This episode is sponsored by Transcend, a veteran owned and operated performance optimization company that I introduced recently as a sponsor on this show. Well, since then, I have actually been using my products and I've had incredible success. There was initial blood work that was extremely detailed, and based on that, they offered supplementation.
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This episode is sponsored by a company I've literally been using for over 15 years now, and that is 511. Now, my introduction to their products began when I started wearing 511 uniforms years ago for Anaheim Fire Department. And since then, I have acquired a host of their backpacks and luggage, which have literally been around the world with me. The backpack where I keep all my recording equipment is a 511 backpack, and then most of my civilian gear, the clothes that I wear, are also 511.
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They've created an ultralight pack now with a hydration system built in for rucking, running, or other long distance events. Now, as always, 511 is offering you the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast. 15% off every purchase that you make. So, if you use the code SHIELD15, that's S-H-I-E-L-D-1-5, at 511tactical.com, you will get that 15% off every single time.
So, if you want to hear more about 511 and their origin story, go to episode 338 of Behind the Shield podcast with their CEO, Francisco Morales. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast, as always. My name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome back onto the show, author and filmmaker, Sebastian Junger. Now, as you would have heard in previous episodes, Sebastian's work has impacted so many of us in uniform.
Whether it was his book, Tribe, or the documentary, Restrepo, he has a unique lens that seems to see the very things that we in uniform observe on a daily basis. Now, in his most recent book, In My Time of Dying, Sebastian details his own near-death experience where he almost bled out from a ruptured pancreatic artery. But also the philosophical and spiritual journey he took after that event.
So, we discuss a host of topics, from the medical side of his near-death, through to the exploration of mortality and spirituality, and so much more. Now, before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment. Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback, and leave a rating. Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 900 episodes now. So, all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women's stories so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them. So, with that being said, I welcome back, Sebastian Junger. Enjoy. Well, Sebastian, I want to say welcome back again. I think we spoke only about six months ago and you couldn't talk about the new book because obviously it wasn't quite ready to be put out to the world yet.
But now we actually get to unpack what you've been working on for a long time. So, I want to welcome you back onto the Behind the Shield podcast today. Hey, thank you very much. Just as a note, I'm a little funny looking this morning because I came down with shingles. And like if you know, if you have chicken pox, it comes back later in life as shingles if you don't get your shots, which you must. Because it is awful and it's all over the top of my head, my forehead and in my right eye.
So, if I look like I got beat up, I wasn't. I mean, I was. I was beat up by shingles. I was wondering. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's definitely get your shots. So, anyway, thank you for having me on your podcast. Yeah. Well, I mean, I know we've talked before and I know you haven't more recently, but up until not too long ago, you were boxing a lot. So, I just figured that you got back in the ring and with the wrong person. I failed to slip the punch. Right. Yeah. No, no, no. If only.
No, I would just. It's one of the few diseases you can give to yourself. And you don't get it from someone else. You give it to yourself. My five year old, the five year old version of me gave this to me. Right. It's at age 62. It's pretty crazy. It is. Well, speaking of that, it's a good segue. So, you know, you and I have spoken a lot. We've kind of dived into so much of your work.
Try to say this every time we talk to this day is still held as one of the most important books, certainly in the uniform profession. So, I'm really, really excited to unpack this new one. I think the best way to start will be to go back to parents and grandparents and kind of talk about the two different kind of philosophies that they were raised with. And then we'll come back forward to, you know, to your near death experience and beyond.
So, talk to me about if you want to go your father or even further back, each side of your family and the kind of philosophies and principles that they were raised on. Yeah. So my mother is a straight up American gal from the Midwest. Her predecessors, her ancestors settled the Pennsylvania frontier. Some of them were killed by Indians, by Delaware Indians in an attack in the 1780s.
They homesteaded and she came to Boston and met my dad as an art student and eventually as a follower of some of the more sort of mystical ideas of macrobiotics and yoga and sort of Eastern mysticism. And she sort of believed in what she called energy, right? Like if you're sick, it's because you have bad energy or your marriage is going south. It's bad energy or whatever. Everything sort of energy.
So my father was totally the opposite. He was a physicist and he was raised in Europe. He speaks just about every language in Europe because born in 1923, fascism kept chasing him around the countries of Europe. He was born in Dresden. His father was Jewish. They left in 1933 after the Reichstag fire. They went to Spain, left in 36 when the fascists came in under Franco, went to Paris, and left when the Nazis came into France. So he speaks all these languages thanks to the fascists.
Anyway, he wound up in America and met my mother and he was the ultimate rationalist and scientist. He would say to my mother, look, energy is subatomic work potential. It's not some sort of vague thing that makes marriages go bad and gives you cancer. My mother invariably would say, oh, Miguel, you're so narrow-minded, which means you're so literal.
But there in front of me played out the great schism and debate in probably every society, but certainly post-enlightenment Western society, which is faith versus reason, empiricism versus belief. Of course, airplanes don't drop out of the sky and medicine works and we know how to do complicated surgical procedures and we can forecast the weather and solar eclipses. The list is endless because of empiricism and rationality.
But there's this other way of looking at life and looking at the world, which leaves open some sort of foggier questions of how does this all work and what's it mean? I think many people, as I did, and I know we'll get to this later, when they encounter the sort of raw facts of mortality and death, there are some reasons to wonder, do we really understand everything in physical terms? Are we missing something very, very important that we just don't quite understand?
You have one parent who's brought up in a very kind of holistic, people would probably label it like a hippie-esque way of thinking. Then you have the very mathematical side on your dad's side. What was the conversation about spirituality or religion or faith when you were in the formative years? Oh, there was none. We were all atheists. My mother fled Catholicism when she fled Ohio.
My father was a secular, half-Jew physicist in America. I finally went to church when I was 18 for an anthropology assignment. We were just never raised with that kind of thinking. For example, one day, my mother, I remember my mother telling me this story when she was newly married. Just to give you an idea of who my father was, he was definitely on the spectrum, a very, very sweet man, but out to lunch.
One evening, my father was sitting in the armchair in front of the fire, is how I imagine it. My mom was preparing dinner. They'd just gotten married and still getting to know each other. My father was in the armchair reading a book. He was muttering to himself, oh my God, that's gorgeous. That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. It's exquisite. My mother could hear him and was like, wow, what is it that's completely captivated my new husband? What great beauty.
