An American Tragedy in Five Acts: Janet Reitman on the Inheritance of 9/11

00:00:30 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Sunday, October 11, 2026, a month after the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. I was actually at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, last month. Saw lots of images of falling buildings and falling people. Very sad, very tragic. And according to a new book that came out a few days ago, The Inheritance by my guest Janet Reitman, 9/11 is more than about falling buildings and falling people. It's about a falling country. Janet is joining us from Springs, New York. Janet, congratulations on the book. And it took you a long time. You are no longer fallen.

00:01:19 Janet Reitman: Oh, no. You know? Still— You're always feeling like you're falling, but go ahead.

00:01:25 Andrew Keen: Well, maybe that's why you're in Springs. Janet, in all seriousness, the book is, a tragedy in five acts about the America post-9/11. Is that fair?

00:01:41 Janet Reitman: Yeah. It is. I mean, it's— the book starts in the 1990s, but it is largely about, the way America responded to 9/11 and the impact that's had over the many years since. So, but through a series of characters, it's about how it impacted people.

00:01:59 Andrew Keen: The book comes with a lovely blurb from an old friend of the show, George Packer. He's, of course, best known perhaps for his book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America that in some ways seems to have a similar architecture to yours. In The Unwinding, George tells the story of a number of real Americans to put together a broader story of America, and that's what you seem to be doing in The Inheritance. Is that fair?

00:02:28 Janet Reitman: Yeah. It is. I mean, I love George Packer's book. I love that book. I thought it was an incredible book, and it was a, I read that book and thought, you know, I've learned more about the unraveling of, you know, the American middle class and about the financial— Excuse me, the financial and the economic crisis, which is what the book is largely about, and sort of how we got to that place, Then I had learned through a lot of other reporting, and it, when I came to writing my own book, which was going to cover a large span of time, I thought a lot about his book, and I thought, you know, how do you— it's also like— it was very novelistic, and that's how I like to write. And so, yeah, it's— it was a big inspiration for me.

00:03:13 Andrew Keen: The Unwinding is a dark book. This Inner History of the New America, which George wrote, in the first, part of the century. It was dark. It was about inequality, alienation, and many other themes of early-twenty-first-century America. Your book in its own way is even darker. Is that fair?

00:03:33 Janet Reitman: I mean, I guess so. I mean, I hate to say, hey. Buy my book. It's a dark book. Yeah. I mean, it's about the trauma of those terrorist attacks on America. I mean, it's about the trauma of the 9/11 era and how that kind of embedded itself into the DNA of a lot of people, into the DNA of our institutions, into the DNA of our policy, and into the DNA of, you know, the people who had to— in my book is a lot about the characters who— some of the characters who had to really contend with those policies, and so— and about how it impacted them. So I think it is dark, but I think it also open— Offers some hope. I mean, I think that— you know, look, I believe you have to reckon with your past in order to, you know, move forward and create a better present, and this book reckons with our past. So in my mind, it's hopeful because it's a— You're confronting something, and that's positive.

00:04:43 Andrew Keen: The number of views of 9/11, we've done many shows on it. Maybe two different ones are on the one hand, it was a catastrophe for America, and it was forced to react, perhaps, in some ways, overreact, but that was the nature of things. On the other hand, some people argue that 9/11 was, well, obviously, in terms of the tragedy of the day, very troubling, represented a massive overreaction, and the wars in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan were a consequence of that. Are you in the second camp, Janet, on that one? What does The Inheritance tell us about the inevitability or absence of inevitability of what happened on 9/11?

