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July 13, 2018 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes
46:29
Get Off My Lawn Podcast #66 | You ever know anyone who sleepwalked?

I start off laughing at sleepwalkers and all the stupid stuff they say but this somehow drifts into a talk about 9-11 and what it was like in NYC that day. Then it gets all heavy and I start crying like a little bitch.

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You ever know anyone who sleepwalked?
How do you pronounce that?
Do you say, who sleepwalks?
But it's past tense.
Did you ever know a... This is the sort of thing where you have to abandon what you initially want to say and just say, did you ever know a sleepwalker?
You can't just... Now that sounds like some sort of zombie though.
Did you ever know someone who had a sleepwalking problem?
Did you ever know someone who sleepwalked?
I think...
I know, but it doesn't sound right.
English is not the most ornate language.
It's no Italian.
It's no French.
But it gets the job done.
I love it.
It's like a Swiss Army knife.
You know, I think the reason it's so good is...
That the Vikings were in, you know, Scotland, what's now Scotland, and there was no women there, and they were sitting around a big oak table, and they started stripping down English, which is Germanic, I believe, it comes from, has German roots, and they just cut out all the frills.
So no more masculine and feminine nouns, just words, and no more fancy umlauts and circumflex and accents, just like, that is my sword.
The end.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the most beautiful English gets is the term cellar doors.
Which doesn't really knock my socks off.
It's no chacun sans goût.
But outside of saying, did you ever know anyone who sleepwalked, I think it's pretty good.
And I get frustrated when immigrants can't speak it.
Every time I get a cab driver.
Yes, are you going to the place that is a store?
Oh, you must have been here for an hour and a half.
Well, welcome to America.
I look forward to learning our language.
When did you get here?
The thirty... Sometimes it's older than I am.
Like, I came here forty-eight years ago.
Like, so, uh, you've been speaking English longer than me.
Um, that's not good, dude.
Like, I moved to Quebec.
I learned French in like a year.
All you need is pussy.
If you're trying to lay a French girl, all of a sudden you care.
And I gotta say, I think there's something about English people, English speakers, maybe it's Westerners, I don't know what we are, but um, we're really eager.
I remember my, this guy was looking after my place in Costa Rica, Jason, this, this surfer.
I did a whole podcast on him, I believe.
Check the Costa Rica apps.
But I remember he was always like, is it esto marrearta or marrearta?
Like, really working on his accent, and trying to get it right, and asking about, you know, weird little sayings and things that only Spanish people get, or ticos as they're called in Costa Rica.
Uh, getting all the inside jokes right, and when you can say that, and when you say thanks, and when you say it's like 10 to 4, but you don't say it's 30 to 4, you say it's 3.30.
You know, all those little things?
He was trying to figure those out.
But the immigrants who come here now, they just sort of, for the most part, they have their little bubbles.
They live in the Indian area in Queens, or they live in the Polish part in Greenpoint, and they're not interested in assimilating.
And then in London, you got Sadiq Khan saying, don't bother assimilating.
It's gay.
I guess that's what Trump is.
That's what I don't get about the left.
City God would say, "Don't worry about Simonae, it's fucking gay." So I'd be mad, but I'd also laugh.
I guess that's what Trump is.
That's what I don't get about the laugh.
I get that you don't agree with him, but don't you think he's funny?
Can't you enjoy that?
Especially comedians.
It's weird to see so many comedians mad at a funny guy.
Like when he said, uh, someone yells out, I love you!
And he goes, I love you too!
And then he puts his hand over his brow so he can see through the lights and he goes, wait a minute, that's a guy!
This is the President of the United States.
He goes, a guy just said that!
And he's pointing it at the crowd, looking at everyone else, basically saying, fag.
How can you not enjoy that?
I mean, with George W. Bush, he made malapropisms and misnomers, and it was embarrassing.
I remember, I was never a Bush fan, he's a neocon, but I remember they had that Bush speak, and it was this CD, this is back in CD days, and it was all the dumb things he said, and even though he was my enemy, I didn't enjoy it.
It was, ugh, I just felt bad.
It was like seeing an old man get beat up.
It wasn't fun.
But with Trump, I love everything.
Warts and all, the mistakes.
Oh God, it's the funnest presidency ever.
I don't see how the left can't see that.
But anyway, Jamie McCabe was this guy I used to go tree planting with.
and uh he was a sleepwalker again that sounds too zombie but um he goes so we would usually camp in tents in the cutover at the base but sometimes if we were lucky and we were transitioning and and uh Or if you were a foreman and you were going to scout new land, you got to stay in a motel.
Bug free.
Snow free.
Rain free.
A motel seems so gross to me now that I'm rich, but back then a motel was fucking, you felt like Scarface.
Say hello to my little soap.
He'd have a big fucking shower.