What's going on? She tiptoed over and the book was open on his lap and the page was entirely filled with equations, mathematical equations. My mother was like, oh, okay, really nothing to worry about here. That was my dad. Ultimately, my main concern is human dignity and human suffering. May there be as little of it as possible. To the extent that religion helps people lead dignified, meaningful lives and alleviate suffering, I'm all for it.
What I'm against and what my father was against was the misuse of religion when religion actually doesn't follow its own high precepts. For example, my father spent a lot of his early years in Spain and he has good friends there. There was a family friend who was dying of cancer.
Very, very painful cancer. This is in the 1980s. The fascists are out and with the fascists went this sort of like it was no longer a Catholic country, officially a Catholic country because the fascists and the Catholics were very, very closely wedded politically. So it was essentially a secular country. But so my, my, this friend, this dear friend was dying of cancer and in enormous pain, agonizing, excruciating pain in the hospital in his final hours.
And the son called my father in a rage saying that the doctor refused to give him morphine, refused to give the dying father morphine. He said it's God's will that he suffer. And the more he suffers now, the less time he'll spend in purgatory. That's what, that's the problem my father had with religion.
And for all the beautiful ideas that come out of religion, what I find is that the religious community really refuses to engage with that kind of wrongdoing, that kind of, frankly, evil history that lies in its past and even its somewhat recent past. I've said this on the podcast a lot recently. I think there's so much good in the common denominators of all the religions together.
If you make a massive Venn diagram in the middle is kindness, compassion, gratitude, community. But the moment you're like, ah, but if you don't believe in mine, and here's what's going to happen, A, B, C, D, and E. And it's crazy because a lot of these people within some of these organizations are so far from what I believe these good people, these prophets, wherever you want to label them as, would do in the same situation.
And the perfect example, you look at homelessness and addiction and people that I know spend Sundays in a certain place and they just want them moved out of their city or stop giving them Narcan. So there is a huge detachment between what I would consider my version of spirituality, which is just being a good person. I think my holy book could just say, don't be a dick. And that would be it. That would cover everything.
And then the teachings of these people and what they're actually doing when they leave the building. Yeah, and, you know, I, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the crucial idea here is that yes, religion helps promote good behavior, but that kind of basic human morality and compassion obviously predates religion or predates Christianity. Right. It wasn't suddenly, it didn't suddenly arise in the year zero when Christ was born. Right.
And, you know, for example, and I'm stealing shamelessly from the late great Christopher Hitchens, the story that Christ tells of the Good Samaritan, who rends his cloak in two to give it to give half his cloak to a passerby on the highway as they're walking along who's cold. He tears his cloak into and gives him half of his cloak to this stranger who's suffering.
That obviously happened before Christianity because Christianity started with Christ. And so that story is a early pre-Christian story of generosity and compassion. So, in other words, clearly those wonderful human values of compassion and helping a suffering person, even if they're a stranger, you don't need to be Christian to act that way and to believe in those things.
And frankly, I do. And I'm a straight up, like, boiled in the wool, whatever the expression is, atheist, right? Like, a stone cold atheist. And I, you know, and I, those ideals, those Christian ideals are foremost in my mind. I just don't ascribe them to God. And I don't think I'm going to hell if I don't act well.
I've made this observation a few times again. This is just my hypothesis. But when we look at evolution, we're like, oh, look, we built the wheel and we built Spears and now we built the computer and AI. But to me, those are superfluous. I mean, obviously they helped advance, you know, human society in some respects.
But to me, what I see as evolution is the increase in kindness and compassion. You look at some of the horrendous things that humans did a long time ago. I think that is the evolution. Now there's a lot of people still trying to drag us back into the dark ages under the guise of a religion or race or whatever the thing is that they stand on their podium about.
But to me, that's, that's, I think is the advancement of the human being that separates us maybe from some of our animal, you know, brethren is the increase in compassion and empathy. Yeah, I mean, there's so I've written about this in previous books. There are these two sort of categories, like how do you treat people within your own community? And how do you treat outsiders the enemy? And of course, the enemy is dangerous. I mean, outsiders can be dangerous. I mean,
look what's happening in Ukraine with Russia right now, right? So compassion for the outsiders if they're coming to cut your throat isn't such a great idea.
On the other hand, you have to be able to defend yourself. On the other hand, how you treat people in your own community, and I'm speaking in evolutionary terms for hundreds of thousands of years, if you were not prepared to be on guard against people you didn't know you were vulnerable to them and you and all your family and loved ones might be killed or enslaved, right?
So that's just that's just a historical reality that the right minded moral person has to bear in mind if they want to stay alive. On the other hand, people within your own community when you treat them unjustly, you are undoing the very bonds that keeps the community safe and cohesive and able to repel an outside attack.
And it's deeply immoral. And one of the one of the problems with the wonderful advent of agriculture and in that industry and technology is that it allows for the accumulation of wealth and therefore an accumulation of power in certain individuals, which, which is ripe for abuse and the sort of early small scale organic hunter gatherer communities that typify our human ancestors.
I mean not without exception, but but as far as we understand from the anthropology and the archaeology, the vast majority were tremendously egalitarian for the simple reason is that you if you're if you're mobile if you're that mobile, you can't you can't carry around all your wealth there really is no wealth to accumulate.
And, and leadership isn't a function of power. It's a function of persuasion and and and given authority. So the leader is given authority by the people, and if he abuses it. It's taken away and that person is often killed. And so that, you know that all changed with the advent of agriculture and the city state and eventually industry and technology. And now we have highly stratified societies with very very wealthy people on top control the
majority shamefully the majority of the collective assets of the society. And frankly, except in the most pure democracies, frankly can sort of sidestep the, the weight of the law they can manipulate the legal system the tax system the political system to their own advantages in ways that people living in a cardboard box on Broadway in Manhattan, you know just are not able to do and you know frankly that's, that's just reality it's not fair but it's reality.
Absolutely. Well I want to get back to the path of the new books I know that we talked a lot about that in the previous conversation and it was amazing. When I was 18, one of my classmates from my senior school so from 11 to 16 moving, we were in school together, died in a single car accident he drove into the side of a house.
