Gary Baker | Aug 22, 2024

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Gary, welcome to our show. I'm so glad to talk to you today. I don't want to ruin any surprises, but you have a quite inspiring life story. So tell me, what was the most difficult point in your life? [00:00:17] Speaker B: When I was studying medical technology in Long Beach, Long Beach Memorial Medical center, to get my. It was an internship before you can get a license. And I had just come down from Montana. I wasn't used to living in a city, and I was trying to date women, but I was awfully busy with the internship. But there was a lady in the laboratory that I was really attracted to, and I was dating her and stuff. And at some point, our relationship just kind of fell apart, and I decided I was going to leave Long beach. So I was living in this really bad apartment in downtown Long beach, and I was saving money like crazy. So I said, well, you know, I've had enough of this. I'm getting out of here. So that was kind of a moment where I didn't know what was going to happen, and I would have been surprised at what happened, but that was kind of a moment that changed my whole life. [00:01:21] Speaker A: What did you do next? [00:01:23] Speaker B: I was, I'm gonna get out of here. I actually had spent, like two years of my life living in a van, and I still had this van. So I hop in the van and I drove 8000 miles across the United States. I went up the west coast, down the Rockies, through Texas, down to the Florida Keys, and up to Boston and say, and I had a year rail pass. I'm gonna go to Europe, man, so it's gonna be safe. Three months eurail pass. So I land in London, and I saw London. And then I started hitchhiking. And when I was a kid, I used to hitchhike a lot. I was a hippie, right? Hippie's hitchhike. And so I hitchhiked around the United Kingdom, clear up to Inverness, Scotland, down to Wales, Salisbury, and. And then I started my rail pass. And I don't know how far I went. I went from Sweden to Morocco and through quite ten countries, but I ended up in Greece, and I still had $2,000. And I made one of the first of the crazy decisions that were to occur over the next year. Decisions no one in their right mind would make dangerous decisions. But I had $2,000. And so I bought some airline tickets and started instead. My initial plan was to. Had been to go back to London and then Boston and go home. You know, just like the classic how many people I'm going to go to Europe. I'm a 20 year old guy, you know. No. So I end up in Athens and go, oh, geez, I'm almost halfway around the world. Maybe I should just keep going east. And so I spent four months in Egypt and Israel, which were very educational and wonderful times, although it was kind of sad. That's when John Lennon died. That was pretty sad when I was in the Golan Heights on a banana farm. Then the next thing you know, I was in Karachi, Pakistan, and I traveled through the length of Pakistan to Lahore, over to Amritsar, where the golden temple is for the. The sikh religion, punjabi people, and went into India. And overall, I spent seven months in India, spent some time in Goa, where my wife is from. When I first met her, we had something to talk about. [00:03:59] Speaker A: You've described this travel right around the world that you did alone. [00:04:04] Speaker B: Correct. [00:04:07] Speaker A: Which is also the name of your book, right? [00:04:09] Speaker B: The last lonely traveler. That's right, yeah. [00:04:13] Speaker A: And you, I, you know that most Americans don't have a passport. Most Americans have. Have not furthered more than, what is it? What is the stat like 60 miles from the place they were born. [00:04:27] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:28] Speaker A: Americans are not global travelers and definitely not alone. [00:04:33] Speaker B: Not in the eighties. You can keep pretty busy seeing the Grand Canyon, you know. [00:04:37] Speaker A: Fair enough. You did something that by all means, is kind of crazy, right? It's the road not taken. [00:04:46] Speaker B: The crazy decision. Go, oh, I've got hardly any money left, and I think I'm gonna keep on going to Karachi. Right. [00:04:53] Speaker A: And I can only imagine that you were telling yourself, it's gonna be okay. Tell us the different stories of what you experienced. [00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah. When I went on a 200 miles trek in Nepal over the Annapurna pass. It's almost 18,000ft, wearing like, a cotton hoodie. Right. It's like ten below zero. [00:05:15] Speaker A: You did it in winter or summer? [00:05:16] Speaker B: Why didn't I die? [00:05:18] Speaker A: Was this winter or summer? When did you do it? [00:05:19] Speaker B: It was in the summer. I went up there when the monsoons had started in Goa. And so there was, every day there was hail. In Nepal, it's the same weather system. And I lost like 35 pounds. I made it back to Kathmandu and to celebrate, I actually been traveling with this german fellow on the track, and we wanted to celebrate, to have a nice dinner. And this merchant said he would make us a chicken dinner, and it makes me sad. And so he's all proud of his