Oh my god.
And you wouldn't- the main guy would get the bed, the boss.
So you'd have cots, but that cot was heaven on earth.
Anyway.
Yeah, this is when I think we were still tree planters.
I became a foreman later on.
And Jamie goes, Hey man, you should probably know that I have a serious problem with sleepwalking.
And I go, don't care.
Thanks very much for the news.
And he goes, okay, well, I'm glad you don't care.
I go, what are you going to punch me in the face when I'm sleeping?
He goes, no, no, I just wander around.
Sometimes I'm in a panic or something.
And he goes, the way you stop me is you say, um, you, you find a hole in my logic, for example.
And then he brought up the time that he ran into his brother's room and he said, John!
John!
I'm being chased by a stampede of married women!
You gotta help me!
And John goes, alright, let's break this down.
How did these women meet?
This is before social media, now we're talking about the early 90s, late 80s.
How did these women meet?
Why do they want to chase you?
Are they attracted to you?
Are you famous?
How do they know who you are?
When did they first congregate and then decide, alright, let's go get Jamie?
And Jamie was asleep when his brother said this, and he went, hmm.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And he walked, he went back to his bed, and went back to sleep.
So I go, got it.
I'll try to find a hole in your logic, dude.
Like I give a shit.
And that night, so we're sleeping in the motel, and he comes over to my bed when I'm asleep, he wakes me up, hey man, hey, what?
Remember at sleepovers, when you're just falling asleep, and your friend goes, are you awake?
And you kind of are awake, and you're like, yeah.
And then he says something stupid, and you think, why did you wake me up for that?
And this was kind of like that.
He goes, hey man, hey, what?
Uh, and then he sits on the cot next to me, this kid Don.
So he's sitting on Don's cot, facing me.
He's woken me up and he goes, Look, I have two posters above my bed.
Okay?
Ahead of my bed, I have a Bobby Orr poster.
That's a famous hockey player.
And at the foot of my bed, I have a BMW logo poster.
It's the BMW.
I like BMWs.
And you can call my folks about that.
It's not a word of a lie.
Um, and there's nothing there that is untrue.
And I go, okay.
And then he gets up and he goes back to bed.
So the next day I go, wow, you really broke it down with those posters last night.
Good to know.
Good to know.
And I, he said, what?
And I told him what I just told you.
And he goes, I don't have a particular affiliation for BMWs.
I like Bobby Orr.
I think he's a good skater.
But I do not have either of those posters.
I don't have posters in my room.
I'm 22.
I have like a couple framed things.
But I haven't put up a poster since I was 16.
And I go, holy shit.
So the sleepwalking you has a separate personality.
that likes BMWs, by the way.
But while Jamie was conscious and saying, "Look, man, I sleepwalk," the sleepwalking part of his brain went, "Hello?" Like it woke up and said, "What have we here?" And he goes, "Yeah, I walk in my sleep." And then as he's saying, "Just find a hole in my logic," his sleepwalking personality is in his own brain going, "Motherfucker.
God damn it." He's trying to shut me out.
He's trying to shut me down.
So then, as he's going to sleep that night, Sleepwalking Emma's going, Oh yeah?
You want to play hardball?
I'll show you.
I'll show you hardball.
I'm going to say that you have posters and it's going to be so convincing that he won't find a hole in the logic.
And I'm going to bluff and tell him to call our parents because we both have the same parents, right?
Isn't that mental?
He has split personalities, I guess, in that sense.
I once met this girl who told me she had multiple personalities.
Now, when you get to this age, you look back at all these stories that you liked about all your life and the incredible stories, and you realize, wait a minute, that could have been bullshit.
Like my friend Derek was with on 9-11.
He, uh... His mom was in the towers, and I'm looking back now going, I think you were fucking lying, dude.
I don't think she was.
Anyway, um, so she's told me that she had multiple personalities and they were trying to kill her and she went to see a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist, uh, the other personalities found out about it.
Obviously you find out you're in the person's brain and they were pissed.
And so they wanted to kill her and she would wake up and there'd be notes saying, if you ever see him again, you're going to fucking die.
She also told me that she woke up once and her chest of drawers was on fire.
And one of the personalities had woken up and tried to burn her room down.
You know what?
This is all a lie.
I'm not lying, but I've cherished this story for many years.
I was blown away.
Whenever I'd be with her and it's someone else, I'd go, ooh, tell them about the note that you found that your other personality wrote.
Super naive and gullible.
I'm looking back now, it was a boring woman trying to give herself some sort of exciting personality.
Excuse me.
And she made up that story.
Alright, alright, alright.
I teased you about 9-11.
I guess I'll tell you about 9-11.
This is in my book.
But I'll keep it short.
How much time have we used?
Not much, right?