And that was the first real experience of death and I was so fortunate I lost my grandparents literally a few years ago at a 99 and 100 and basically 105 years old so yeah I've been spared from a lot of funerals apart from all the firefighters that I've gone to bury I do this podcast, but it absolutely shook me when my friend died, because you know that was a, you know, the realization that you're not immortal that you're not going to live forever.
And then it was about a year later that one of my friends that I went on a ski trip with real deep thinker was talking about a brief history of time and about the, the infinite universe and multiple, you know, what they call them now the quantum realms, basically I blew my mind back then but now Spider-Man's explained it better for me.
But, you know, it really it was it was such a jarring moment of my life you know from 18 to 19, where that mortality really grabbed me by the throat and you know it scared me for a long long time. I know we're going to talk about your actual near-death experience that when you look back because you touch on several, you know, kind of either moments that were very scary for you or actual near-death experiences prior to that event.
Obviously you and I have talked about losing Tim Hetherington, talked about Restrepo. So when you when the other side of this right in the book and analyzing some of these moments maybe a little deeper. What were other pivotal moments prior to that where your perception of your own mortality maybe shifted slightly. Yeah, so it's more complicated than you would think. I mean, I've seen plenty of dead people in war zones.
But it was like, oh, that's happened to them. That's not me. Right. And partly because I was had to travel to be in a place where life and death sort of like were in such close proximity. But back home it all seemed rather safe and that we were firmly in the realm of life and death was sort of this distant far off thing that I knew abstractly was waiting for all of us. And that really was not part of my daily reality. So the reality of death was in other people's countries when they were at war.
And then the people that I knew who were killed were killed in wars. So you had to sort of travel to find your mortality. You had to sort of travel. I mean, that was my experience of it. And I was I mean, I did plenty of things that could get me killed. And I had incidents in war zones where I came very close. I was blown up in an IED and it went off under the engine block instead of under the crew compartment.
And, you know, that might have saved us certainly great harm if not death. And, you know, I had a bullet hit a few inches from my head into a sandbag, you know, shot from 500 meters. And I had a bullet hit at the angle of the rifle barrel that saved my life. I mean, so small you can't hardly calculate it, etc, etc. I had plenty of that. Right. But it was all like, oh, well, that happens over there. And if you don't want that to happen, don't go over there. Stay home. Right. And and
as young I was as a struggling writer, I started I was working as a climber for tree companies. So that meant that if someone was taking down a big tree in their backyard or over their house, they couldn't just cut it down. You have to take it down in pieces. And if you can't get a crane in there, you need a climber. You need someone at the top of the tree hanging on a line, five or 6000 test nylon line with a chainsaw piecing the tree out, cutting it, cutting it down in pieces,
lowering the heavy chunks so they don't damage what's below it. It's a kind of reverse architecture that allows you to take down even a hundred foot white pine in a small space. So that was my job, obviously inherently dangerous. And I was very, very scared of heights. I mean, we're wired to be scared of heights heights, you know, heights will get you killed right it's like, like snakes, you know, we all react sort of badly to those threats, and I had a very hard time with the heights and
I learned to just, I never got over my fear of heights. I just learned to not look down. And I feel like we all, you know, just focus in front of you make sure your knots are tied make sure you the front cut and the back cut is you doing them properly which direction is the wind coming from, etc etc, you know, like all the little details that keep you alive in a dangerous environment.
Focus on those, just don't look down. Right. And, and so I feel like we all do that, like we're living leading our lives and we're, you know, writing our thesis and then we're raising our kids and we're making breakfast and we're catching the bus we all this stuff right
and it's like, and you can do it all. As long as you don't look down, like as long as you know like, oh my god I'm gonna like, I'm going to die one day, and I might even be today, who knows like you, you can't do that. I mean you know it's the truth, but if you do that it's paralyzing. Right so my real understanding of mortality really didn't come until until it came after me until death came the front lines came after me in my home and what was a presumably a very safe place.
You know gunfire and might I you know it was, we were in Massachusetts during coven in a house in a very old house built in 1800 deep in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road, like the safest most beautiful place you can imagine, and the safest place of a war zone. And that was where I really almost died. And it came with absolutely no warning at all it was a morning like any other. You know I don't I don't, you know I'm fit I'm healthy I'm an athlete.
My heart, my, you know my heart's perfect my health is perfect I all know I'm not going to drop a dead of a heart attack, you know I've none of those things that make might make a 58 year old man worried about their longevity I'd none of those things right and. And yet, I almost almost died I should have died my odds of dying were incredibly high and I somehow made it. And it came absolutely out of nowhere.
My, my reality change, literally in one moment. I went from just an ordinary person like you are right now having a conversation to boom dying, you have 90 minutes, go brutal. So walk me through that then we're talking about June 16 2020. So obviously we're in, you know, the beginning of the pandemic as well. You're in a somewhat rural area, walk me through from, you know, you realizing something wrong telling your wife and then the ambulance and beyond.
Yeah, so, so I. I own this old house deep in the woods. I built a little cabin, even deeper into the woods from the house like with the woods, you know with wood stove and no electricity no running water it's really rustic place and so it's a nice.
You know, we had a rare bit of child of childcare babysitting from a family that we know up the road. They had two teenage girls and so that once in a while they come over and and just take care of our little girls at the time they were six months old and three years old.
Take care of our little girls for a few hours so we can get some work done or whatever so I, you know, I said to my wife Barbara like listen, it's a beautiful afternoon let's just go chill out in the cabin like you know, and I literally say we know no one knows how
bad it's beautiful that's just instead of like getting stuff done, let's just throttle back for an hour right. So we walked out of this cabin and there's no cell phone service and the, the transport time for emergency services from where we are is over an hour. It's one of the longest transport times in the state of Massachusetts.
And of course I don't care because I'm in great health, like I'm like that. I'm never going to have to rush to the hospital and I'm fine like what I'll drive myself there you know I mean that is like that kind of stupid attitude right. So, in mid sentence while we're in the cabin. We're chatting right and it's a beautiful soft summer afternoon. And we're chatting and I suddenly felt this or pain in my abdomen.