dinner, and my german fellow and I came to dinner at his home and he presented us with the chicken, and it was $5 for the chicken, you know, the Costco chickens that are $5. They're gigantic chickens. Well, I didn't know, coming from United States that most of the chickens in these third world countries or developing countries are pretty small. And I. I'd been spending fifty cents a day living in India, so I just spent ten days worth of my money on a little tiny chicken, and I wasn't happy about it. And I was also really stressed out. I had been through a lot of dangerous things and physically exhausting things, and I was not polite to that guy who made that nice dinner. I was upset about it, and I let him know it. And to this day, I feel very, very bad about that. So, you know, that's one lesson I learned that I didn't realize that, you know, how expensive meat was. You know, meat is cheaper here than it is for people who make way less money than we do. So, you know, that was kind of a lesson where I had a, kind of was kicking myself and the rest of my life for being so rude. [00:07:33] Speaker A: And, in fact, the Nepali, they eat meat somewhere between the lucky ones once a week and once a month. So, in fact, for them to be able to have meat is actually quite a. Quite a special occasion. [00:07:48] Speaker B: Yes, yes. My wife's from India. She's a Christian from Goa right there. I think St. Thomas is interned there in Goa, but, yeah, she tells stories like, oh, boy. You know, we had, my dad came home, he was a merchant marine, and we had a chicken for like five people and a little chicken. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I, we were poor, but we were hunters, and my grandfather got an elk 38 years in a row and died hunting elk up in the mountains. Bitteret range. Yeah. And so we had. I was used to having meat even though we were poor. [00:08:30] Speaker A: That's not trivial. When we. I did on a poor hike and just to. Just to share with the audience, this is a. Depending on when you did it, it's between two to four weeks of a hike. Right. I'm assuming for you it took about three weeks, right? [00:08:46] Speaker B: It took three weeks, yeah. [00:08:47] Speaker A: So you. [00:08:48] Speaker B: I didn't know anybody else who ever went up by Annapurna. [00:08:52] Speaker A: It's a, it's, it's a. It's a great hike. I. It's beautiful, right. You go through all these basically four different terrains. Right. [00:09:00] Speaker B: That's what climate changes. [00:09:01] Speaker A: One of the most beautiful things, you know, person can do. But so you got to experience this very different culture. And there was a clash of cultures. Right. You had a certain expectation. You didn't know how rare meat was, and you didn't know the difference in meat availability and pricing and cost, and your expectation basically clashed with a reality and a different culture. So you learned something from that, right? That things are not the same everywhere in the world. [00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And I really appreciated my life in the United States, too, and going, oh, my God, foods. We spend only a much smaller fraction of our income on food than everybody else. [00:09:46] Speaker A: What about the Middle east? [00:09:47] Speaker B: You know, the place that first shocked me was when I went to Morocco, because I went from Spain to Morocco. And it was really disturbing for me that you didn't see females anywhere. And I'd go out at night to the town square, and we'd be smoking and sipping on tea, and there were no. There are no women around. And that was pretty disturbing for me. And it was that way in Pakistan also. I hitchhiked around Israel. I think I hitchhiked. I hitchhiked around Israel, and I hitchhiked through the Gaza Strip. And I'm going down this highway on my way to Egypt, and I got picked up by four young palestinian men in a tiny car. And I get in this car with them, and they meet. They leave the main road and start driving down this narrow wood, dirt road to a village. And I get there, and the whole village came out to look at me, and they brought me. I went to the home of the village elder, and I'm sitting there talking to him. He spoke some English, so his whole place was full of people. And there were people outside the door all wondering about what I was. And this, like, nine year old girl comes walking in, and there's no women anywhere, but this nine year old girl comes walking in with a metal tray full of food, and they're feeding me, and. And then I spent the night there. And the little girl brings in breakfast in the morning. And on my way out, the house had two main rooms, and there was about halfway up the center of one of the walls, there was a, like, eight by eight hole framed hole, and the women were on the other side. And so on my way out, I said, you know, I yelled back to the house, you know, thanks for the wonderful food, you know, but I'm going, man. I never even saw these, these ladies that made me my food. I went. I took the train all the way up to the valley of the kings and stuff up there, Luxor, Aswan. So I was all over, I mean, the main parts of Egypt and all around Israel