Okay, so it's New York City, kind of the peak of my life, really.
I mean, I've had a lot of fun times.
Being in bands when I was a teenager was fun.
Starting Vice was fun.
Moving to New York was fun.
This was part of the moving to New York.
And I hadn't really done blow before, but there was a lot of it in that sort of hipster Lower East Side scene at the time.
And the custom was going to Max Fish, then going to a karaoke spot.
And renting a room.
It was Ryan McGinley and Amy Kellner, Leslie Arfin, Matt Sweeney.
Those kind of dudes.
And gay guys.
And the gays.
Ben Cho.
Baby Leg.
Gavin DeGraw.
What's his name?
From Gang Gang Dance.
That whole scene.
Chloe Sevigny.
Her brother.
Anyway!
That was our crew.
And we would go and just get fucking hammered and do blow and sing our asses off.
And we weren't joking about it.
We had serious rules, like you have to sound like the guy.
So if you're doing Prince, you have to do a high-pitched voice.
I don't want to hear you going, I never meant to cause you any sorrow.
I want to hear like, I never meant to cause you any sorrow.
Like you really got to tense up your diaphragm.
And of course, everyone has to pay.
It's not expensive to rent these rooms if everyone puts in their 12 bucks.
But you'd have these fuckers.
Who would cheap out and they'd ruin the whole thing.
That's why I hate getting dinner with more than three or four people.
Because it's always some cocksucker who doesn't pay the full thing and you get the bill and it's $340 and you count all the money and it's 200 bucks.
And you go, oh, I guess I'll just throw in another 140.
One time I was at one of these big dinners.
It was actually Matt Sweeney's girlfriend.
Uh, I forget her name.
And, uh, Amy Gartrell.
I'll never forget her name because there was a Bill Cosby episode where they all wanted to wear this fake designer named Gordon Gartrell.
And, uh, Denise Huxtable can't afford Gordon Gartrell.
Or, no, Theo, whatever.
So Denise makes him a fake Gordon Gartrell on her sewing machine, but it's totally fucked up and one arm is shorter than the other.
And he's really embarrassed by it, but then he wears it to school and it's a hit and everyone wants this bootleg Gordon Gartrell.
Anyway, that's why I'll never forget Amy Gartrell.
She's a good artist.
But we're at dinner and I go, Amy, we're like a hundred bucks short.
Didn't you put in like eight bucks?
And she goes, yeah, that's about what I got.
And I go, but you ordered a margarita.
Those are seven bucks.
And then you had the burrito dinner.
And she goes, yeah, well, that's not that extravagant.
It's just a normal burrito meal and everyone's having margaritas.
And I just thought that is the communist mentality in a nutshell.
I'm not going to be too greedy, but I'm going to have what I think would be fair.
A margarita that everyone else gets.
And a burrito.
Yeah, everyone else is paying for that.
You don't just sit there and take a fair amount.
It's not like there's a buffet and you go, I'm not going to be greedy.
So she got about $18 worth of food without the tip and then just put in, well, this is all I have, eight.
So that's everyone else will have to pay for me.
Isn't that the left in a nutshell?
Anyway.
I'm close to 9-11.
I should have made 9-11 the thing.
Why did I make this about sleepwalking?
So, we go out, we karaoke that night.
Andrew WK was with us, that was fun.
And he obviously gets super intense.
I don't think you have to enforce the karaoke rule about sounding like the guy with Andrew WK.
He's not gonna be singing Prince in a high voice.
Or, it's so fun to be with him that you don't care if he sings it wrong.
I gotta say, Andrew's not a big drinker.
For the guy who's known as the party hard guy, I've never seen him do drugs.
Although I think he smokes a lot.
Yeah, he smokes a lot of weed.
But I've never seen him like, shots, shots!
He sort of parties like a retard.
To be honest.
You know, like, retarded kids?
I don't know if you ever hung out with them.
They're super fun.
But they love to party in quotation marks.
Let's have a party!
Yay, party!
And that just means, to them, partying just means having a good time and living life to the fullest.
And it can be with one person.
It can be with 20.
You can party in a car.
I'm very different.
For me, partying means you have to puke.
And I remember, oh that's the Andrew WK song, I remember in high school we would have a pact.
We'd all lock arms and say, puking?
Yes, puking.
And it wasn't that hard because the booze we got was jungle juice.
You'd take a little bit of a sip, a little bit of a splooge, a little bit of a pour from all your parents' liquor, including Wine.
So you have vodka, slow gin, whiskey, rum, wine, all in a jar.
You can never find the top for the jar, so it would be saran wrap with 30 elastic bands, and you'd bring that out.
Everyone would have one.
And you'd drink that poison!
Oh my God, it was horrible.
And then you'd barf.
And I remember James Hunter didn't barf and we were so mad, so betrayed that James would stab us in the back like that and not barf.
