no, nothing did. Nothing came at her, nothing like that, nothing that would cause any kind of reaction. She just worked really well. And he said, well, there's your answer. Dogs don't what if, they live in the moment. We what if everything to death, which causes us to have so much more fear than we need to have.

1:09:48It was over for Roselle. That's why she wanted to go off and play. It was done. which was true. The next year, in December of 2002, we went to the American Kennel Club Canine Yukonuba Awards because Roselle was going to be given an award for her bravery in all the work that she did. And while there, I met George Berker, who was the publisher of the AKC Gazette. And George said, you ought to write a book. I said, I hadn't thought about writing a book. And he said, you should. Well, he and I kept in touch. And he had an agent who wanted me to write a business book. And I said, I don't want to write a business book.

1:10:21I want to write a general book that people will read. And I've been taking a lot of notes and thinking about the format. And then in 2010, I got a phone call on a Sunday afternoon and a woman identified herself as Susie Flory. And Susie was writing a book called Dog Tales. It was going to be 17 chapters, each chapter about a different dog. And she wanted to include Roselle. And she hadn't heard a lot about my story. So she said, can you tell me your story? Well, I told her probably almost as long as we've been talking about what happened. And when I was done, there was this pause for a moment.

1:10:58And then she said, you got to write a book and I want to help you write it because I'm a professional writer and I have an agent and I think we can make him interested in it. So the next day she and I called her agent, Chip McGregor, and talked a little bit. And he said, well, I don't want a 9-11 book. I said, good, I don't either. I want a book that's going to teach people about blindness, that blindness isn't the issue. I want to tell people what happened to me, but why it happened and why things went the way they did. He said, well, write a proposal and send it over and I'll look at it. And Susie and I wrote a book proposal and sent it to him.

1:11:33All I can say is when he called us on the phone, he was bouncing off all the walls. He loved it. And in less than a week, we had a contract with Thomas Nelson Publishing, which is now part of HarperCollins. And we wrote Thunderdog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog, and the triumph of trust at Ground Zero, which was published in August of 2011. Now, it was published, I think, on the 2nd. And on the 11th, we were in our home in Novato, California, because when the job ended at Guide Dogs, we just stayed where we were. And I was able to do a couple things to function and earn a living. One was a lot of speaking.

1:12:10but I also was asked by the president of the National Federation of the Blind, Dr. Mark Maurer, to coordinate distribution and sales of a product called the KNFB Reader Mobile. And I can describe that in a moment, but it's actually an app on a cell phone that could take a picture of a page of material, whether it was print or typed or whatever, and it would read it out loud. But anyway, on the 11th of August, we got this call and it was, among other things, the editor who had worked with us on the book they said we got to tell you something but you got to sit down and he sounded all horrible and sad and all that and I said well Karen's sitting does that count of course they knew she was in a wheelchair they said no you got to sit too well I was sitting so I just waited for a second they said okay I'm sitting now and the next words out of their mouth was in its first week out Thunderdog is on the New York Times bestseller list, they were bouncing off the walls.

1:13:05We all celebrated and so on. When the pandemic occurred in 2020, I knew that people were going to fear it. And I realized that I had been talking about how I survived with the World Trade Center for, at that time, 20 years. But I had not really taught other people how to learn to control fear. And I knew that fear was something that you can control. It doesn't need to be a natural reaction that as soon as something happens, you go all paranoid and you can't make decisions. SEAL teams, military teams, so many people learn how to control fear. They don't say it doesn't happen, but they do say you can control it.

1:13:45And you can make fear a very powerful tool to help you focus. So I decided that I really wanted to teach people how they could learn to control fear and get away from what-iffing everything to death, for example. And so I started writing a book, and I worked with a friend of Susie's because I love collaboration, Carrie Wyatt Kent. The book was entitled Live Like a Guide Dog, True Stories from a Blind Man and His Dogs About Being Brave, Overcoming Adversity, and Moving Forward in Faith. And we talked about bravery. We talked about teamwork. We talked about resilience. We talked about so many things that people could do to make their own lives a lot more focused and not fear so many things.