And it's like it's worth it's, it's worse, it's a lot worse than indigestion, but it's not kidney stone pain it's somewhere in the middle, right, it's not agony is just like, oh, what is that. And no matter what I did, you know I couldn't make it go away usually if you have some kind of digestive pain you can, you know, work it out I whatever nothing affected it so I stood up to see if I could sort of walk it out, and I almost fell over.
And I said to my wife, I sat back down I said to my wife I'm going to need help. I'm going to need some help I don't know what's going on I've never felt like this in my life. I was getting very light headed. So, we stood up and I put my arm around her and she was sort of half walked half dragged me out of the cabin and down the trail back to the driveway.
And it rained recently so the phone lines were out there was the landlines route because they're old landlines and they were they they just get like, they short out and you can't use them and there's no cell phone connection so we're really like, what do we do is we went. Barbara put me in the passenger seat of the car and ran into the house and told the teenagers.
There's something really bad going on and take care of the girls, we have to get them to the hospital and one of the teenagers came out and managed to get one bar of signal on her phone. If she walked around the driveway she got one bar signal and called 911. And, you know, meanwhile I was starting to go now I'm starting to go blind. And I'm in and out of consciousness my wife is like holding my hand say, stay with me you got to stay with me and she's watching me go in and out.
And I go out I stay longer and longer and I come back and I have no idea I'm going in and out of consciousness. But I've gone blind now. And so, what I didn't know what I found out later was that I'd had an, I had an aneurysm in my pancreatic artery which is like this little artery that no one actually really needs to talk about any real reason to talk about right.
And I had an aneurysm in one of my five pancreatic arteries. I had an aneurysm which is a ballooning of the blood vessel because of a weak spot or excess pressures. And it would say structural abnormality, right, it's not high cholesterol and you know whatever it's not coronary disease I mean it's a structural problem. And it's related to, I have a, I have a myceliac artery is, for some reason, very few people have this but it's it's compressed by a ligament that's in the wrong place.
And it forced it. It's called median arcuate ligament syndrome and it forces the blood out through smaller arteries, and one of them balloon, and this happens over the course of your lifetime right this is a slow process. And eventually, the artery walls get sort of weaker and weaker. And eventually they rupture.
Now if someone just stabs you and you start bleeding out you start bleeding out into your own abdomen. If someone stabs you in the stomach, in the abdomen, the doctors will know where to put their finger, basically where to plug the leak right because you have a stab wound.
With internal hemorrhage with abdominal hemorrhage, your abdomen is basically a big bowl of spaghetti. I mean there's no, no idea where it is right. And so, it's extremely dangerous and now I'm, I'm losing in the end I needed 10 units of blood. I'm losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. And it took me 90 minutes to get to the ER, I mean I was.
I probably lost two thirds of my blood by that conservatively but by the time I got to the ER so that. So by the time the medics get there that the ambulance gets there. I've gone into compensatory shock.
And, which means that my body is shut down all the extraneous stuff the legs the arms, you know, whatever, it's pulled all the blood. This is unconsciously right this is not a conscious decision but your body is containing it all the blood in your, in your chest and in your stomach, where it's sort of where it's needed. And I even lost control of my bowels because even your in your intestines aren't even getting the blood supply they need right everything sort of just letting go right.
But because of, because I went into compensatory shock my brain sort of rebooted. So I'm like now I'm clear minded again I'm not blind anymore. I just have belly pain, but that so the medics got there and there, and I was like you know I think I'm okay you know I just. I married men live longer it's a famous statistic right my wife is like no. He was going he was passing out a few minutes ago you're taking him to the hospital, like don't listen to it, like take him take him to the.
And so my compensatory shock lasted for about the entire hour of the transport. And right when I got to the emergency department and hi Anis. I went off a cliff. And the guy in the back of the ambulance wasn't particularly worried either he gave me an IV bag he was like God's probably just indigestion. And you know no one was tracking this right and and then as soon as we got to the emergency department.
I turned pale incoherent, I mean I did all the classic signs of like imminent death from hemorrhagic shock. And so they rushed me into a trauma bay. And, you know, I'm still sort of caught semi conscious I'm puzzled by all the activity. Everyone looks so worried like why why are there so many people here why do you all look so worried. I tried joking with them nobody laughed I'm like damn this is one serious party, like what's going on guys like I'm just here for belly pain like, and.
So I remember the doctor. He wants they want. They needed to put blood into me to transfuse me and I said what I remembered on my helmet when I was in combat. I'd written Oh positive on the side of my helmet so that met if I were wounded medics would know what kind of blood type I was. And so I said I remember my helmet on my army helmet. I had Oh positive I think I'm Oh positive they're like okay thank you.
And so, I, he was, he was putting a he said I need your permission to put a large gauge needle directly into your jugular. Right. And I was like God that doesn't sound like a huge amount of fun doc, like, why, what you mean in case I said in case there's an emergency. He said this is the emergency right now. And I said, Okay, so we started working on it and it took it took quite a while. And, and while he's working on it.
They needed an ultrasound probe and all this stuff it seems like it's taking a while and it feels like he's fumbling around with it obviously wasn't but as he was doing that on my below me on my left. And this infinite black pit opened up this just yawning black abyss. And, I was like, Damn, what is that and I started getting pulled into it and I started panicking.
I had no idea I was dying. I mean, none. Right. But I knew it's some of the animal instinct in me knew you don't want to go into the infinite black pit right that just better to avoid right. And I started panicking. And as I was panicking. My dead father, and I'm going to reiterate right now for those of you for anyone who joined, you know, at this point, I'm an atheist. My father was an atheist.
Not only, only am I not a mystic I'm actively anti mystic right I just want nothing to do with any of it right. My dead father appeared above me to help me crossover. He was like it's okay you don't have to fight it you can come with me I'll take care of you. Right. I didn't know I was dying. I was horrified. It's like come with you. You're dead. I'm alive I'm not going anywhere with you. What are you talking about. Yeah, not now like get out of here. Right.
And I said to the doctor you got to hurry I'm going. You're losing me right now I'm going. And he succeeded in the in putting the needle in and they transfuse me. And now that then now they're using a rapid transfuser to push blood into my system, and, you know, they, the doctor said I was probably 10 minutes from dead.