How dare he?
Anyway, it's, that's probably why Andrew survived.
Cause if he was a real party hard serious dude who did heroin and coke, like he'd be like Chris Farley and John Belushi and Amy Winehouse and all those other Partiers.
Jimi Hendrix.
Excuse me while I puke and die.
Um, so we're partying and we're karaoke-ing and coking and drinking and getting shit-faced.
I had just met my wife, like a week before.
And she was my girlfriend, obviously, at the time.
And I was with Derek Beckles.
African-American gentleman.
Doesn't like me anymore.
Uh, says I'm racist.
Uh, and he's known me my entire adult life.
So, yeah.
You must be right.
That's what made me so mad.
I'm like, dude, you know me.
We've been best friends from since we were 22.
You ruined my wedding with your speech.
By the way, the way you ruined my wedding, the first time we met, we were 21, 22, 21, 1991 in Vancouver, and people in Vancouver are boring.
All they do, like all West Coasters, they watch TV in the day and smoke pot and laugh at how bad it is.
Yeah dude, it's daytime TV.
It's for maids and children.
Of course it sucks.
And Derek said that.
And he goes, let's go do something fun.
And we go, we had cars and shit.
It's Vancouver.
You need a car.
So we go, let's go look at prostitutes.
Yeah, that's fun.
You know, you see them on the strip.
There's a, Vancouver is a beautiful pastoral town with trees and mountain biking and all kinds of swimming holes.
It really looks like heaven.
It's like forest heaven.
At the same time, a junkie a day dies in Gastown, and there's prostitutes everywhere.
And Indians that want to fight you.
In fact, the Indians in Vancouver, holy shit.
You gotta watch your ass.
What happens is the girls...
We'll come over and start flirting with you and sit on your lap.
And I like squaws.
I married one.
That's my cup of tea.
I like chinky looking brunettes.
Who can drink.
They'll come over and sit on your lap.
And you go, oh, I'm popular.
I knew someone was going to appreciate me one of these days.
They don't really appreciate you.
They're trying to make their boyfriends mad.
They're giant, Indian, literally man killer.
That's a name.
That's a- My wife has friends she went to high school with.
Their last name is Man Killer.
Hello, I'm Joseph Man Killer.
Guess what my ancestors did?
It's what I'm gonna do to you for letting my girlfriend sit on your lap.
So the second they sit on your lap, you have to say, Oh-ho-ho-ho, okay!
Uh, you're a very nice lady.
Excuse me, I'm just gonna sit over here, please.
Cause they're trying to start shit.
Anyway, lots of interesting stuff going on in Vancouver, so we go to look at prostitutes.
And there's two ways you can do it.
You can just drive around.
I've done this a million times.
Or you sit at a bar and you watch the way they work, and, oh, she's going with that guy.
Oh, she was gone for ten minutes.
It's fascinating!
So we went to look at prostitutes.
Now, the term at.
What is at?
Can you look that up, Dave?
Is it an article?
The word at is a preposition.
It's a very important preposition.
It's not a proposition.
One letter away.
So Derek at the speech says, I first met Gavin when I went looking for prostitutes.
And I'm sitting with my wife's dad going, What my friend here is trying to say is AT was not getting prostitutes.
That is not.
I don't know why we're talking about prostitutes at my wedding, but okay.
All right, Derek, let's have a seat.
It wasn't really his fault.
My idea to make sure all my drunk friends were sober for the wedding was to have a four-day stag.
So three days of drinking, there'll be two hungover on the fourth day, and then we'll have the wedding.
But I forgot Adderall.
So, we drank.
Didn't eat, by the way.
We didn't really have food.
We totaled this hunting lodge.
One day, there was someone who brought some meat.
We had some pizza another time, but it's just like dudes with their shirts off, fighting, drinking.
It was chaos!
Total chaos.
Black guys in Klansmen uniforms, shooting off fireworks.
It was mental.
Homosexuals.
Anyway, um... Uh... Yeah, they did Adderall.
So, they could drink four days.
And so they were drunk at the wedding.
In fact, I heard later that the guys had a saying, and they said, uh, Adderall up!
What do you got?
A great wedding!
So anyway, that's why he shot his mouth off.
By the way, I saw Derek Beckles' new show, and despite the fact that he stabbed me in the back, uh, I gotta admit, it looks unbelievably good.
Wow.
He is- I will never deny that man's talent.
He's fucking hilarious, He's a great editor.
TV Carnage must be checked out.
My LLC is still called Street Carnage from the terrible website we had together.
But holy shit is he good.
I think it's because he was raised by television.
So he kind of has a PhD in television kitsch.
And that's what his show is.
It's called Mostly Millennials or something.
It's out really soon and he's in white face the whole time with like a Guy Fieri wig.