00:05:31 Janet Reitman: I'm 100% in that camp. I think that— Look. I think after September 11, we had this wonderful choice. We had, the whole world was with us. You know? I mean, a good portion of the world was hugely supportive. And we had the option of sort of taking a high road and trying to understand— Literally and really understand what it was that, made us, you know, made people just hate our country. I mean, we used to ask why did they hate us, but nobody ever gave— you know, the answer to that was like, oh, they hate us for our freedom, which is a non answer, frankly. I mean, there are real reasons why America was not loved by many, many parts of the wor— of the non-Western world. You traveled overseas in the nineties, you would— or the eighties. You would encounter people who would— were very hostile towards the United States. And so we had an option, I think, at that time to sort of open our minds and sort of do some analysis of what happened here. But instead, you know, the other road was to seek revenge, and we sought revenge and retribution in the most extreme way possible in my view. And I think we, not only did we do that in Afghanistan, which, you know, we could connect at least to the 9/11 attacks we did in Iraq. That had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and we came up with a narrative that it did and sold that narrative to a bunch of teenagers and young men and their— Young men and women in their twenties, late teens and twenties, who went to war for, you know, for never forget. They were— you know, I write about this in my book. I've talked about this a lot elsewhere. I was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, and you would go to, like, remote bases. You go to the [unclear]— you know, to the Republican Palace in Baghdad, but you would also go to remote bases in the middle of nowhere, and you would see these posters of the nine— of, you know, the World Trade Center collapsing and, like, the words never forget as if they were fighting that war for— to somehow avenge 9/11, which had— which was ridiculous, and they even knew— I mean, most of these people knew that, and yet it was the narrative that was told for a number of years. And, you know, it was devastating. Devastating. It was a devastating war for the United States. It was a devastating war for the people that fought it. It was terrifyingly devastating for the Iraqis. And it had a long, long impact, and particularly on— I think it had a long impact on the country and a long impact on these soldiers. And I wrote about one of them who— his name was Nathan Damigo, who was a marine who went to war thinking he was gonna bring democracy to Iraq and, you know, all— Avenge 9/11, and he got there and he was just quickly disabused of a lot of that and, you know, had the trauma that most soldiers had. Came home with a lot of— they came home with PTSD, which is what about— I think it was one-quarter of those who fought in Iraq came home with some form of PTSD or TBI. And when he came home, there was no acknowledgment, official acknowledgment of this psychological condition at all. The military was still kind of trying to deal with it, and the Marine Corps was in denial that it existed. And so there was very little help that he could have gotten. He was in denial that he had it, and he wound up self-medicating. And, you know, one thing led to another. He winds up in prison where there was no help for veterans, no psychological help. Like, no— you know, this would be— and he had also been cut loose from the Marines. So the government, like, sort of, you know, washed their hands of people who got screwed up in that war. And what happened to Nathan was he sat there in prison and decided, you know what? Democracy sucks. And the only thing that I can really count on is my race. That's my real family. That's my real brotherhood. You know, this family that they said the Marine Corps was, well, that's not my family because they just, like, let me go without my benefits even. I can't even call myself a veteran. So my real family are white people. And he gets out of prison, and he and he's a smart and, you know, enterprising young man, and he goes around trying to find a community, and he does. And he finds a community online of people who are looking to promote this exact view, and they are looking for an avatar to do that. And he is the perfect avatar because he is a handsome US military veteran, blonde, blue-eyed, square-jawed, well-spoken, and he wants to create a group to recruit young men, you know, to the white nationalist cause and to also infiltrate our politics in some way or another, infiltrate our institution. And that's what he did. He created a group called, you know, Identity Evropa. He became a leader of Charlottesville. He was inspirational, and his group was inspirational to a lot of young men. And some of those young men have made their way into our government and into law enforcement and, you know, into the State Department, and some of that's been exposed. But that's where we are. And—

00:10:42 Andrew Keen: The rest is history. Yeah. History. I wanna come to some of the other characters in the book. But, last month, we did a show with another, very distinguished journalist, Jacob Weisberg. I'm sure you know his work. He has a new book out called Profiles in Cowardice, which is very critical of some of the individuals who, at least in his view, folded on Trump 2 and were critical on Trump 1 and then refused to take on Trump 2. One of the people he includes is George Bush who actually, George W. Bush, who's had a pretty good press, particularly in comparison to Trump. But are you saying, given the response to 9/11 under the Bush presidency, that when it comes to this inheritance, this American tragedy, if there are individuals to blame, it's the American president and, the other powerful figures in his administration, the people who took America to war?