for, like, four months. [00:12:23] Speaker A: I've never been. But for me, it's always been a dream to go see the pyramids. [00:12:27] Speaker B: A lot of times when I was in the Middle east, women would ask me to please go with them where they're going, because they couldn't go alone. And so we were hanging out at the pyramids and there was nobody. There was us, these two people at the pyramids, nothing else. And, you know, we could climb on the pyramids. People, hippies would go sleep on the top of the pyramids. I didn't have the nerve to do that. I was able to see the Mona Lisa from like three inches away. You can't do that anymore. The Sistine chapel is a madhouse, you know. So my gift, the biggest gift in my life, was that I got to see the world before the tourist came flocking in. [00:13:13] Speaker A: So you've gone from Middle east to Asia? [00:13:19] Speaker B: Sure. [00:13:21] Speaker A: That is a very different culture. What were your experiences there? [00:13:26] Speaker B: I wasn't really good at spotting con artists and stuff because Montana people were more honest generally. So I had, you know. But that's kind of a risk you have to take in order to be exposed to new situations and overall, over. I'm alive. I'm still alive. I almost was, not more than once. But one of the other themes of my life, it's coming from being raised in Montana and being really independent, is you take risks, you're not living if you didn't take any risks. When I was a kid, my mom didn't want me to, but we used to dive off the bridge into the river really far. No adults around, right? And we did things like that. And I've broken twelve bones in every appendage and in my chest. And I've been on fire and I've had five concussions. But I have had a lot of fun. [00:14:31] Speaker A: So, you know, I can't let you get away with just saying these things and then moving along. So I'm gonna stop you there. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Okay? [00:14:41] Speaker A: You said you had some really close calls in Asia. [00:14:44] Speaker B: One close call was on Annapurna, so we were going over the ridge. I don't know if you were up to the pass at which you look off to your right and you see it looks like a really easy trail to the top, right? It's not. People get killed up there. But when I was up at the top, I was with the german fellow and his feet were cold. [00:15:07] Speaker A: Cold or wet? [00:15:08] Speaker B: They were wet. Seriously, man, you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, so. [00:15:12] Speaker A: So let's just take a moment. Wet feet in cold. That's frostbite. You could lose a leg you could lose a toe. This is very dangerous. And above and beyond that, you're at a high altitude. So what that means is that you're at serious risk of altitude sickness. Altitude sickness can kill. Every season we hear about either tourists or porters, that people thought they were drunk, but no, that was a symptom of altitude sickness, and these people die. This is not Disneyland, right? This is a dangerous environment and a dangerous trek. And as dangerous as it is nowadays, 30 years ago, it was way more dangerous. So just to kind of align everybody to what we're talking about. [00:15:57] Speaker B: You're an interesting guy. Are you? Well, you know, some things many people don't understand. [00:16:03] Speaker A: I just want to bring our audience. [00:16:05] Speaker B: Wet kills, man. When I was in Alaska, people used to say cotton kills because it would get wet and freezing. Yeah. So, yeah, we almost, you know, it really was way below zero on the. We left at two in the morning and started climbing. Right. And the hairs and my nose were freezing together. And. Raised in Montana. I know when. And that was at 12,000ft, we were going up to 18. And so we're probably experiencing maybe 20 below at some point, but. Yeah. And his feet got wet and he wanted to get down fast and so he was saying, let's go down in that gulch over there. That'll get us down really fast. And I'm going, no. My hobby in college was following streams to their sources. And one thing I know is, on your way, there are cascades and cliffs and, you know, very difficult situations. And I talked him out of that and I think we saved his life. [00:17:03] Speaker A: I got to die. [00:17:04] Speaker B: I think we would have died if we'd have gone down, taken, and we didn't have really a map. Right. I mean, this is crazy stuff. And we were in front of us was this huge. Oh, my God. The most beautiful glaciers everywhere. Blue ice and the sun rose and it was golden and it. It's just amazing. But there was no trail because the snow on the glacier covers up. There was no trail. And we're on this ridge eating glucose cookies or whatever and some frozen tea and trying to decide how we're going to get down. I said, maybe we should cross this glacier and see what's on the other side. And if we hadn't done that, I think we would have perished. Yeah, that's. [00:17:54] Speaker A: That's. That's absolutely crazy. Now, nowadays, you know, you're walking in a long line with other tourists because it's completely. [00:18:04] Speaker B: With a guide. [00:18:04] Speaker A: With a guide. Yeah. So