It's really, really good.
And his previous show was really good too.
What was that called?
Totally for Teens or something like that.
Where he took stupid TV and then framed it as an Entertainment Tonight show.
For that show, this black man wore blackface.
He made his skin darker than it is.
That's how hard it is for me to compliment him.
That's how hard it is for a Scotsman to be nice about someone who is an enemy.
But anyway, so the next morning, September 11th, and my girlfriend is pounding on my door.
And I wake up and she goes, turn on the fucking TV right now!
She's got two large coffees.
Now, Scottish people, when we drink, our stomachs are weak.
We've been drinking beer all night.
That's a lot of bubbles and stuff.
You don't want to be around us in the morning.
Just avoid Scottish people in the morning.
Our farts are brutal.
And she goes, turn on the TV.
So we turn on the TV and we see the first tower smoking.
We see the smoke coming off of it.
By the way, I've always said I wish that George W. Bush started planting bricks on September 12th.
Organizing the same exact tower built up.
I had an argument with the fire department guy, a fireman about this.
He said, would you want your kids going to that, working in that building?
I go, I don't care if it's a grain silo.
I don't care who's in it.
It needs to be rebuilt.
My goal as president would be to have British people denying that it ever happened.
I would like 9-11 truthers.
And there'd be a plaque, we're not gonna say it didn't happen, but there'd just be like a nice plaque, nice statue going, September 11th, these buildings were gone for a couple days.
But poof, they're back.
And that would be such a great statement, it would be such a fuck you to Islam.
Right now, that big giant handkerchief that's there, with the huge hole in the bottom, it's just a big mosque.
It's a big testament to Islam.
It's a big, can you believe how badly these guys nailed us?
And they did nail us.
I think it cost them 12 grand.
Those flying lessons and everything.
How much did it cost us to fight back?
30 trillion?
I don't know how much.
How do you factor in the cost?
You've got to include all the global polarization of Islam in the West and oh my god.
It was the most effective attack in the history of war.
Pearl Harbor was pretty good.
The Nagasaki and Hiroshima ended World War II.
That was fairly effective.
But for effort put in, Actually, no, you're right.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Dropping nuclear bombs is the most effective war move ever.
I would say September 12th is number two after that.
I'm not sure what's three.
Pearl Harbor, maybe?
Anyway, so we turn on the TV and he goes, my mom works there.
And, uh, he's sitting on the floor.
We just passed out on the floor.
I'm sitting on- I passed out on the couch.
He's on the floor.
And, uh, we didn't even make it to a- a bed.
Um, not that we slept together.
Actually, we sorta did a lot of times.
Not sexually, relax.
Uh, and so he's right at my buttcheeks.
And I let out this fuckin' fart.
So he's watching what might be his mother dying, and he just smells my buttcheeks, my fart, my flatulence.
So he just gets up and starts pounding me.
Which I totally understand.
It's fair.
Fair punches.
Although, Jay Johnson, the guy who looks like Moonface from Mr. Show, he once beat me up for farting in his face.
And then he came to my house, maybe a year later, and took his shoes off and his feet reeked up my house.
and I punched him.
He goes, "Ow, what the hell's that for?" And I go, "How is that different "from farting in your face?" It's exactly the same.
Farting is poo particles floating through the air, going into your skin and your nose, so you're putting poo in my face.
You have rotten skin cells that are festering on your feet Those have little microbes.
Those float in the air and go into my nose.
That's what poo is.
It's fecal matter.
It's solid waste.
That's what rotting feet smell is.
It's solid waste.
You pooed in my nose.
Punch.
Anyway.
So, uh... That sucks, and we just can't believe it's real.
And I also, my first instinct in these kind of things is just like apathy.
I think it's a coping mechanism where I go, oh well, just a building on fire.
Whatever.
So then we go up onto the roof.
And my wife is smart enough to be freaking out.
I had a photo shoot for Vice Magazine planned that day.
I was still intended to go there.
We'd rented a limousine.
I'm gonna have all these girls wear blonde wigs, and they'll be riding around in a- wearing all white, with white wigs, in a white stand-up limousine.
That'll be a cool photo shoot.
Let's do it.
Who cares if a building's on fire?
And then we go upstairs, and, uh, the second- we watch the second plane hit the tower.
And now the whole sky is full of smoke.
And it's starting to dawn on us that this isn't just a building on fire.
We're starting to realize the seriousness.
And then with Derek, now when I... I'm starting to think Derek was lying.
That his mother wasn't in the tower.
I go back and forth on this, but anyway.
I have a picture of my book, actually, in Death of Cool, of my wife on the phone.
We'll pull that up for the podcast now and rub the picture on the microphone so you can feel the contours of the drama.