00:11:40 Janet Reitman: I mean, to some degree, yes. I mean, my book is not, by the way, about, the political decisions that were made. I mean, there were plenty of those kinds of books about— you know, there was hubris. There's a lot of books that have really deconstructed the Bush— the Bush people. I think that the— one of the worst things that the Bush administration did was they promoted this idea that they were gonna go to war, and a very small number of people were gonna go and fight that war, and the rest of us were not gonna take part in any of it. We were gonna go shopping, literally. You know, we were going to go to football games and say thank you very much to the troops, and we were always gonna remember to thank them for their service and sort of do these performative patriotic acts that did not require us to actually engage in what was going on. And so I think it distanced Americans and distanced, you know, just to distance our whole society from the reality of what was happening, in Iraq and Afghanistan and from the reality of what these people that we were allowing to go off and fight this war for us were actually experiencing. And I know that, you know, in the case of a lot of the soldiers again, you know, they felt— I, you know, know a lot. I still keep in touch with some of the people that I met in Iraq and, you know, they've always hated being thanked for their service. Like, it— I mean, it was nice, but it feels kind of inconsequential ultimately because it's not followed up with, like, so how can I help you get a job, and how can I pay? You know, help you get your housing, and, like, let me help you with your medical bills and things that they really need and they haven't had. So, but I think it was that the worst thing that the Bush administration did on the home front was to, you know, to tell the American public they were gonna wage a war on the dark side and that we were gonna have to put— we should just allow that and that they basically made— they spread a lot of fear. And they weaponized the fear, and the fear became, very much institutionalized, and we internalized it. It was part of the narrative of the 9/11 era. And that was tremendously damaging, and you can see it playing out now because— Look. Look. You see Trump talking about going to war in Iran because they're terrorists, and they could drop a nuclear bomb on. I mean, my god. Like, he's talking about them dropping a nuclear bomb, you know, which is the exact language that the Bush administration used for why they were going to Iraq. Well, they might drop the— you know, they might— Have WMDs. They might, you know, at some point drop a bomb. It's the same, you know, kind of rhetoric that's being recycled essentially. And so I think that was very damaging.

00:14:28 Andrew Keen: Janet, I may have been very influenced by— or very, you were— I wouldn't say impressed, but struck by a recent CDC poll research, which found that over 70% of American adults wake up tired. What does that tell us? What does your book tell us about this new mood of exhaustion that seems to have settled on America?

00:14:52 Janet Reitman: So I started this book in 2017 when already people were beginning to ask themselves, like, what is going on? And, like, we're seeing neo-Nazis walking through the streets of Charlottesville. We're seeing, the newly, at this time, newly elected president of the United States sort of saying things and, you know, sort of demonizing people in a way that most, you know, American presidents or politicians just— they don't. They didn't. And I, over these years, I think I've seen it— it's— I've seen this get worse and worse. And we are now arrived at a place where I think everyone is asking themselves on some level, doesn't matter what political party you're a part of, what's going on? I'm a— I'm tired. I feel exhausted. I feel— I can't read the paper. Like, how many people do you know that, like, don't wanna read the headlines? I mean, I know my own friends, like, in my business are like, ugh. You know?

00:15:54 Andrew Keen: Not good for you as a New York Times, magazine writer. People need to be reading your stuff.

00:16:00 Janet Reitman: I know. I mean, I do it. I do it. Right? But, yes, please read my stuff. But I'm not a daily news reporter, so, you know, I'm not constantly reporting the bad news of the day. But I think that there's a lot of bad news, and there's a lot of people are sort of psychologically exhausted and emotionally exhausted. And I think that is not a new phenomenon. That has sort of been building and building and building over a very long period of time. And I think it's— you know, one of the things that I, that this book kind of addresses in various ways through these characters is that prior to 9/11, no matter who you were, no matter how cynical— I mean, I'm a Gen Xer. This is a very— to me, this is like a very Gen Xer book. Right? Like, it's filled with people that sort of took America for granted and took, like, the privileges that we had for granted. And we grew up sort of after Vietnam and all that stuff. And so we were, like, really worried a different— you know, this will— like, what do we have to worry about, you know, kind of mentality? That was the nineties. It was the eighties and the nineties. And, but there was always a sense that no matter who you were, this country stood for something that nobody else stood for. Right? It did stand for sort of, this kind of ideal of freedom, this sort of ideal of equality and democracy. And even if it wasn't perfect, that we were moving in that direction. Like, that is what we believed in and that we believe we're a good country and that we stood for things that other countries absolutely didn't stand for. We did not torture people. We did not, you know, we did not do— Shoot people in front of firing squads, like your president is discussing doing right now. We did not behave the way authoritarian countries behaved. And after 9/11, I think we had to rewrite the narrative. Like, we had to— we were attacked for the first time, in this dramatic way, by a foreign, you know, entity. And we were— we proved to be tremendously vulnerable, which we did not ever prepare for or think we were. And now we had to completely reorient ourselves around this idea of protecting ourselves, of national security, of defense. We created a Department of Homeland Security, which sounded a little Orwellian at the time. And, you know, kind of still— maybe still does a little bit, but, like, this was a new American identity, a new America. And I think we have not finished writing that narrative, and we did not really kind of conclusively decide what that made us. And I think the confusion of this, created a lot of, you know, sort of fractures in our society where it just— it left the space for extremist ideas that we've been suppressing, for all the negative stuff that we suppressed to come to the surface. And I think that's what we've been seeing over the past twenty something years. We've seen it with the white supremacist movement. We've seen it with political extremism on every side. We've seen it with kind of, you know, just a lot of, you know, anger, a lot of inequality, a lot of, you know, sort of overt anger at one another that I think is a product of a lot of this, and it— and it's led to this exhaustion. And that's my view of it. Like, believe me, you know, there's many, many, many reasons, but I think that's one reason is that.

