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Dear 9/11 Truthers, you suck.
I have spent 25 years arguing with your nonsense. But you picked the wrong guy to fight with. You’re fighting with a guy who missed one question on his SAT (verbal, perfect math), which took him to Caltech which taught him to tear everything down into first principles and build it back up again. That took me to Silicon Valley, where I became a data nerd because I liked the flow of data, and a UI nerd because I liked the challenge.
You can’t be a data nerd unless you can picture flows and systems of pieces. That helped me understand 9/11.
You can’t be a UI nerd without the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes.
So I get it. You would like someone to be in charge, some master conspiracy behind the scenes pulling the strings. It’s scary to think that God leaves us to our own devices, that there are more stupid people than evil people in the world, and mostly, humans just muddle through. This is the reverse side of Protestant Sunday School “God is watching out for you, and Satan is trying to get you.”
Unfortunately for you, I’m not Protestant. I’m Greek Orthodox. I believe, and have found to be true in my own life, that God gives us what we need, not what we want. I did not want to have a brain tumor. I did not want to be held captive in OHSU for 40 days (TBF, hallucinating), and now have a brain that is super smart for 4 hours a day, and stupid after that.
But I’m happier than I was a shit-doesn’t-stink Silicon Valley executive. And it’s 2026, and I have the time, and over a weekend, I can stop telling people that buildings are hollow and made out of pieces, that gravity wins, and if they don’t believe me, build a tower out of dominoes.
I can build a sim.
So that’s what I did.
Play it: gtbwtcsim.grok.me
Bonfire
When I was a Boy Scout, to earn my Fire Safety merit badge I had to build a bonfire that could be lit with one match, and for the Wilderness Survival badge I had to do it without the match.
Fire spreads, heat rises, so fire spreads upwards.
This is my wood stove. I have both a wood stove and a fireplace in my house, because after the ice storm, I tried not freezing to death via a fireplace fire, and it was useless. So I got the wood stove, which has done its job: it has scared the ice storms away.
The wood stove people gave me fire starters. I don’t use them. I was a Boy Scout. I use a hatchet to make small pieces of wood that get lit, that heat up the large pieces of wood.
Fire starters are sawdust covered in wax. Wood covered in an accelerant. This will come up later. The wood stove people attach a thermometer to your wood stove. If you look at the photo of the thermometer, you’ll see it’s marked from 100F to 900F. This is a critical piece of the wood stove. (40-500 in French units.)
This is my second wood stove. When I lived in Flagstaff, in a cabin (double wide) with shitty insulation, I had to heat it with wood, because the electric baseboards would be $300/month. I almost burned the house down, because what you generally do with a wood stove is strangle the fire by closing the vents to about 1/2”. I forgot to do that one night, and left them open wide.
I did not burn to death in a fire, because Smudge the cat gave what I can only describe as the Howls of the Damned in the middle of the night, and woke me and my then-fiancee, now wife, up. When we got up, the wood stove was chugging like a freight train. Not only was the wood stove glowing red, the pile of wood next to it was on fire. Closing the vents calmed the fire down, and we threw the burning logs from the wood pile into the snow outside.
Even though I am older and should know better, I have gotten the second wood stove above 900F. When I put a fire in it, I have to set a timer to check it every 15 minutes.
When you build a bonfire, you build it in a pit. It doesn’t have to be as tall as the bonfire. It just has to catch rolling logs, and to define the actual boundary of the fire so it doesn’t spread. It also contains sparks, though if you’ve ever sat around a bonfire, you probably have a few holes in your clothing. That will come up later as well.
So the first simulation is a bonfire. It is a stack of wood in a crisscross pattern. This provides the fire a lot of air. Fire likes air. It is lit with one match. The fire will spread to consume the whole pile, and then gravity keeps the wood in the pit. The wood does not leave the pit. There is no way for the wood to get “sideways” energy.
This sim demonstrates two things: fire spreads, and gravity pulls things down. You can set the fire speed to faster if you don’t want to watch for an hour, but gravity is always 9.81 m/s².
Christmas tree, 1 story
Every year around Christmas, the cheerful folks at Underwriters Laboratories drop the same YouTube video: a dry tree goes up and the room follows.
We silly humans cut a tree, let it dry until the needles are tinder, wrap it in hot lights, and act surprised when it goes. The tree isn’t what takes the house. The couch is. A dry Christmas tree doesn’t smolder politely for hours. Needle ignition is around 300°C / 570°F. One needle lights and you’re in a room-scale bonfire in roughly 30 seconds, flames up around 900°C / 1650°F, heat release into the megawatts. That hits the upholstery. Flame-retardant fabric buys you minutes. Grandma’s acrylic throw does not. Acrylic melts, drips, and keeps the party going. Then the couch foam melts into a burning puddle of death. Watch the video. It’s a trip.