I heard Amy Sedaris, she was dating, uh, God, who was she dating at the time?
I think it was Philip Seymour Hoffman.
And, uh, she, she is on record as doing the most too soon 9-11 joke in history.
As the second plane hit the tower, she wasn't looking at it.
She was looking at him.
And he said, what are you looking at?
And she goes, you.
And he goes, what are you thinking about?
And she goes, us.
As the towers were on fire before they collapsed.
Amy Sedaris, you win.
Anyway, that keeps going.
And we watch the whole thing.
We're freaking out.
Andrew WK, who was with us the night before, he goes down and he's with his buddy Jimmy Koo, who was the guitarist for his band.
I was lucky, I had Derek, I had my girlfriend, and everyone in our building was on our roof too, and we're all freaking out.
You know, we had a community.
He was in Long Island City, over the water, over the East River, with Jimmy Coo, and he goes, Jimmy, Jimmy, turn on the TV!
Or fucking look outside!
The sky is black!
The World Trade Center is on fire!
And he goes, Jimmy Coo wakes up and goes, so?
And Andrew WK goes, I need you to watch this with me.
I need you to, we have to turn on the news.
We have to watch the news together.
And he goes, look, Andrew, there's, that's happening over in Manhattan.
There's nothing we can do about it now.
So shut the fuck up and go back to sleep.
And then Jimmy Coo went back to sleep on September 11th.
Just dozing away, sleeping through the apocalypse.
Um... So, this continues.
And... We see the smoke.
It fills the whole sky.
Everyone on the street's freaking out.
We hear sirens galore.
And that was all those firemen who went down there.
And I have nothing but respect for the firemen and the police who went down there, obviously.
But I have heard some kind of shitty stuff from the FDNY.
NYPD, FDNY, there's a rivalry and they don't like each other.
And I tend to side with NYPD.
And there were stories, you can look this up, about firemen going down to the Rolex shop underneath the World Trade Center during the smoke and looting it.
Now, I know many men died there, and I would never trivialize their bravery.
In fact, I would argue that this Rolex thing is what trivializes their bravery.
It was blasphemous, almost, you know?
It was shitting on their graves as they were dying.
So that's fucking evil.
Imagine wearing one of those Rolexes.
That's like buying a Rolex from Satan.
You're taking that Rolex to hell.
Anyway, um... No, no, no.
Before the collapse.
Oh, they would have been destroyed, I see.
So your attitude is, fuck it.
Get some free watches, man.
Yeah, there's an argument there, but I think your labor would be better suited rescuing thousands of people.
Which they did, by the way.
Giuliani points that out.
That no one talks about the thousands of lives the police and firemen saved evacuating the building.
I knew this dude Sprague, who lived in Soho at the time, and so he was right there.
We were in the Lower East Side, by the way.
I lived above Max Fish, 174 Ludlow.
I believe it's, uh, three miles from, uh, uh, the World Trade Center, but that's by road.
It's probably two miles as the crow flies.
Um, but Sprague was there volunteering, and, uh, there's so much you don't know about 9-11 that only New Yorkers know.
It's fucking horrific, man.
Like, uh, when lots of people jumped.
It wasn't just that couple you saw.
That was the thing.
Everyone was just jumping.
They'd given up.
Which I don't really understand.
I would be fighting to the very end.
Maybe your room's full of smoke and you're seeing people cough and suffocate and you think, I don't want to suffocate.
I'm going to jump.
But when these bodies would hit the ground, they would pop.
Like water balloons.
And there'd just be limbs and pieces of torso.
So one of the things volunteers were doing was assembling the body parts.
I don't mean making a person back out of them.
That ship has sailed.
But putting pieces of human on pallets and stacking.
The pallets were stacked with body parts.
And that was Sprague's job.
By the way, Sprague was never the same.
I don't even know if he's alive anymore.
I think he got into heroin after that.
But he- No, no, none of us were the same after 9-11.
In fact, this- I was gonna say this to the end, but, you know, I get a lot of criticism.
They call me racist and blah blah blah and homophobic and none of that is true.
But, Islamophobe, I think, is a pretty accurate, uh, uh, way to describe me.
I definitely, from that day forward, I wasn't really that political before then, I definitely wasn't right-wing, but I had just read Death of the West by Pat Buchanan shortly before that, where he all but predicted this, and that day I went, it's us and them.
It's the West versus the East.
It's Christianity versus Islam.
Even if you're an atheist, you have to be on the side of Christianity and recognize that it built the Western world.
That was a game-changer for me.
And I think it was a game changer for a lot of people.
I know Anthony Cumia, he wasn't really political.
And we both had the exact same epiphany that day where we said, wait a minute, what have you guys been doing?
What's been going on?
Wait, I'm getting involved.
I thought you were on autopilot.
I thought you had this handled.