00:19:35 Andrew Keen: Is there another take, though, Janet, on this that, your book's already got a great review in The New York Times, by Anand Giridharadas, one of America's leading writers, "How 9/11 Created a Nation of Fear". The great English seventeenth century, philosopher Thomas Hobbes, of course, argued that we are by nature fearful. Do you think, in a way, after 9/11, America has become more realistic, for better or worse, about the world? You mentioned the Gen Xers, and that you always thought things were gonna get better. But maybe the reality of things is that fearfulness is a natural condition, and that's— I wouldn't say healthy or unhealthy, but that's just the way in which most people live their lives around the world. And why should Americans be different?

00:20:27 Janet Reitman: Well, you're not— so I don't know if you're an American citizen. Are you?

00:20:31 Andrew Keen: I live in America.

00:20:32 Janet Reitman: Okay. But you're not an American. So if you were raised— and I'm just gonna tell you something. If you were raised an American, particularly if you grew up in the seventies, the eighties, and nineties, you were raised with a very different idea of yourself than probably anybody else in the world, which is that you're not fearful, that you are the greatest country, that nobody can beat you ever, that you are superior. And I'm not— like, this is— I am not— you know, I'm coming from a— I'm a progressive. I mean, I admit it. Like, I'm not coming from a conservative, like, you know, any kind of reactionary space. Like, this is just how kids were raised. And so that is what made us a special nation. Whether you wanna agree with that or not, believe me, I met plenty of people in my life who thought that was an insane way to look at the world. And I could say, objectively, it probably is a kind of crazy way to look at the world, but it's not always— it's the way Americans looked at the world. It's the way— it's the way we thought of things. So it— it's a wake up call that we have to join the rest of the world at— in our— like, as human beings. But I think that it's something that Americans are not always that well prepared for because of this particular mentality. It's like, it's I don't— it's hard for me to explain this. I understand this perspective, and I agree with this perspective, but I don't, necessarily, think it's just— it's all that easy. I don't think it's that easy for people. And if you look at what's happening even now in our politics, sometimes I think they're trying to make sense of this. Like, they're trying it— this is why we keep looking backwards to, like, the 1950s or whatever.

00:22:13 Andrew Keen: Let's come to some of the characters in the book, Janet, in The Inheritance. Are the characters— and you've written very detailed descriptions of them, of their lives since 9/11, the ups and downs, particularly the downs. Do they see themselves as casualties of history? Do they see themselves as losing agency? It's somewhat of a chicken and egg, of course, because the America you describe is one where we've collectively all seem to have lost agency, where we feel exhausted all the time and we can't control our own lives. And the lives that you write about are ones where people aren't in control. What comes first? And what's the psychological condition of feeling disempowered, of tired, of not having control over one's own life?