Yeah, but I was going into hemorrhagic shock I was convulsing on the table. You know, I mean I mean I was at all the last awful signs of like you're about to go. And if it felt terrible. It was the most is the worst feeling.
So, just going back to the ambulance ride for a second, just as a, you know, something else for us to consider in the world of EMS, were there any vital signs when you kind of look back that suggested it, or you just in such good compenser compensatory shock that everything was looking good because I mean we only have limited capacity on an on an ambulance anyway so the treatment probably would have been exactly the same whether they knew or not.
Oh yeah, no, I mean the only option they had would have been to drive faster right I mean they're you know they don't they don't have blood on an ambulance. They can restart your heart obviously, but with some pads but so they, they, apparently and again I'm not a doctor I learned all this by interviewing, I circled back around to write my book and I interviewed all the people that saved my life.
And so I talked to the guy in the back Joe in the back of the ambulance with me, there he would be a technically a paramedic is that the term is that the correct term. Yeah, most likely yeah some have just EMTs but usually it's an EMT and or a paramedic. Okay, alright so. So Joe. What he said later was that the, you know, the classic sign of internal hemorrhage is a high heart rate.
Because your heart, because you're bleeding you have low blood volume your heart has to pump harder to maintain sufficient arterial pressure to keep you conscious and to keep your heart beating. And so your blood pressure your your heart rate will go up you know 80 90 100 110, you know the kinds of heart rates you you would typically see when someone goes out for a run.
But I was a lifelong athlete I was a marathon runner when I was young I ran for 12 for the mile in college. You know I kept kept a lot of that sort of good shape athletic sort of like life, and so I have a, I think I have a fairly big, efficient heart. So my heart rate was just sort of hanging out in the 70s. It never went up. So he, so Joe was like okay he's good you know whatever's going on.
He's not bleeding, he's not bleeding out into his own abdomen. He's got indigestion right he lost his bowels he's like something's gone maybe he ate some bad oysters you know that's what that's what he's ticking through for completely good reasons, right. And, and I was coherent right I was, you know, I wasn't. I hadn't gone off a cliff yet because I was in compensatory shock so joking with him I called my family and said hey I'm fine.
Don't worry about me my daughter said I love you to the moon and back, you know, which now just makes me cry when I think about it because it might have it was statistically should have been the last thing she ever said to her daddy, you know, and by some miracle it wasn't. But so you know poor Joe I mean I was an extremely misleading patient to Joe.
But the you know the belly pain was intense. And the history of the reason the history that I had of being in and out of consciousness, like, whatever my blood pressure was in the heart in the ambulance and whatever my heart rate was doing.
If there was a period where I was out of in and out of consciousness and losing my vision. That should be a tip off that the person's bleeding to death. They've, they've staved it off for a while with compensatory shock, but there you're heading right to the edge of a cliff.
I just interviewed a young girl who had a horrendous atv crash at like 50 miles an hour into a park car she was messing around in the suburban area, and she survived and she had massive TBI and she survived and she's now cheerleading again. This is it. Was this in Wilmington, North Carolina. Oh my goodness I'm trying to remember where they live now.
Florida, Florida. Florida. All right, so my best friend saved a girl who wrote an atv into the side of a car park car with Carolina, and he was a soldier and he knew some combat stuff and so yeah anyway I just thought wow what a coincidence anyway I'm sorry go on. There was a combat medic on scene. I wonder if it was the same call. Yeah, that's really I'm gonna have to look into that now but we'll figure that out later.
Because either way I mean if two things happen that's what that's what the takeaway was apart from her miraculous recovery but the point being obviously the mechanism of injury it was very apparent you know it was evident what was going on there.
But the takeaway was how dangerous atvs are you know and they're good under controlled situations in an in an area that's designed for an atv. But you know you drive them in the wrong place at the wrong speed with no helmet, you know you now are burying a child so that was a, you know, the lesson learned from that, but as a medic we're taught you know with with abdominal pain specifically that is that kind of gray area where we just don't know.
We don't have ultrasound we don't have CTs or MRIs so we have to err on the side of caution but you know Matt giving
the right word. Painting the picture of what it's like to actually be an EMT or a paramedic in America and the frequency of calls and the sleep deprivation and the burnout. There is you know the danger of going, I think you're fine, just sign here, you know and so this is what's important with this is every so often a true emergency is going to be hidden amongst arguably a lot of bullshit calls to be completely honest.
And so that complacency can set in so I think it's important for the first responders listening of some of these cautionary tales that had that not been taken seriously, you wouldn't be with us today. Yeah, and you know the thing is, they're really their hands were tied they don't have blood in the ambulances so even if they'd known what was happening.
I don't think there's anything else that he could have done like you know one IV pack and that's it. Apparently if you give too much IV fluid you're risking acidosis in the blood and you know other things that can kill you like so it's their hands were tied.
I mean you would need to, you need to roll with blood that you could, you need to roll with the ability to transfuse people in the ambulance. Yeah, which I think is the next step for my community to be honest because you know in trauma what we can do is plug the hole and drive as fast as we can.
So, right, right. All right, so then you do a beautiful job obviously of leading people through, you know what happens and the amazing, you know, courage by some of the people in medicine and you know what they were able to finally do to to find this this aneurysm, stop the bleeding, you know, and then ultimately, you know, get you back on your feet.
So let's talk about the other side of that now as you mentioned staunch atheist see father by black void. What was the, what was the kind of emotional processing, and then lead me through that, you know, ending up becoming the the book that we're going to discuss.
So, it took hours in the interventional radiology suite to fix the problem. So the IR suite they basically you it's basically an x ray machine that gives live video to the to the doctor and they can watch in real time as they manipulate things inside your body, so they were threading a catheter from my groin in inside my vascular system, trying to get it to the source of the bleed, which was in my pancreatic artery and there's a lot of twists and turns.
And you know these catheters can turn but they can't make really sharp turns it's hard you know whatever it's complicated. And they after six hours and you know I'm not sedated. I'm not in pain for me to be able to answer questions. And so, and I'm in screaming pain, I'm in so much pain because I've now I've got all this blood sitting in my organs against my organs, and they're there. It's called an insult to your to your kidneys and your liver and it's extremely painful.