You made a few blunders in the Middle East.
But I didn't know that this was going on.
And same with Pamela Geller.
She wasn't really political.
And she became obsessed with Islam after that.
And those are just the famous people.
There's millions of people who all of a sudden became political that day.
It really changed me fundamentally.
It changed the whole course of my life.
And that's what they were going for, by the by.
See, Islam is sort of like Antifa.
They want a war.
They don't want to negotiate.
You know, Palestinians are not looking for a deal.
Bill Clinton brought Yasser Arafat to Camp David and they haven't... Bill Clinton had a deal that I don't think was very good for Israel.
It was the perfect Palestinian deal.
And Yasser Arafat walked out of the room and said, uh, I have to take a phone call and didn't return.
He can't, if he negotiated any kind of settlement, no matter how good it was, If it didn't involve killing all Jews in Israel, he would get killed.
So, there's no authority in Palestine that can negotiate a deal, and I believe that's indicative of the Islamic mentality, which is, I don't want a deal.
I want a war.
Antifa don't want to sit and argue with you about smaller government and how Trump is actually the most anarcho-president we've ever had.
They don't care about that.
They want a war.
Which is weird, because they can't fight.
And they're starting a war with war vets, and tradesmen, and bodybuilders, and fighters, and MMA guys.
Okay, it's on.
And Bataclan.
You know, why did they pick that hipster place with Jesse from Eagles of Death Metal?
What's his name again?
Jesse Hughes.
He, by the way, became politicized after that shooting and has totally changed.
I mean, he's definitely on our side.
I think he's going to join Proud Boys.
But yeah, he's very concerned about Islam and very concerned about guns.
He said he knew of cops at Bataclan who were going to bring their guns.
They weren't on duty.
And their wife said, please don't bring that gun.
I had that gun.
And so they didn't, and they regretted it.
And when he played there again, they showed him their guns.
So this is turning into a fucking bummer of an app.
But the reason Islam chose Bataclan was to polarize.
They know that there's the far right and they know that there's the radical Islam.
They like both those things because they want a war.
What they don't like is moderate Muslims and tolerant hipsters.
Living together, going to shows, being cool.
They don't like that.
They want to radicalize both sides and make the cool hipsters into far right, which they did with me, and it worked, guys.
Way to go.
Good job.
And they also want to take the moderate, tolerant Muslims and push them to the far, uh, to the far whatever.
Far left, I guess.
Um, and I assume that worked, too.
So that's what they were trying to do with, uh, 9-11.
And it worked.
Anyway, so we go downstairs, and the streets are empty, and we go to this bar, Nice Guy Eddie's, and everyone's there.
Oh, and we all have beers, and we're all watching TV, everyone's fixing on the TV, but there's a real sense of community.
I might tear up.
Um...
Then we went...
All right, crying is gay.
Then we went up to Doc Holliday's, and we all hung out there.
And, uh, Derek kept trying to call his mom.
I still don't know if this is true.
The story I got was that she was going to make some photocopies but the photocopier didn't work and she had a presentation to do so she took the elevator down from the first tower, went into like a Kinko's nearby where she could see the tower, did her photocopies and saw the tower collapse where her purse was.
Notice I'm not crying anymore because I don't believe this story, it's too perfect.
And then she walked over the bridge or the tunnel, the jersey, walked through the Holland Tunnel I guess, covered in ash like a ghost and that's why she wasn't answering calls or calling anyone.
A little too perfect.
Anyway, I believed it back then, and I kept pretending she was going to be okay, even though I was sure she was dead.
And then he called his brother Collect, and we were all obviously totally aware of this, and Emily had met all her friends, so it was half chicks, half dudes at Doc Holidays, which is a wonderful bar to this day.
Perfect dive bar.
Right amount of junkies, right amount of weirdos, a couple students, old-timers.
It's surprising that it's lasted as long as it did.
You know, the East Village has a lot of good bars that have retained their East Villageness, like 7A and Handsome Dick Manitoba's.
I mean, there's still old punk rockers there from the 70s.
That's impressive.
The neighborhood, not so much, but those bars, those dives I've held on.
Probably because they have grandfathered in rent.
But um, we go to Doc Holidays and we're drinking beers, and uh, everyone's- everyone's partying!
I mean, we're- obviously there's a state of shock, but it's also like a... I don't know, man.
It was the same with the blackout in 2004, which is also in my book.
It was- New Yorkers were- all came together.
The blackout?
My wife's shirt says 04, but um, okay.
You're right, 03.
So, don't correct me if I'm a year off, by the way.
Throw out my whole fucking rhythm, because I'm literally a day off.
That's what the difference in a year is.
Anyway, um...
So, he calls, he finds out his mom's okay.
I think in the audio version of my book, when I tell this part, I start crying.