you guys didn't even have a porter. You had no, nobody look. [00:18:10] Speaker B: No. We spent like two weeks getting up to. I can't remember the name of the town. Starts with a J. Johnson, something like that. And have an airport up there. It was interesting. I'm an, I'm a pilot, too. I'm going, this is an interesting airport to land at. You get one chance because there's no go rounds. You're in a valley. Your go. Yeah, so, you know, we went from 9000 to 12,000ft every single day for like ten days or something. And so, and so we were. And I'm from Montana anyway, and I have a super high hemoglobin and stuff. [00:18:40] Speaker A: But your, your german friend at a risky situation, right. Borderline phosphorite bite. How did you guys make it through? [00:18:51] Speaker B: You know, it was hell climbing the hill at first. You'd see the sun rise and it was orange on the mountains behind us, and go, the sun's rising and it was starting to be beautiful. And then we come up over the top and there's like this blue and orange and then we're. And then there's this, this feeling like we're not going to die, you know? And, and I've hiked enough to know I go three times faster down the hill. And so the rest of it was pretty good. I walked 45 miles that day. There's another little sub story about going down the backside. So we, I, we made, maybe went like five or 10 miles down from the pass and there was a Sherpa coming up the other way. Young guy, same age as I was. And he had a horrible cut on his foot. The ball of his foot. He didn't have, he didn't, wait, he didn't wear shoes, right? Maybe the Sherpas where I'm now, but they didn't then. And he had this nasty cut and he didn't speak any English. And we were having lunch by this crazy raging river, so steep that the water's just crashing and screaming and it's like silver because there's so much silt in it and the, and so I see this cut and I'm a medical technologist and all this, and I'm going, man, we need to help this guy. And he's helping, he's like waving his arms, help me, you know. And so we, we cleaned it like gravel out of his cut and I had a bunch of medical supplies because when I was in Israel, I was helping a fellow clear rocks from a field and he was throwing me the rocks and I was throwing them into this metal bin. And I kind of miss estimated once and I could get this rock flying. It was, you know, like a ten pound rock. And I slammed my hand into the metal edge of the bin and it made a hole clear through my ring finger on my right hand and all the way through the scar on both sides. And so I bandaged myself up, but I still had it in my backpack. So we put in this antibiotic sav and did all this stuff. And then we just gave him all of the, all of the supplies we had. And I was wondering, why is this guy, why is he going that way? Annie, where is he going? I just came down from the mountain. There was nothing up there. Where's he going? Is his family lived. I didn't see any hots or anything, but. So then we got up and walked further down the mountain and I realized I left my umbrella there where I was eating lunch. Okay. This says something about how important, like, a $2.50 umbrella can be because I hiked 5 miles back up the mountain to get my umbrella that I bought in New York City about the time I was kidnapped by the mooney's. That's another story. But that umbrella was really important. So I'd made a ten mile hike to go get my umbrella. [00:22:08] Speaker A: Okay, explain this to the audience. Why is the umbrella important? [00:22:11] Speaker B: Why did you do that? Oh, my God. It's. For one thing, I'm apparently a mostly swedish background. I only recently figured that out. But I needed protection against the sun. I need protection against the wind. I need protection against the rain. You know, that umbrella was a very valuable tool and I could not let it go. Matter of fact, without it, I ended up. Further story. I ended up getting a sunstroke at one point. Yeah. [00:22:43] Speaker A: You can't carry enough water for you for three weeks. What do you do? [00:22:46] Speaker B: When I was a kid, we lived not far from the continental divide. Right. And we always drank all the water. We never. I never remember getting sick and so we just drank the water. When I was a kid and this was awfully high up there, you know. But I'm a bit tech and so I, and I studied microbiology and stuff. And I'm going most of the time in India. I drank tea all the time. [00:23:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:10] Speaker B: And there were farmer shacks and you could stop by a farmer's shack and he would give you a. You could buy a pancake for about a half of a rupee or something. And a pancake was some wheat flour that was mixed with water and cooked and they would also, you could get some tea, and sometimes we would feel. Pardon? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sounds familiar. And they might put some of this, what they called honey, which was. Shoot, my wife knows the name, but it's essentially a concentrated sugar cane juice. Made it into a pancake because he had the sweet stuff on it. But, yeah, I can remember. I mean, one of my problems in India and one of the things that influenced part of my political outlook on certain things is that they had really high import taxes, like 200%. And it was really frustrating. I needed a bottle of. A water bottle, and I could not, in 1982, purchase a bottle that did not leak. So I had. I did have a bottle. It might have been 700 ML or something that I. But I had to keep it upright, so I would carry that. And, yeah, so mostly I drank water that was. Was probably heated up by the farmers. [00:24:44] Speaker A: So. So, okay, you're trying to get away with this, but you said you were kidnapped. [00:24:49] Speaker B: I'm gonna get away. [00:24:50] Speaker A: Did you say you were kidnapped? [00:24:52] Speaker B: Oh, Jesus. Cry Minnie. I said a lot of weird stuff happening. Okay. [00:24:58] Speaker A: Jesus, God. [00:25:00] Speaker B: I was in New York City, and I had. I had my red van, my 40 con line van, and I had a bicycle, and I was traveling around, like, on Fifth Avenue, and here's the naive hick in New York City. And I was approached, and they said, hey, you know, do you want to go up to a farm and have a lot of fun? And. Yeah, okay. What the hell? And I had my van, and so they said, well, let's use your van. We'll go up there. So we went up to the Adironics, upper New York, where the mooney's had a. They had purchased, I think it was a boy scout camp, and it was a big controversy. I remember it in the news. And so I ended up at this camp, and it was. And it was fun. There were nice people. It was extremely regimented. You could not do anything that wasn't. I run to this day, like three, 4 miles every Sunday. So it was Sunday, and I put on my tennis shoes and I started running down the road, and these guys say, you got to go back. You got to know. And said, no, I'm just finished my run. Then they'd send somebody in a car, and about the third person, they're saying, you got to go back to the camp. And so I'm with them for a week or two, and I'm going, oh. And I'm sitting with a group, and. And everybody's talking about how they. How they enjoyed everything so much. And how it was, this was such a friendly and nice environment, very christian. And then one of the people, one of the participants said, geez, you know, when I first saw you guys, I thought you were a bunch of moonies or something. But this world unification church is just wonderful. But, but the world unified. They said, no, you know, we, we do follow the teachings of Reverend Moon or whatever his, what his name with that kind of made me feel like I'd been misled to some extent. And so a few days later, I was asking, when I first went there, they had me back my car into this kind of a dead end space in the woods surrounded by trees. And they had to have the keys to my cardinal. So I'm saying, you know, I want to go now, but, but, oh, and then this fellow, what was his name? Really nice, really smart guy. He was the head of the church in the, in the US. Dang. And he parked his car in front of mine and so I could not get out. And so I was kind of, I'd been tricked into going into the, to their camp and I had given up my freedom of mobility. I was one of the only people there. Everyone else went up in a bus, but I went up in my own vehicle. And so it, it took me three, four, five days before I finally, and I'm such a nice guy. I'm not, I'm not going to be too pressure and, and, you know, and I like those people well enough. But finally the point came. He said, you know, you've got to give me the keys to my car and have the president of the church move his old Buick away from the front of us so I can go. And, well, we'll see about maybe tomorrow. Well, that I was planning, I had a buck saw and I was planning on sawing down the trees that were, that were surrounding my car so I could leave. And then that morning, they gave me the keys to my car. And this is one of the big lessons in my life too. And I drove away from the Moonies and I, and I, and I drove these windy roads in the Adirondacks and there was a, it was one of those viewing pullovers and I parked the car and I'm looking out across these valleys and I, and I said, I can't believe that that happened to me. You know, I can be essentially, I was brainwashed in just a few weeks, right? [00:29:17] Speaker A: I mean, I barely dodged a bulletin. [00:29:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And they really, you know, I was, I was, I'd considered, like, moving in with their group and that was a big. Because I'm this independent guy from Montana. And I was in shock that they could manipulate me to that extent. That was a big lesson in my life. There's a lot more to that story. Oh, God. [00:29:50] Speaker A: So, just so I'm not as familiar as you, obviously, about the moons, but this is a religious cult, basically. [00:29:57] Speaker B: Yes, it's. Yeah, it is. Reverend Sun Young moon. I think he's a Korean. They thought he was held as a messiah, a christian messiah. And the world Unification Church still exists. It's still controversial. You know, they're famous for having these, like, weddings of 2000 couples and they're all. And people that never met each other before, but they're set up by the reverend. I don't know. I think maybe Sun Yun moon is no longer alive. You got a lot of stories to tell when you're 68 years old. [00:30:35] Speaker A: These stories, you know, topavanapurna, basically in a religious cult. These. These stories could have ended very badly. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. [00:30:45] Speaker A: Very, very badly. Okay, so you come back from your trip abroad, which lasted how long in total? [00:30:55] Speaker B: Oh, I guess a little over a year and a half. [00:30:57] Speaker A: Year and a half. And you're back in the States. [00:31:01] Speaker B: What do you do? Oh, gosh, you know, I was sleeping in the woods in Oahu, but I remember I was back in the States and I'm gone. I'm looking at these Americans and they seem so naive, but they're happy. They had big smiles on their faces and stuff. But that was kind of. Kind of caught my attention. I'm going. The Americans, like, live in their own world. [00:31:30] Speaker A: This is what we call a reverse cultural shock. It's when your own culture, it's a real thing. Seriously, when your own culture suddenly seems weird to you after being exposed for a prolonged amount of times in different cultures, how did they seem weird? What was suddenly caught your eye? What suddenly seemed different? [00:31:49] Speaker B: I think one of the image that actually is in my mind right now, I was in Oahu, and there was a pretty large man, kind of like a Texan with a cowboy hat on and stuff. And he had this big grin on his face. And it just seemed so foreign after being in Asia for so long. And, you know, he was so large and he was so well fed and so wealthy, and it just seemed really strange. One of the things that was kind of caught my attention, too, in some of the places, particularly Japan, I hitchhiked around Japan. Oh, yeah, that's another giant story. But it was really quite evident that the young people were much bigger than their parents in the eighties, a lot of those parents had been through World War Two, and they were. I mean, the kids were like 30% larger than their parents. [00:32:56] Speaker A: When you say bigger, you mean physically. [00:32:58] Speaker B: Physically larger people. [00:33:00] Speaker A: Why is that? [00:33:01] Speaker B: Because they were, they had nutrition. You know, all throughout Asia, there were some really hard times from the forties through even the eighties. It's. And so they were, the parents did not get the nutrition they should have had. But prosperity did eventually come. And, you know, the. Even in, like, Taiwan and even in India, the kids were much larger than their parents. [00:33:31] Speaker A: And, I mean, there were significant world events during these years, right? I mean, you grew up through. Through history, right? [00:33:44] Speaker B: Well, the one that comes to mind is, you know, while we're talking right now, I almost cried several times. I'm serious. I went, like, ten years of my life and I never cried once. I was. I had broken home and I was extremely. I bought a motorcycle when I was 13 with my own money, and I went wild and I left home when I was 17. And I was very independent and very unattached. But I. When I was in India, yeah, Reagan got shot. And I remember when Kennedy got shot in 1962, I was like, I don't know, what, six or seven. And I remember how it tore the country apart even as a child. I go, oh, my God, this is really bad. And so when I heard that Reagan, I was in, like, I don't know, varanasi or someplace, and there's, you know, I was walking down the street and there's all these people, like, in New York City or something, running every direction. And this indian fellow says, did you know Reagan got shot? And I said, are you kidding me? And he said, yeah. And I broke down crying so hard, I couldn't stand up. I'm sitting there in the street with people walking past me. And something that used to happen to me a lot in India. Some fellow walks up to me and says, you know, come with me and let's go have some tea. That just happened a lot. I don't, whether practicing English or what, I. They're bankers and mayors that would take this hippie and it went into their office and start talking to him. But, you know, come in here. I think it was a banking office or something. And they set me down at an empty desk, and I just cried. They sat there and cried. And I thought Reagan was dead. Apparently, you know, he, he was just shot. [00:35:47] Speaker A: But about 911, at the 20 hours, I was like, that's. My initial response was disbelief. I was, like, just telling the story. Goosebumps immediately. But I was like, bullshit. You don't laugh about that. That's not a legitimate joke. That's not funny. And then he said to me, he said, no, I'm not joking. Yeah, and the. I can barely talk. I mean, my whole body is shivering. But like that. I will never forget all the details of where I was, what I was doing, the shock, the feeling. I remember the equipment that. The chair that I was sitting in, the desk, the screen. Like, everything was just etched into my brain. Those experiences, really. They never leave you, do they? [00:36:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Even a six year old remembers Kennedy got shot.