00:23:07 Janet Reitman: Well, look. I mean, I don't think that any of the characters in my book feel disempowered. I think that they are trying very hard to be empowered. My book is about, I mean, what we've just been talking about is sort of the backdrop of my book. My book is about a bunch of idealists who believe very deeply in this country and very much in its values and who are trying very, very hard in the aftermath of, you know, during the, you know, in the 9/11 and post-9/11 era to do the best they can and to, keep their faith and keep their idealism against increasingly challenging odds. So I have an FBI agent who'd be— you know, is working counterterrorism. I have a lawyer who winds up, you know, defending a lot of Muslim clients in the aftermath. All through for twenty years, he's, you know, defending Muslim clients who are charged with terrorism related offenses. You know, I have a family who, again, you know, we have a family who— the father who goes off to war as a kind of a— He's a military contractor and he goes off to war. He's a contractor, and he is a pilot, and he was in reserves. And he believes in this country. You know? They believe that they're doing good in the world, and they try to do good in the world. And, in the case of, you know, one of my characters is this— an FBI agent winds up leaking a lot of documents because he's so disturbed by what he's been charged with doing in the counterterrorism realm that he wants to inform people. And that's an idealistic decision he makes. He makes this because he believes that people need to know and people need to do something. So they are not, like— They're not disempowered. I think the question maybe to ask is maybe we are disempowered in some way. I mean, you know, it— Will these gestures make an impact on our society is, like, a totally different question. But I think that they individually are people that really, really believe, and are really trying to do the right thing and are meeting, you know, with the challenges of the moment.

00:25:17 Andrew Keen: You begin the book with a prologue about Vicki Weaver. Why— Why'd you start with the Weavers?

00:25:23 Janet Reitman: So I began a pro— my prologue begins with Vicki Weaver, who is a suburban housewife from Iowa in '19— in the early 1980s who was lying in a bathtub. And she hears the voice of god, and god says, it's time. And she goes, like, what do you mean? What— for what? And he's like, it's time. You know? And you must leave soon. He's telling her, you have to leave. He's showing her a vision of a cabin on a mountain and that this is gonna be her oasis and that she and her husband and her family need to pack up and literally head to the hills to escape the coming apocalypse. And I thought it was— and they do that. And it, you know, it ultimately will result in a devastating way. But they go and they silo themselves off in the world because they believe that something bad is gonna happen in the world as they know it is changing and in a way that's gonna damage them. It's gonna be, you know— That's scary and doesn't feel like the world that they know. And so they need to go and hide and wait for the whole world to be destroyed and then rebuilt in some way so they can then return. And I thought that was a really— she was kind of a harbinger, and it was a nice way to open a book that is about that change. You know, it's about that sort of overhaul, and what comes after that.

00:26:47 Andrew Keen: Violence runs through the book as well, doesn't it?

00:26:50 Janet Reitman: Yes.

00:26:52 Andrew Keen: Perhaps you might explain how and why.

00:26:58 Janet Reitman: Well, it's a pretty broad statement. I mean, violence is, I mean, we have, you know, the Iraq war and the war on terror is, you know, violent. I mean, it's an— it was a—

00:27:12 Andrew Keen: And, of course, 9/11 itself is obviously—

00:27:14 Janet Reitman: Yeah. I mean, like—

00:27:15 Andrew Keen: itself a remarkably violent act that triggers the violence that you talk about in the book.

00:27:21 Janet Reitman: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a— one of the characters in the book is a teenager who, is a— Becomes a kind of obsessed with guns. And, his dad is the aforementioned contractor and pilot who went to war and, had been a pilot in the nineties, and his son, you know, worshiped him and wanted to be just like him and wanted to be in the military and wanted to do, like, really cool guy militant stuff and, you know, got really into— and he joined these Airsoft [unclear]. Do you know what Airsoft is? It's a kind of, it's like, you know, they're like toy, you know, toy guns.

