Greg Ebben, senior producer for SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily, recalled how the Islamic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, contributed to a reinvigoration of his personal and professional development on Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News’s flagship daily radio show with host Alex Marlow.

“Twenty years ago, I was working in radio in Boston, and I just turned 29 years old,” Ebben said. “I was just kind of going through the motions … professionally, and 9/11 happened, and obviously it was a profound, epic moment of my generation’s lifetime.”

He continued, “About less than a year and a half later, I found myself back home in New Jersey where I grew up, and I entered the cable television world. From then on, I kind of always had 9/11 in the back of my head as kind of an impetus to kind of enter a new phase of my career personally and also professionally.”

Ebben said his sense of the finite and fragile nature of life was heightened after seeing so many lives lost on 9/11.

“It kind of really spurred me on to reengage with what I wanted to do with my life, knowing that so many lives were cut short that day that,” he stated. “You’re given a chance in this life to do something, and and to earn it, and that’s what it really spurred me to do.”

“[September 11 led to] a little bit of a 180 in my life,” Ebben remarked, “[to] get into it, and proceed ahead and move onward and upward.”

Ebben considered the continuity between the recent killing of 13 U.S. military personnel in suicide bombing attacks in Afghanistan and the mass murder of the September 11 attacks.

“It is important to remember, even though it’s not the greatest thing to remember,” he said of 9/11. “The Afghanistan War had to end one day, and the way it ended was abysmal, but it had to end, and it’s just a sad fact that those 13 kids had to die, be allowed to die.”

He went on, “That was hard, I thought — just as a regular American who never served — because my dad was in the army. But that was a tough pill to swallow for me personally, because it was just, those kids are just 20 years old.”

He concluded by identifying patriotism as a unifying force transcending partisan political divides.

“A lot of stuff happened in 20 years, but it is important to remember, and no matter who the president is and who’s in the administration, we’re still Americans,” he determined.

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.