And I'm like begging them for painkillers and of course the doctors are totally ignoring me like doctors, they don't even respond I mean you could say anything you want to a doctor and it's like you don't exist right it's really amazing and then the nurse, the nurses are much more empathic, they're like, it's okay sweetheart we're going to get you through this.
It's very, very funny but the doctors are like these two robots, thank God, right, but so they finally figured they finally got the catheter to the bleed site and embolized it plugged it with a coil and pulled their gear out and then filled me up with, with other people's blood top me off with 10 units, and, and good, good to go right so I you know they will mean to the ICU and then I think they sedated me because I don't have any memories. And then I wake up in the ICU the next morning.
You almost died. In fact, no one can believe you're alive. And you know I look it up later the odds of my surviving were as low as 30%. And that was probably based on a reasonable transport time to a hospital that you know that statistic probably doesn't reflect a 90 minute transport time. Right. So, so, what are my, you know, what were my odds I in the single digits right or something like that luckily I'm a healthy strong guy and they gave the doctor something to work with.
And that's what at least that's what the doctor said later but so I was shocked that I had no idea it almost died. I was. I mean imagine waking up from a nap and having your wife say you almost died. You know, like you're in the hospital you almost died which shocking, really shocking right.
Then she left, and I'm just sit there. I'm throwing up blood I'm a total mess. I'm so weak I can't even sit up. I'm just tangle of wires going all over me. My back's in agony. I mean I'm a hurting puppy right and but I just keep thinking about I almost died. Are you freaking kidding. My girls almost lost their father my wife almost lost her husband. Are you kidding I, I couldn't believe it was really trauma traumatic.
And so then the nurse came back a while later, is it how you doing, and, and I said well I'm okay you know I've lied I was doing terribly but I said I'm okay but you know frankly it's terrifying what you told me. I've never really struggling with it. And, and she said, try this. Instead of thinking about it as something scary. Try thinking about it as something sacred that you walked out of the road.
And so I've been sort of working on that the entire time right and my book is partly an attempt to answer that question. And the, the, I don't know what she meant specifically, it may be. Maybe she meant you should go to church more often Mr younger I mean I have no idea what she meant, but I'm going to make my own meaning out of it which is basically. I went to the threshold of life and death the place where we're all headed.
Well, I was allowed to peek over the edge into the abyss, and then allowed to come back, like most people aren't most people you get you know once you glimpse that you're headed in right, I was allowed to come back. What did I learn. For me as a secular rest, the words with the word sacred means to me and I think there are sacred jobs, sacred callings. The word sacred means anything that helps people lead their lives with more dignity.
So that's what sacred means, and that's so it's true from some medical professionals and some people in the ministry, and maybe some some psychologists and maybe some writers and etc etc it's a, you know, it's like what helps you people live with more dignity and less pain. Right, that's so I was like what, okay, what did I came, you know, I've been going to front lines my whole life.
I now sort of went to my own frontline, I was allowed to come back. What did I learn, what did I learn that might be a value to other people. And so, so my, my book, I did all people keep asking like, so are you still an atheist. I mean, yes, I'm still an atheist. But I'm a changed atheist, right. Again, atheist.
I've, I've, yes, I've, you know, I've been I've been touched right I mean I have been changed by this experience and, um, you know, I'm not an agnostic. Right. I mean I do not believe in God, I do not believe that God is part of our daily lives and I just
can't believe you know it's like you can't, you can't choose to believe in God anymore that you could choose to fall in love with Sally, like you're either in love with Sally or you're not in love with Sally, but you can't choose to be and I just don't believe in it, right, or I got, I'm sorry. But that doesn't mean that you can't think about life in quote sacred terms right and and so I don't think you need God to lead a moral life to lead a meaningful life to help others.
And you know ultimately, what I mean this is the very very short version of where I came to in the book, sort of philosophically, is that we, we, by necessity we take life for granted because because otherwise focusing on the unspeakable miracle of life at
every moment would prevent you from actually leading that life and doing the dishes and taking care of your kid and whatever, like, you actually have to block out what a freaking miracle the whole thing is in order to live the life that is a miracle, right. And but what this incident did is basically I learned you know sometimes you got to stop, stop thinking, stop doing. I just stand there for even a moment and just understand what a miracle existence is any existence, any form of existence.
I mean if the universe existed and we're a bunch of rocks, it would be a miracle, right. A universe that only contain frogs would be a miracle right I mean everything, oh everything about it's a miracle and the idea that this universe. 14 billion years old, 93 billion light years across. The number of it existing are almost infinitely small. There are 10 to the negative 230.
The fact that that this universe produced conscious beings that can contemplate their own consciousness is, it's something that defies explanation defies belief understanding. But it doesn't defy appreciation. And one of the things you must do in life is stop and understand what a miracle this is that you even exist enough to think that it's a miracle.
And you can do that in a traffic jam. You can do that when your kid has a fever, you can do that when faced with your own final diagnosis of terminal whatever it's going to be that takes you out. You know if I, I went through a brief period after this where they thought that I might also have pancreatic cancer there was something called the neoplasm against my pancreas, the neoplasm.
It just means new tissue that shouldn't be there and it was old blood from the, what it turned out to be was old blood from the aneurysm from the blade but they didn't know that and the doctor was like listen just because you had a ruptured ruptured artery doesn't mean you can't also have pancreatic
cancer. We ought to check this out. So for a while, they did a lot of testing to make sure that this thing wasn't cancerous and had it been a, you know, I mean it wasn't thank God, but had I gotten the most devastating news that no you're you know you're going to die in a few months you also have pancreatic cancer.
Life's even sacred then sorry like it's still it's still a miracle right and so you know so that that is that awareness is sort of in my back pocket now in a way that it never was before and couldn't have been. And I think that's what ultimately what that nurse meant or that's the meaning that I gave to what she said. Speaking of that nurse talk to me about you trying to find her.
Well yeah it was quite strange I mean one of the things I struggled with after this was trying to figure out what was real and what wasn't, and I entered a rather paranoid phase of worrying that I actually had died. And then I was a ghost actually wasn't here. Right and the origins of that word that 36 hours prior. So two nights prior, the dawn of the previous day.