00:28:00 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:28:00 Janet Reitman: But very sophisticated ones. They're like BB gun, and they're they look like AR-15s, but they're not. And he, you know, became— Got there. There's a whole, like, universe of people that play. It's almost like— it's like— it's not like paintball, but it's like they play these sophisticated games, like war games with toy guns. And Andrew was, a kid that got really into Airsoft and got it— and just, you know, started collecting them, built an AR-15 with his dad when he was a teenager. And his mom, at a certain point, got really afraid that he might— he had a— he was not a very social kid. He had a lot of, you know, sort of adjustment issues with— in terms of socially. And his mom really worried that he might be a school shooter one day. And he drifts into white supremacy and, you know, very, very sadly, he winds up getting killed by somebody else who is a gun-obsessed white supremacist kid. But, you know, so there's a lot of violence in that regard. But, you know, it's— I think that violence is, it's not— it's not a book that's about mass shootings or anything like that. It's just— it— it's— There's it's kind of a subtext, I guess. But that's a— Isn't that a subtext of our age? I think that's a subtext of the [unclear].

00:29:17 Andrew Keen: Right. And speaking of subtext, I just saw the new movie by Aaron Sorkin, The Social Reckoning, which is the second part of, his movie about Facebook. The first one was The Social Network, and it connects social media and Facebook in particular with a lot of the issues that you talk about, radicalization, violence, particularly, right-wing populism. You begin the book in 2001 when there were blogs, but there wasn't really social media. What's the role the— in your sense? I mean, there's this ongoing debate about whether or not social media has caused or the Internet's digital culture has caused this cultural crisis in America, political economic crisis. What's your take in terms of actually talking to real people, how they've lived their lives over the last twenty five years?

00:30:13 Janet Reitman: I mean, I don't think it's caused— I think you've— it's really hard to nail down what causes extremism. There's a million causes for why people behave a certain way or believe a certain thing. I think that social media has been, it— you know, I'll tell you a story. So one of the— there was a couple of kids in my book die they're killed by— They're part of a neo-Nazi group and they're killed. And I don't mean to give this book away, but that happens. Spoiler. And I interviewed one of their moms. I was working on a piece about this. They were members of a group called the Atomwaffen Division, which would— was— Became a kind of a very famous right— White supremacist domestic terror actually group, in the late sort of 2010s. And, I wrote about this for Rolling Stone at the time. And I, interviewed one of their mothers, and the mom was like, look. We can't— I can't control his— what he does on the Internet. And I, you know, he spends all his time on his computer, and I don't have any— I— what am I supposed to do about it? I can't control that. And I heard that from a lot of parents, and, I mean, it's true on a certain level, but it's also kind of like the Internet and the— you know, the Internet has become a really good babysitter, for young teenagers. And, you know, I mean, a lot of people that I spoke to, like, they didn't really— Unless they were really on top of it, and some of them are. I mean, really, I mean, a lot of people are. But unless you are on top of it, your kid can just be kinda going off and doing— and talking to whoever they want to be talking to and getting whatever ideas they might be getting, and you will have absolutely no concept of that. And, you know, I— I've explained it before. It's like sort of— a lot of these kids got into, far right stuff through this site called— it was an image board called 4chan, which, had all these different, like, rooms in it, and, some of them were very extremist. And it was like— they were— you know, it was like the Internet is like a— it was like a huge city with a bunch of clubs, and 4chan was a particularly dark club. And inside that club, there were, like, certain rooms, like VIP rooms, if you can put it in that context, where you could walk in and you could be 12 years old and meet people with very bad agendas who wanted to recruit you into something. You wanted to, like, influence your ideology or wanted to, like, you know, insisted that, you know, when you believe in the far right ideology and if you didn't get on board with those ideas, then you couldn't play their— you couldn't game with them. You couldn't play, you know, Minecraft with them. You couldn't do whatever the— your online gaming world was. And— because a lot of the stuff was oriented around gaming. And, I mean, there's— so in that way, I think that it has had a radicalizing, effect. But I don't think that's the only reason. And I think that to blame the Internet is to take the responsibility off of, you know, parents, off of our society. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that people, you know, can become—

00:33:36 Andrew Keen: Should we even use— I mean, given the nature of this book and given the seriousness, at least in some people's minds of the current situation in America, should we use the b word, blame? Is it helpful?

