Lawrence Wright: The 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks: reflections on how they happened, and lessons learned and not learned

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Lawrence Wright. Lawrence is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. He's written many books, including Going Clear, The Plague Year, America, In the Time of COVID, The End of October, God Save Texas, and several others. However, in this podcast, to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9-11, we're going to focus specifically on The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11, a book Lawrence wrote in 2006
The Looming Tower is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and it was named one of Time's top 100 books of all time.
Now, some of you may have read this book. I suspect many of you will have not. Regardless of whether or not you listen to this podcast in its entirety, I can't recommend the book highly enough. The book was also turned into a mini series that played on Hulu about two years ago by the same title. In the months leading up to this date, I knew I wanted to deviate from my normal subject matter and speak very specifically about 9-11 for this week, but I didn't really know the right way to do it. I didn't know who to interview. There were a number of people I considered speaking with, but as I reflected on the first time I read The Looming Tower, I realized that Lawrence was indeed a great person to interview for this book. And I think that comes across in this interview. His research into this story is second to none. And this is really many stories. It's not just a story. Effectively, it's two major stories. The first is the story of how Al-Qaeda came to be, which of course focuses on Osama bin Laden, but also his counterpart from Al-Jihad, Ahmad al-Zawahiri. It also goes back further into the roots of radical Islam within Egypt. A parallel story to this is the story of the intelligence community, namely the CIA and the FBI, and their failure to see what was happening before it was too late. Now, of course, it's not nearly as simple as that. And I'm deliberately being glib, but that's effectively what we discuss in this podcast. We go through these parallel stories and how they interweave.
This podcast is over three hours, which took both Lawrence and I by surprise. I was not expecting it to be that long. But nevertheless, I suspect it speaks to the content that we were dealing with and the depth of Lawrence's research. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lawrence Wright.
Lawrence, thank you so much for coming over. I love being able to kind of interview people in person. So to have somebody that's from Austin and to be able to sit down with you is really exciting today.

**Lawrence Wright** (3:40)
Well, it's a pleasure to be out and about even under the constrained circumstances that we find ourselves.

**Peter Attia** (3:47)
You know, this is a topic that I think many of my listeners are going to kind of wonder what does this have to do with longevity because that tends to be what I speak about. But as we sit here minutes away from effectively the 20th anniversary of certainly the most pivotal moment for many of us in our lifetimes, of course, you were also alive during some of the other pivotal moments in our history. I think for many of us, we just sort of can't believe how fast 20 years has gone by.
So I kind of want to just start with maybe a silly question, but what do you remember of that morning, that Tuesday morning? Where were you?

**Lawrence Wright** (4:21)
Back then, I had breakfast with a bunch of colleagues that were learning Spanish, and so we would speak Spanish at breakfast and every Tuesday.
After breakfast, I got in the car and NPR was on and they had reported one plane had hit the World Trade Center. And by the time I got home, the second plane had hit. And I had written about terrorism already, so I was aware that this was probably a terrorist attack. It wasn't a surprise to me that it was a terror attack. Of course, it was an immense surprise that it was such a dramatic strike.