1:14:30How many people will do it? I can only hope everybody does, but that's still something that isn't happening probably as much as it should. In reality, we can learn to control things. Right after September 11th, I started reacting, at least internally, every time I heard people say, we got to get back to normal. We can't let this happen again. We got to get back to normal. It took me a while to realize why I became so frustrated and upset when I heard that. What I realized was normal will never be the same again. We can't get back to normal. If we do, the same thing's going to happen again. It's different.

1:15:07And for a while, this whole country was unified, and then politicians started to mess that up, which is unfortunate. But the reality is that normal would never be the same again. And the other thing, as I mentioned that I heard from God, focus on what you can control. Don't worry about the things that you can't control. Focus on what you can. The rest will take care of itself. You don't have to fear them. And so those are things that I do talk about regularly. We started this conversation with the story of how Roselle was really scared of thunder. So much so that she woke you up shortly after midnight and you had to sit with her until 2 a.m.

1:15:47And what was remarkable was that as the North Tower tilted so far that you thought the tower might fall to the ground while you were in it. I mean, as that was happening, she was snoozing under the desk. And then even with the scent of jet fuel, and you think about how sensitive a dog's nose is, even with the scent of jet fuel filling the stairwell and thousands of people packed in there, she was calm throughout that. How do you contrast the fear she has around thunder, but then the total calm that she had during 9-11? So two comments. One, what happened at 1230 was thunder and lightning. And the reason that she detected it so far in advance is that a static charge started kind of building up on her fur and she had a kind of prickly feeling.

1:16:40And she associated that with thunder. That was probably what gave her her first warning that something was going on and she woke me up. But on September 11th at the World Trade Center, that wasn't thunder. It was totally different. And as we were going down the stairs, I knew that my job was to keep her focused and calm. And so all the way down, I kept saying, good girl, Roselle. What a good dog. Keep going. What a wonderful dog. Good girl. You're doing fine. Good girl. Because I had to transmit the message to her that I was okay and keep her from being stressed. I believe that's extremely important always.

1:17:18I don't want her to be stressed or any of my guide dogs to be stressed. And the reality is guiding is a very stressful job. The dogs take it so seriously. They'll work until they drop. Several years later, I spoke in Kansas City. A woman came up to me and she said, you know, it was like about the 54th floor in the World Trade Center, the 52nd floor. you just passed the doorway and we heard you talking to your dog and saying what a good dog she was and so on we just decided if you could do that and be calm we're going to follow you and they followed us and so many other people did the same thing because i was keeping roselle focused and she just did a great job so she had to sense that a lot of people were afraid but she's looking to me if i had been stressed it would have been a totally different situation or if I had acted stressed.

1:18:11How would that have been? Well, she would have become fearful. She would have started shaking. Who knows? Certainly her heart would have raced and any number of different things could have happened. She'd have been worried about me because she expects me to be the focused one. Right. And that keeps her going. That's my job. And so when people talk about the guide dog led you down the stairs, that's not true. But it's also true that it's a team effort. So it almost sounds like mutuality. You and Rozelle have a mutual responsibility to each other. It's a team relationship in every sense of the word.

1:18:46It is as close-knit of a team as you will ever see. And it's mutual respect, mutual responsibility. I'm sure we think of it differently. But nevertheless, that's what we have. And that's what I have with Alamo down here. And I have with all of my guide dogs. It's the way it's supposed to be. If Roselle had been stressed or if Roselle had been worried about you, what would that have looked like? It's an interesting question. How would she? Well, let me do it this way. There were times that we were walking where there were thunderstorms around us. And she was worried. She was nervous. She was shaking a little bit.

1:19:25But she guided through it. She continued to work. And I encouraged her. So I think that no matter what had happened or what could have happened, she would have been able to work through it as long as I continued to support her. If I weren't supporting her, it would have been a totally different thing. But that was what my job was, was to support her. And as long as I did that, she would do her part. That's the relationship. That's the love. That's the admiration. That is just all of the kinds of thoughts that we have about each other. That's what teamwork is really all about. And she didn't even steal any socks when we got home that night.

1:20:06For me, you know, people ask me, you know, how has this changed your life? And my response is, it isn't so much that it changed my life. Yeah, it did. I have a different career. Or maybe not, because I'm used to speaking. On any given day when I was in sales, I could be speaking to members of the board of a company or to IT people or whatever. But what happened on September 11th to me was a validation of my beliefs, of everything that I thought. When I was born, I was born two months premature in Chicago. Medical science had been alerted to the fact that a premature child put in a pure oxygen environment could see their retinas misform and they might become blind because of it.