00:33:47 Janet Reitman: No. No. I don't believe— I don't— I think that— I, you know, I think we're kind of all complicit on some level. Right? I believe in personal responsibility. I think that, as soon as you start to try to put blame on something, you remove any kind of blame from yourself. And I think the most important thing to do is to kind of examine, maybe examine some of your own failings. Maybe examine some of the ways you've taken your eyes off the ball or, you know, or your friends have or your— you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't think that you can blame any one thing. And believe— you know, there's a girl in the book who explores this concept with herself. How do you— who do you blame? Well, you can blame this, this, this, this, you know, and ultimately, everybody is complicit on some level. So, you know, I think— but I think that there are specifically— there are certain incidents I do think you can blame. I think you can blame the Iraq war. I think you can blame, the repeated 9/11 imagery that was played right in the aftermath of those attacks that were kind of an indoctrination. I mean, they were, you know, I watched— Let me just tell you. I'm a New Yorker. I watched this live. I stood on my rooftop on the morning of 9/11. I watched the buildings collapse, from not very far away. I had pieces of the airplane meals from American Airlines drift over the river and land in my neighborhood in front of my building in Brooklyn. It is a visceral experience for me and for a lot of people I know. I know people who have serious health problems because they live downtown and not too far from the World Trade Center, and that's it. Their lungs will forever be damaged. I mean, it's real. And, I watch this— that footage or particularly the image of the falling man, that beautiful, beautiful picture you were showing. I mean, that's— that is— I hate using the word trigger, but it is kind of triggering. I mean, it is like— I can— I just [unclear] right there. And America was put there, you know, watching— I mean, there's a woman in my book named Marlo Cadeddu, who's a lawyer, who represents Muslim clients ultimately. And on the morning of 9/11, she's in Dallas, Texas. And, you know, she finds out what happens. It's horrible. She's devastated. And over the next year, she begins to see this— you know, every time she walks into, like, a convenience store, she's seeing images of 9/11. She's seeing, you know, these videos playing over and over again. It's on, you know, on whatever news program, especially if you watch Fox News. I think it was— they played it on, like, kind of repeat. Never forget these towers collapsing. And she thought about what is that doing? It's indoctrinating you. It's having a really major impact on you. And I agree with that, and I think that had a— it embedded that mentality and those images in the minds of Americans that were not in New York on that day and would have otherwise been very disconnected from it. And it connected everybody to this one moment and made them angry. And I think that's a really big problem, actually.

00:37:15 Andrew Keen: You've been very generous, Janet, with your time. Couple more questions. We began, with a reference to George Packer's [as spoken: Placker's] The Unwinding. As I said, the book comes with a great blurb. I know you just did an event with him, who is a master of this kind of nonfiction narrative tying together, people's lives into a broader narrative, a kind of a symphonic, a nonfiction, symphony. But last time, I saw George, he was actually on the show. He has a new book out, a novel called The Emergency. I wonder for you as a writer— and also Kurt Andersen has a new novel out, The Breakup. He was just on the show. Another great American writer, someone who's written a number of books, invest— Nonfiction books investigating contemporary America. He's also shifted to fiction. Were you ever tempted by that? Do you see a big difference between what you're doing in terms of this symphonic non, nonfiction work and a novel. Are you somewhere in between in a way?

00:38:26 Janet Reitman: I think so. I mean, I think that— I, you know, I know that George has said that, like, kind of the only way you can write about this stuff is through fiction. At this point in time, I really do think, like, the only way you can, you know, you can get at what's going on is somehow through fiction because it's just too hard to keep up with it in nonfiction. And I'm a huge fan of both of them. I mean, I— you know, Kurt— I love Kurt Andersen as well. I, wanted to use fiction techniques in my book, which is nonfiction. So I read a lot of fiction. I didn't read very much nonfiction while I was writing this book at all. I mean, except for— I did read George's book, obviously, and I read some other similar, you know, people that wrote sort of similar themes on similar themes, but not many. And— but instead, I read, like, Libra, for example, John— Don DeLillo's amazing—

00:39:22 Andrew Keen: And he, of course, wrote a book about falling. What was it called? The novel? Was it—

00:39:28 Janet Reitman: The Falling— The— Was it—

00:39:30 Andrew Keen: The fall—

00:39:30 Janet Reitman: The Falling Man. Wasn't it— No. It wasn't called The Falling Man. [ed.: DeLillo's 2007 novel is titled Falling Man.] It was called—