I'd been woken up now my family, you know we co sleep at the time my daughters were six months and three years on a pad on the floor. So, it was dawn and I and I and I had a dream that I had died. Not that I was going to die or not that that I did die. And that my for lack of a better word and I'm sorry I apologize for the Christian connotations of this word but my soul was hovering above my grieving family.
And I didn't know I was dead I was trying I was like hey I'm over here you don't need to cry I'm right here. And then I was made to understand no no you died. You're dead. You can't go back they can't hear you. It's done forever. And I was so anguished. I was just bereft. And there's my family I just want to hold them I just want to go to them right and I can't I'm getting pulled away.
And I was so upset that it woke me up and then boom I'm in my room, I'm in our bedroom, and there's my eldest daughters right next to me I sort of clutch cluster. And, like they clutch their stuffies I was like sort of clutching her like oh my god thank God. Thank God that was a dream. Right, and so then I got this very paranoid feeling after I came back from the hospital. I stayed in the ICU for five days. I set, I set records for recovery from abdominal hemorrhage.
Then on the regular floor for a couple of days I'm going to home it was done in a week and I came home. And you think it would be kind of party like whoa I almost died let's let's celebrate you know it's not it's it's almost like a kind of funeral like wow. We're all so lucky, like, I can't believe you know I mean a really somber, really somber time, and, and I just kept crying all the time right i mean it's like, I was incredibly emotional and, and I started to think, maybe I, maybe the dream.
I've introduced what are called nd ease near death experiences very very closely so when people come back there's a lot of documentation of this when people almost die like I did, or do die if their heart stops and then they revived that one of the most common
experiences is this sort of hovering above your family or hovering above the doctors and and and being sort of drawn away and and that and that's what had happened to me and I knew nothing about nd ease at the time and I started to get this paranoid idea that maybe that was my experience of actually dying that I actually did die. Right. And that everything that followed the trip to the trip to the hospital and they in the return home and etc is all a dying hallucination.
Right, it's all happening in my mind, as I mean my last hours and minutes and seconds. Right, it's all a hallucination. And there's a terrifying and wonderful movie called Jacob's Ladder, where that happens to a soldier who's dying on the battlefield in Vietnam.
And he's dreaming that he actually went home and there his death dreams. He's actually still on the battlefield. It's a terrifying movie at any rate, I start I got very very paranoid that I went so paranoid that I went to my wife at one point I was like, Can you just tell me, just tell me I'm really here, right, just can you confirm that I got a heartbeat and I'm in you're talking to me, and this, I'm really alive right.
And she said of course sweetheart you're right here you're safe blah blah blah. And then in my mind I didn't say this my mind are like, that's exactly what a hallucination would say. It's, I'm on to you, like, I got, I got very kind of crazy so what so I started to research all this stuff because I'm a journalist and I'm a nerd and that's what I do.
And, you know, one of the strands of research is you know frankly we actually, there is no way to prove what is and isn't real and consciousness is an enormous enigma that nobody really understands and, you know, at the quantum level it's all an infinite mystery you know you know I was just like oh my god. I'm opening Pandora's box of deep deep philosophical and physical questions, and you know in physics and quantum physics.
But one thing I tried to do is find the nurse who gave me the best advice of my life, right. And, and I, I know I called the hospital. The ICUs are quite sequestered you can't just walk into an ICU and say hey where's Brenda, you know I mean that doesn't work, but you, so I went through the PR department and the staffing department
and so forth, and not only did not only did they not know who I was talking about because they could look up who was working that day right. Not only did they not know who was I was talking about. There wasn't even a nurse who fit that description like that, that was on duty
I mean it just they do total blank. Just nothing. So I really started to wonder not to be all woo woo or anything I was like, am I sure that that happens. I mean, am I sure that wasn't a vision, like, my father was a bit you know like and what, what is real and, and, and I mean I really just started to question. Absolutely everything. And, and I wound up getting incredibly anxious and depressed I mean this sort of like short version is that kind of questioning is paralyzing.
And if you take it if you really if you really really are questioning whether you died or not, it's, I mean it's a. I basically was turning myself into high. I was giving myself schizophrenia or something I was no longer in reality right like I was one foot in another
world, and it really and my wife, my wife finally said listen you're you're actually getting a little hard to live with can, can you please get some help. You know I find I finally did I was getting extremely depressed and anxious as well. And so I actually finally talked to someone and it turns out is like what what I was going through psychologically was fairly common for people who have almost died from medical causes.
You talk about Tyler Carroll in the book, and he's become a friend as well dead reckoning collectives an amazing group of people. How did you come about tie across Tyler and talk to me about his example that you use. Yeah, I mean I was Tyler guy amazing young man I he he was at a veterans retreat that I was invited to as an author and they read all my school patrol base about day in Western Montana and, and last June and they read all my books and I was there to talk to
them for a wonderful long weekend in the mountains of Montana was amazing. And he was one of the vets who was there and and he just sort of mentioned. I mean I sort of mentioned what happened to me and he was like oh basically the same thing happened to me in the battlefields of Afghanistan and he you know he bled out from a shrapnel wound.
And he had something that people who study near death experiences and I know all this because I did all this research about the phenomenon, what they call a life review. And as he's in and out of consciousness he's entering this place where he sees his entire life is quite a common thing. His entire life simultaneously. And he has a kind of universal love and understanding and clarity about all things, and his entire life.
And. So, he survived and so I interviewed him about that experience and I use him as an example. As a journalist I'm loathe to just write about myself it seems self indulgent and, and, you know, whatever. So, you know, part of, you know, part of my professional sort of DNA as it were is to is to interview other people because the self is not really a worthy topic, and just on its own so. So I interviewed some amazing people and one of them was Tyler about the about his experience.
And I think it was a mother on, she was a I think it was Apache pilot swears like a sailor, such an amazing conversation but yeah she's, she was absolute spark plug. Right, right. Yeah, amazing. Yeah. Yep. And one thing that really jumped out at me and it was literally a sentence in the book, but I think it resonates so deeply because when we look and I'm sure you and I talked about this before I mean you literally underlined that your fitness saved your life and that's the same with Matt Chan
and some other people had on the show that they're, they're diligence with their physical health is what created their survival and obviously, sadly we saw the opposite of that during coven. We see people getting, you know, more and more overweight and obese and sicker and sicker.