Because I still believed it back then.
I've since stopped believing it.
So he called and he found out his mom was okay, then the whole bar cheers.
Yeah!
When we find out his mom's okay.
Holy shit if he's lying that is some dark shit man Making a bar cheer about your wife.
I mean your mom who was never gonna be dead That's fucking rich I still don't know by the way.
I'm not accusing him.
I'm just saying I know I've got a bad feeling So And then we finished drinking.
I realized we're not doing the photo shoot.
It starts around like 3 or 4 p.m.
It starts sinking in.
Ryan McGinley and his buddies, they went down there the next day, I believe, or maybe that same day, that night, on their BMXs with bandanas around their necks because of the ash.
I mean, there was ash everywhere.
People walking around like ghosts.
I'm not doing the drama credit here because, I don't know, I'll just sit here and bawl my eyes out like a fag.
It won't be a very good podcast, so I'm keeping it light.
But you have to know that it was the most dramatic event to happen to anyone in New York City.
In fact, I can't remember who said this, but around 2008 they said, the way you can tell you're a real New Yorker is if you've lived here for 10 years or you were there for 9-11.
And people, you know, they say never forget, but they're so worried about offending Muslims in New York City.
Like, remember that girl who had her hijab stolen?
Everyone was bending over backwards to appease her.
God forbid someone should touch a piece of cloth on someone's head.
It turned out to be a hoax.
But that was, it was too late.
We'd already apologized and de Blasio had a big fucking festival where he ate her out and started crying.
And I just thought, so we did forget.
We did forget that Islam is a dangerous religion.
You know, there's... And the people go, why are you so obsessed with Islam?
I go, watch two towers fall and get back to me.
Watch a city of zombies walking up from southern Manhattan covered in ash like ghosts.
They just keep appearing and appearing.
It was honestly like something out of Ghostbusters, where they open some vault that wasn't meant to be open and all these dead ghosts were just walking up through the streets catatonic.
With their their eyes wide open stumbling around not knowing what's going on Not knowing where their co-workers are if they're dead or not.
Oh my god.
I just remembered something else horrific There was a church in there was all churches but there was a There's a church near 9-eleven where people were putting up pictures laminated pictures of their loved ones saying missing Have you seen this man?
With, uh, phone numbers.
And this was also at the hospital at Beth Israel on 14th Street.
People were putting up these laminated pictures of their loved ones.
Laminated!
So it'll last for days in the rain and stuff, saying, call if you see this person.
Uh... Your dad's dead, my friend.
I heard that Vampire Weekend were formed from a lot of the kids of these rich finance dudes because areas like Westchester, all the dads were working in Wall Street.
So you had a whole generation of rich kids with dead dads who now had all this money and were losing their minds because their father just passed away.
So they were doing heroin.
So there was this weird epidemic of rich kids in Manhattan dying of heroin overdoses because they had tons of money and tons of grief.
Good!
Fuckin' rich kids, I'm glad they're dead.
Ugh, I can hear people thinking that.
Um, Vampire Weekend's whole positive attitude was, you know, fellow Westchester kids saying, let's not kill ourselves, guys.
Keep it light.
But, um, yeah, for days after that, I had to show my utility bills, because I was in the Lower East Side, and that was, it was like, uh, uh, Houston Street and South were sort of considered a war zone, unless you were, you know, way, way out in the West Village.
And we were very close.
And you could still see smoke in the, and the smoke took forever to go away.
It was, it was a literal and figurative cloud over New York City.
And you had to show your utility bill to go home.
Because the streets were all blocked off.
And there was fucking tanks!
There was regular tanks going up and down Houston Street.
So my question, when people say, why are you so angry?
I go, why aren't you more angry?
There was tanks going up Houston Street.
3,000 people died that day.
Why aren't you fucking mad?
I mean, people are mad about Pulse, the Pulse shooting.
People are mad about Sandy Hook.
All of those things are horrific, and I appreciate that rage.
But 9-11 was 3,000 people just in the World Trade Center.
Actually, I'm not sure about that.
Maybe it was 2,900 or something in World Trade and the other things added up to just over 3,000?
Thousands and thousands of dead bodies in the name of Islam.
No, it was our foreign policy.
Oh, fuck off with that shit!
Why are Chinese Muslims murdering people in China?
Why are Polynesians murdering people?
Why are there so many Muslim-on-Muslim attacks in Somalia and Pakistan?
Is that foreign policy?
Is it my foreign policy that's getting gays thrown off buildings and women stoned to death for being raped?
Is that my foreign policy?
Or is it a corrupt book that encourages the murder of apostates?
See?
You made me talk about 9-11, you got me all serious.
I tried to start this off funny by talking about sleepwalking, but nooooo!
You had to bring up the fucking apocalypse.
Way to go, you.
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