00:39:34 Andrew Keen: I thought it was. But, anyway, certainly on that theme—

00:39:37 Janet Reitman: I have it in the other room. No. He's done. He's— Yeah. He's amazing. I mean, I read— Richard Powers is an incredible author, amazing writer, and he's— his book, The Overstory was really beautiful and a wonderful— it was about— Ultimately, you know, it was about the environmental movement. It was about radical environmentalists who I, in fact, like, we all sort of covered from back in the day. These, like, the ELF and these, like, radical environmentalist types. And— but he wrote a novel that could— it was about trees and all these different characters that were connected to trees. And, ultimately, it was connected to the environmental movement and to radical environmentalism and to the prosecution of several people who became radical environmentalists and were involved in a deadly incident. And, so he took— he— in other words, he took something real. He took something like— he took nonfiction, and he wrote a fictional book about that through [unclear] stories. And I thought that was, you know, fascinating and wonderful, and I, you know, was— it could have easily been nonfiction. Didn't have to be. It was fiction, but it could have easily been nonfiction. And I think that you can do that in books if you know how to write about characters, if you interview people, if you know people. I mean, you have to be able— There's a lot of journalism today that's very data-driven. And I think that there's— you know, if you want to do something that's not data-driven, I mean, it takes a tremendous amount of outreach and time and sitting down with people, listening to people, talking to people, and, you know, and it does lend itself more creativity.

00:41:19 Andrew Keen: Right. It takes a lot of time. I mean, your last book was, back in 2011, Inside Scientology, which, was also a highly [unclear] book. Very well received, the bestseller. Finally, Janet, it's, as you know, not a cheerful book, dark in many ways, like the last twenty five years of American history, but not totally dark. It has glimmers of hope. What— I mean, people gonna read the book. It's out, and it's an important read, The Inheritance: An American Tragedy in Five Acts. You need to read all five acts. But what are the positive lessons that we might glean from this book from the characters that you cover?

00:42:04 Janet Reitman: That if you— I mean, the— First of all, that you can change and that it— that you know, I mean, every single— it's hard to say, like, it— this is a book about a number of people, so it's hard to say when it is about one major lesson. But I think that, like I said, you know, the people in this book are idealistic people. They're trying to do their best, and they're not defeated. They're not defeated. You know? They do their best, and sometimes their best lands them in difficult situations. But not a single one of those— these are real people. Not a single one of them would regret their choices. I mean, I know that. You know, they are— like, I think the lesson is if you— you know, don't give up on this country, don't give up on your ideals of who we're supposed to be, are we a country that does— that isn't really good to put people— you know, to be rounding up undocumented people and deporting them to places they've never been in their lives before? Is it— was it good for us to torture people? Like, you know, have we been— Have we dealt with our veterans in the way that maybe we should not have? Like, if you think that there have been things that we've done wrong, well, like, own it. It's okay. You know, that's probably— we probably have. And the hope in that is like, hey. You can recognize it. You can move forward and change that. You can vote. I mean, it's a book. It should empower people to think about— it's not such a bummer. I mean, it— I mean, first of all, these are— this is a book about people, and they're weird. So it's, like, it's weird. It's not a book about, like, the boring— it's not a boring politics book, please. It really— it's— because I hate boring politics books. So it's not a boring politics book, but it is— you know, it's a book about people that are having pretty intense experiences and that, you know, try to hold on to their faith, and I think that's very much like all of us. And so, hopefully, you'll be able to identify with a couple of people or, you know, you'll recognize yourself or recognize things about our country through this book.

00:44:24 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. Don't give up on your country. If there's a positive conclusion to this major new book, The Inheritance: An American Treasure [as spoken: Tragedy] in Five Acts by, Janet Reitman. Janet, congratulations on the book. Thank you so much.

00:44:38 Janet Reitman: And—

00:44:38 Andrew Keen: I hope we're not gonna wait another fourteen years for a new book. Are you working on something?

00:44:43 Janet Reitman: No. I'm about— Well, I will start working on something for the Times, the magazine where I write for. And, yeah, like, I always tell my agent, the next book I do is gonna be, like, two years. So I'm hoping the next time it will— I'll be able to stick to that because, yeah, eight years now. Two years, good.

00:45:03 Andrew Keen: Good. Well, we'll see you in a couple of years, Janet. Good luck with the new book. Thank you so much.

00:45:07 Janet Reitman: Great. Thank you so much.