1:20:55but most people in medical science didn't believe it. They couldn't accept that even too much oxygen could be a bad thing, right? At four months of age, one of my aunts, who was also living near us in Chicago, Aunt Shirley, was at our house, and she said to my mom, Sarah, I think Mikey is blind. She called me Mikey. My mom said, why? And she said, he's playing in the sunlight, and he's not reacting to the bright light at all. Well, they took me to the hospital, and the doctors diagnosed and said, yeah, he's blind. Send him to a home for handicapped children because your son will never be able to grow up and do anything or amount to anything, and he's going to be a drain on you, he's going to be a drain on your family, and he's going to suck up all the love that you even have for your older son, two years older than me, who was sighted.

1:21:45And my parents said, no, you are wrong. He can grow up to do anything he wants to do, and we're going to give him that opportunity. And I don't remember how old I was, maybe nine or ten, when they told me about that story. Maybe I was even younger. But they told the learned medical profession in Chicago that the medical people didn't know what they were talking about, and they brought me up that way. And I've always believed blindness isn't the problem. It's societal attitudes about blindness that continue to be the problem. That's why we still have an unemployment rate among employable blind people, near 70%.

1:22:21The fact of the matter is it's not that we can't work, it's that people think we can't work. We had to fight for years to get legislation passed because insurance companies weren't giving us life insurance. They said you're a higher risk. But they didn't use any of their normal precepts to make that determination. They had no mathematical evidence. They had no statistical models. they were using basic prejudice that blindness is a big problem. And Karen, being a person in a wheelchair who had scar tissue on her spinal cord, so there was no other kind of disease or anything, she couldn't buy insurance.

1:22:58When we learned that they were really doing this basically only out of prejudice, I and others in the National Federation of the Blind and others started working to get legislation passed in every state in the union that said, you can't discriminate unless you've got actuarial statistics or evidentiary data. And to this day, 41 years after the last law was passed, nobody's come up with any proof that we're a risk because we're not. It doesn't have anything to do with any of that. People fear difference. Now, I was in a hotel in in 2023, my aide, Josie Reynoso, had entered me into a contest to win tickets to go to the Kelly and Ryan live after party, after the Oscar party.

1:23:51And so the Tuesday before the party, I get this call and somebody says, congratulations. I says, for what? Oh, because you won tickets to the after party. I didn't know anything about it. And I got Josie to fess up. She has five children and a husband, and we only could get three tickets. So my niece and nephew and I went down, and it was Saturday afternoon about three. We got to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and checked in, went up and dropped off our luggage in our room. And then we were coming back down the main stairway. Suddenly, about halfway down, I hear people screaming. And I asked my niece, Tracy, what are they screaming about?

1:24:30We just lost power in and around the hotel. It's dark and all that. But remember what I said. The first floor was there. It's the hotel. Tons of windows, lots of light coming in. But it wasn't the light that everybody expected. They lost their ability to have light on demand. And they were panicky over it. And I realized that in reality, that is as much, no matter what anyone says, that is as much a disability as me being light independent, if you will. The fact of the matter is Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb and others were involved, invented the electric light bulb in 1878. If you use the terminology of the Americans with Disabilities Act as a guide for this, they invented the light bulb as a reasonable accommodation to provide light on demand to people who are light dependent.

1:25:20And that's what it was. And for the last 148 years, we have worked to continuously make light on demand more readily available to people who need it. It doesn't mean, though, that your disability isn't there. The fact is that the light on demand covers it up until you lose power and don't have a smartphone or a flashlight nearby. But disability is not a lack of ability. That doesn't mean that I have any less or more of a disability than anyone else does. And I mentioned earlier that unstoppable mindset, where inclusion, diversity, and the unexpected meet. And I word it that way because all my diversity friends, when we have diversity people come on the podcast and we talk about what they do, they never mention disabilities.

1:26:05And I ask why? And they say, oh, because that's not really a minority. It's a social justice thing. And I said, the heck with you. Of course it's a minority. The CDC says up to 25 % of all people have some sort of a disability. Of course it's a minority. They say, well, okay, but disability begins with dis, which means it's a lack of ability. I said, well, what about discern, discreet? What about disciple? Is disciple a lack of iple? It doesn't matter whether it begins with DIS. It's not a lack of ability. Disability is a characteristic that every single person on the planet has, and we need to recognize that the The only thing about it is it manifests itself differently for different people.

