Matt Bevan

Due to his experience in counterterrorism and security, he was offered a job as the head of security for the World Trade Center.

He called his producer friend Chris Isham to tell him the news.

Isham said, well, at least they're not going to bomb it again, referencing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

John O'Neill responded, they'll probably try to finish the job.

John's first day was August 23rd, 2001.

He died in the centre's South Tower on September 11th, just three weeks into the job.

The coincidence there is just unbelievable.

You couldn't write about it.

It's just amazing.

Now, if you were around back then, you'll remember that there was understandable concern that something like this might happen again.

A lot of changes were made to try and make people feel safe from terror attacks.

And a lot of those changes were quite annoying.

The sort of sense I had was that the way we were going with just, you know, ridiculous airport security checks and super intrusive surveillance all the time, it wasn't really making us safer.

This is tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has some complicated opinions about how the world should be run, which we'll get into in the next episode of our series.

But let's just say at this stage, he wasn't a fan of the government trying to intrude into people's lives in the name of trying to stop terrorism.

He was concerned that if there were another attack along the lines of 9-11, the government would try to become even more intrusive.

If the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even want to think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack.

And so you have to prevent it to stop more erosion.

He was more in favour of the liberty side of John O'Neill's ordered liberty seesaw.

Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be tough on terrorism and things like this?