Pretty much everything has an ignition temperature and a burning temperature. Moisture is what decides which one you meet. Water the damn tree. I’m sick of that UL video.
So the second sim demonstrates that in a 1-story house. The house burns down into a pile of rubble. It does not move sideways. Not really that different than the bonfire, TBH.
2 stories
What if the house was taller? Ok, 2 stories, Christmas tree in the living room. Heat rises. Still a pile of rubble. No flying roof.
Apartment
8-story apartment building? Well, apartment buildings have better fireproofing in the hallways. So it’s harder for the fire to spread horizontally. But vertically, heat is still rising. So a 3rd floor apartment will take out the apartments above it.
From the UK: Grenfell fire took three hours to encircle the building. Fire burns the same even if you drink tea.
North Tower
Ok, so now let’s apply this to the North Tower. The islamotards purposefully hijacked planes from Boston going to LA so they would be fully loaded with fuel. Fuel is an accelerant. It was the firestarter. Bin Laden said so.
Yes, kerosene can’t ignite steel. But the fuel is the couch. The kerosene sprayed throughout the floor where the plane collided and caught on fire. The floors on fire burned and caught the floors above them on fire. The fire burned until it got so hot that the joints in the steel beams yielded. Steel doesn’t have to melt to bend.
This sim shows that. The plane crashes into the building, the fire spreads horizontally and upwards for an hour. Eventually, the bottom of the fire, where it’s been burning longest, that steel gives way, and they give up the ghost. Doesn’t matter if it’s one side or all sides. Once one side gives way, the other sides can’t hold up all the weight either, so they all go.
Once a floor collapses, the upper floors fall. The falling building hits the next floor with 5x the rated load of the beams. Those supports buckle. Then they hit the next floor. It’s a chain reaction. This is how all tall buildings collapse. There is no way for them to “tim-ber” like a tree. They’re hollow. For something to timber, the center of gravity has to get off to the side.
Yes, when they blow up buildings on purpose, they collapse like that too. But that’s because gravity is still winning. The amount of energy in a stick of C4 is tiny compared to the amount of energy in a heavy building provided by gravity.
I live in Oregon. I see people cutting trees down all the time. It’s more work than you think to get them to timber. Life is not a Bugs Bunny cartoon. IRL you have to manage the center of gravity to get things to fall sideways.
South Tower
South Tower, same thing.
WTC 7
Is the airplane even necessary? No. Fire is enough. I bring you WTC 7.
What if the fire didn’t spread sideways?
Since this is a simulation, I control the rules. Which means I can experiment with things without having to spend a few $B to build a building and fly things into it.
So what happens if the fire didn’t spread horizontally, but just upwards?
Doesn’t matter. Once one side of the building gives way, the other side can’t support the rest of the weight and those beams snap too.
What if there wasn’t a fire?
What if it was a plane from LA to Boston instead of Boston to LA?
That DOES matter. Without the fully loaded plane, the fire is small, burns itself out. Building is 2x strong enough.
How do you get timber?
Ok, so how do we get the timber truthers want? We make the building solid. Pretty useless building if you ask me. Buildings have to hold people, but whatever. Now the floors can’t compress. So then, yes, you get the top to slide off.
Truther cleanup
Yes, someone stacked UAL puts on Sep 6. What truthers skip: that same advisor bought 115,000 shares of American on Sep 10. Hedge, not prophecy. You’re betting one airline’s management vs another, not that planes fall out of the sky. SEC dug it. No advance-knowledge trading stuck.
So net they didn’t make a ton of money. To understand why they would do that, you have to understand how hedging works.
Hedging is when instead of trying to pick which stock will do well, you try to figure out which stock will do better than another. So you meet CEOs in an industry, pick the dumbest and the smartest, and you short the dumb one and go long the smart one. You’re not betting the industry as a whole will do well. You’re betting on one CEO being better than the other.
That’s what those people were doing. They weren’t betting on the airline industry. They were betting on the management of AA vs UAL.
Don’t trust books written by Doctors of Theology about physics or chemistry. Trust them for how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Rules of engagement, Grumpy style
If you can code, the code is at github.com/twinforces/GTB911sim. Make your own sim. If you prove me wrong, fame and fortune await you.
If you can’t code, there’s a remix button at the top. Click that, and tell Grok what dumbass scenario you want to test. It will be happy to help, but you will have to send Elon at least $40 for Premium+ while you experiment, so he can buy Grok electrons to eat.