1:26:46But don't think that you are better or worse than I simply because your disability is different than mine. And there are a whole lot more people who have your disability that gets covered up by light on demand. The fact of the matter is it's still there. I love the phrase light dependent. Light dependent. Yeah, versus light independent. Exactly. Blindness isn't the problem. It's societal attitudes. and we need to have that changed. And it's hopefully something that will come out on this podcast. Hopefully people will think about it. We all have characteristics and we don't all have the same characteristic.

1:27:23That's okay. There are people who are left-handed. I'm sure there's some people who are right-handed that think that if you're left-handed, you're defunct in some way, but not true. They call us visually impaired. They used to call people who were deaf or hard of hearing, hearing impaired. If you say that to a deaf person today, they're liable to bust you right in the jaw because they recognize we're not impaired because we can't hear. Deaf or hard of hearing is the right terminology. And we've been working to deal with that with blindness. All the professionals in the field came up with this thing, visually impaired, which is wrong on so many levels.

1:28:00First of all, visually, I'm not different simply because I'm blind. They shouldn't even be using that. But impaired, I'm not because I am blind. That isn't the issue. is what I decided to do with my life. And my parents had the right attitude. We're going to give him the opportunity to do whatever he chooses. I rode a bike when I was growing up. I rode bikes to school. I've driven a Tesla down I-15 over here. Didn't you fly a plane once? I flew a plane once. I was traveling up to do a speech. I got to Boise and a friend of my brother-in-law's came to pick me up in a plane. And we were talking about some of the technology I used.

1:28:36like I had a GPS device and it had a built-in altimeter. And he said, why don't you take over the controls? And I flew the plane pretty much the rest of the way up to Haley, Idaho. I just knew that you stay above the mountains and you won't have to worry. And I've driven a car literally several times. And I own a car. Just because somebody's different, it doesn't mean that they're less than you. They're different than you, but so what? And we've really got to get to the point where we truly accept that and we accept that just because we're different, it doesn't mean that we're less or more. We're part of the same world.

1:29:12We're all on the same spaceship earth running through the universe. I love that you've spent the last 25 years promoting that message. And continue to do it. And I hope that people will reach out. I hope people will want, after seeing this, to have me come and speak to their organizations. I've traveled the world. Literally three days ago, I flew back from being in Australia, speaking at a mining health and safety conference. What part of Australia? Queensland, Brisbane. Oh, nice. Actually, it was on the Gold Coast. While I was there, I went to Corumbin Wild Animal Sanctuary and got molested by a bunch of birds.

1:29:51I fed them and met a kangaroo, met an emu, held a koala for about five minutes who just loved to get his neck scratched. Aw. It was fun. Was Alamo with you? No, the trip got set up too fast because they don't have rabies there, and so we'd have to go through a process to get him approved, so he didn't get to go. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Is there anything I haven't asked about? Is there any? Well, I will just say, and I know you're going to be putting it up in the notes and so on, but if people would like to talk with me about speaking, I'll work with them, and I'd overcharge by the talk.

1:30:26If we agree to have me come, I will do whatever they need me to do. But they can reach me by emailing me. It's speaker at michaelhinkson.com. That's S-P-E-A-K-E-R at M-I-C-H-A-E-L-H-I-N-G-S-O-N dot com. They can go to my website, www.michaelhinkson.com. And there is a lot of information there. If anybody wants to be on the podcast, love to have you. We're always looking for guests. Excellent. We convinced you to come on. So we'll work on that. Yeah, I'm very excited. Yeah, thank you. I really hope that people will decide that we have something to offer. I look for a lot of speeches, and I've had a number of people write back and say, well, we really want industry-specific things.

1:31:12We don't want just an inspirational speech. And my response is, I don't either. I'm going to inspire. That's part of it. But there's so many more things to learn. There's so much more to discuss about teamwork and leadership and trust. and resilience, emergency preparedness. In 2014, I delivered a speech in Washoe County, Nevada. It was during a conference on emergency preparedness, and I talked about my story and emergency preparedness and resilience. In January of 2023, someone who attended that conference wrote an article specifically about me and my speech and talked about how wonderful it was and how much they learned from it.

1:31:56And as I put in letters that I write, how often do you find somebody who was so well thought of that somebody wrote an article about him nine years later? And that's true. But I work with event managers, event planners, people who are involved in doing events. And I believe my job is to not have it about me, but to do anything I can to help make the meeting better. And I will always do that. That's beautiful. Well, thank you, Michael. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate you coming all the way. And I'm sorry that you have to go back to all the crazy weather in New York.

1:32:33Thank you, Michael, for sharing your story. And thank you to Alamo, his dog. Michael was generous enough to invite us into his home, myself and two videographers. We were lucky enough that we got to spend the afternoon with him. And his story needs to be told, needs to be shared. Every part of it, his message about abilities, about not underestimating people, about abilities and capabilities and not letting society's ideas about limitations hold you back. That's a big piece of his message that needs to be shared. And then, of course, the memory of September 11th. Right now, approximately one third of the U.S.

1:33:20population was born after September 11th. People under 25 are approximately between 30 to 31 percent of the U.S. population. In New York City, it's 750 ,000 residents are under the age of 25. So that means we are rapidly entering into an era in which more and more of our population will be people who were born after September 11th, 2001. It's up to us, those of us who are old enough to remember it, to make sure that future generations never forget. A few other themes or lessons that really came out from this interview. Number one is to prepare before you think you need it. Michael had walked multiple corridors of the World Trade Center.

1:34:16He had learned various World Trade Center exits. He had learned the emergency procedures. He learned the physical layout. he made sure to take his guide dog on different routes so that the guide dog wouldn't autopilot that is intense preparation for a low probability but high magnitude event so prepare for the things that you think are unlikely if the things that you think are unlikely would be calamitous if they were to happen prepare for things that you hopefully will never need to know. The best case scenario is that you spend your time preparing for something and never have to put that preparation to use.

1:35:00That's the best case scenario. That's what you want to happen. So prepare before you think you need to. That's one major theme or lesson that came out of this. Another is to be aware of what you know and be aware of what you don't know. And know the difference between the two. Know your known knowns. Know your unknown knowns. know your unknown unknowns, and recognize that you don't know many of your unknown unknowns, which is to say, risk is the thing that's left over after you have prepared for everything else. Another lesson is don't get caught up in outcomes that you cannot control. Stay focused in the moment.

1:35:42Stay with Roselle. Focus on the part that is within your control. stay inside of what you can control. Those are all important lessons that came out of this interview. All of the sponsorship revenue from today's episode will go to charity, will go to a registered US-based 501c3 nonprofit. In full disclosure, the way that sponsorships work is we don't know specific revenue per episode. Our network tells us what the monthly number is. So we're going to calculate it by looking at our monthly number for September, dividing it by the total number of episodes in September, and that will be the donation amount.

1:36:28If you are somebody who plans events or has speakers, please consider Michael Hinkson. Go to his website, michaelhinkson.com, H-I-N-G-S-O-N. And if you have the time, if you are retired or early retired or regular retired and you have the time to volunteer with guide dog training in the process of preparing for today's episode. I gained a deep appreciation for how much effort that takes and how important volunteers are in training guide dogs. Please, if you have the time, look into volunteering as a puppy raiser for guide dogs. It is a commitment of between 12 to 18 months, and it is a tremendous commitment of raising a puppy, not just raising a puppy, but raising a puppy to be a guide dog.

1:37:22Volunteers are so incredibly important. Please consider giving your time and attention to it. If not, consider making a donation to an organization that trains guide dogs for the blind. A few options include Guide Dogs for the Blind, based in California. There's also an organization called Guiding Eyes for the Blind. There's the Guide Dog Foundation. There are many groups that do this. According to the Guide Dog Foundation, it costs about$50 ,000 to raise, train, and place one guide dog or one service dog. Finally, on the 25th anniversary of September 11th, 2001, let's honor our firefighters and our first responders.

1:38:06Let's honor the many, many volunteers who spent months at Ground Zero. let's honor the families of the fallen and let's make sure again all of us who are old enough to remember as we get older and as our population is increasingly people who weren't born yet let's keep sharing stories so that the memory of 9-11 lives on thank you very much this is the Afford Anything Podcast My name is Paula Pant, and I'll meet you in the next episode.