We also have in this country obviously you know a heavy faith based community and it saddens me and this just might just me and everyone else might be absolutely fine the way they are but it saddens me there's almost this like don't worry about here, because you're
going to be a better place is so much better, there's gonna be angels and waterfalls and unicorns or whatever you believe in. And I find it so sad because of the miracle that I know the only thing that I know whether it's perception whatever it is is right now, I know that if I'm an asshole in the world. I make it worse if I'm kind in the world I make it better, you know if I pour myself into my child the chance of him becoming a kind compassionate adult is far greater so this is my reality.
I want the child to feel truly attempt to pay her back proud of her own judge or fainted it out. alchemy. And then you said there was a shift where kind of religion pulled people away from that. I think there's, you know, obviously in this conversation, there is space for both to exist simultaneously and people lean into whichever one they adhere to more. But when something is disregarded or held as heresy by religion, that becomes extremely dangerous. And we've obviously
seen that in certain places around the world. What is your perception of, you know, let's take that time, you know, when science is turned into heresy, what is that? What are the dangers of a society when that happens? Well, the incredible quality of life and abundance that we enjoy right now in Western society since, you know, the 1600s, is the result of Enlightenment era
empirical thinking. So if you think sunflower seeds can cure cancer, you give a whole bunch of people with cancer sunflower seeds, and then a whole bunch of people who have cancer, you don't give them sunflower seeds, you give them pecans and see if there's a difference in survival rate. That's empiricism. And that's how we develop medicines and surgery and airplanes that fly
and everything and the toaster, right? I mean, everything, right? And so what my father used to say is that in the Middle Ages and the Dark Ages, the Muslim worlds were the leaders in science and in medicine and in astronomy and in math. And their scientific inquiry was just divorced from the religious thought that ran parallel within Muslim society, right? They were separated. The largest library in the world was in Alexandria at the time. And then it shifted.
And the Enlightenment came to Europe. It came to the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages of Europe, and Copernicus and Galileo and Isaac Newton and on. I mean, the sort of long roster of brilliant, brilliant thinkers, you're right, all the way up to Stephen Hawking in our era. That was Enlightenment era thinking, which basically said, you know what, God, if you just use God to explain everything, you understand nothing. And there are ways of
understanding and predicting the natural world. We can tell you when the next eclipse will be, because we know the movements of the stars and the sun and the planets. These are mathematically predictable. The sun is at the center of our solar system, not the Earth. And of course, Galileo was threatened with being burned at the stake for uttering such a heresy,
but it's the truth. And he declined the honor of being burned at the stake for secular thought and Vatican gave the Catholic Church what it wanted, but everyone knew damn well it was nonsense. And so the incredible blessings, material blessings and technological and scientific blessings of our society are the result of secular Enlightenment era thinking. And we completely reversed roles with the Muslim world, which lapsed into sort of religious
authoritarianism. And it's there still, right? And in the Arab Spring and in all of the sort of wars that have roiled those regions, the weapons that everyone's using were developed by the West. They were developed by Western engineers and scientists. It's not like the Mujahideen in Afghanistan were using weapons developed in Muslim society in Afghanistan. They were
using weapons developed in freaking Russia by Russian engineers. So that's the advantage of Enlightenment era thinking, which doesn't mean there's no role for responsible religion. I put those two words together very intentionally for responsible religion. And of course, it doesn't preclude a role. But the idea that God is the answer to all things deprives us
of the miracle of God's world, right? I mean, God, if you want to follow the thinking, and I don't describe things to God, but if you want to follow it, it's like, all right, God gave you life, God gave you this world, and you're now telling me to don't worry about it? Because then there's something after this ultimate gift from God. Like, yeah, don't worry about it. That's just, yeah, you'll be done with this soon enough. That to me is heresy, right? Like, come on.
And that's why Karl Marx loathed religion, because he was, this is the time of enormous oppression of the serfs who had virtually, they were virtually slaves of Russian society, right? I mean, they're sort of the peasant class that had no rights whatsoever. And Karl Marx wanted to
bring a sort of economic and social political revolution to Russia. And what he hated about religion is that the, of course, the Orthodox priests who were in league with the authoritarian rulers, with the czar, because one of the unfortunate things about the church is it often allies itself with the wealthiest, most powerful and abusive people in the country. Shame on you all, right? Because of that, the Orthodox priests were sort of telling the peasant class, like,
don't worry about it. Yeah, your life suck because you're serfs in czarist Russia, but in the afterlife, you know, the humble shall inherit, the meek shall inherit the earth, and in the afterlife, you're going to be fine. Right. And that's why Karl Marx hated it, because it demotivated the working class, the peasant class from throwing off the chains of rebellion and bringing dignity to themselves and their lives. You use the word responsible religion. I think
the same can also be applied to medicine. And as we just heard the incredible medical practitioners from paramedics and nurses to doctors that, you know, were the chain of survival for you, that was modern medicine at its absolute pinnacle. However, when you look at chronic disease management, that is not responsible medicine. Telling people all you need is a pill for your mental health problems or you need a pill for your high blood pressure or your cholesterol
is extremely irresponsible. And so I think this is another thing is whether it's religion, whether it's science, when the wrong people are at the helm, they abuse it. At their core, they're both beautiful philosophies, whether you choose to subscribe to science or not, to subscribe to religion or not, that's entirely everyone's individual journey. But when it becomes a tool for power and greed, whether it's medicine or religion,
that's an entirely different conversation. Absolutely. I mean, I would just say that anything that disproportionately empowers a small number of people and gives them sort of rights that no one else has, that's evil. And that's true of fascism. It can be true of religion. It can be true of medicine and technology and everything else. I think that I believe it's Google, that their assets are something north of a trillion dollars.
Sorry. I'm not good with that. And I don't, I mean, not to boast or anything, but this is my phone. I mean, I have flip phone. I'm not going to actually lay myself open to your algorithms that are designed to addict me to a process that gives you a trillion dollars and allows you to influence the outcomes of elections and all kinds of other nasty stuff and addict our children.
Like, sorry, thank you. No, I'm not going to be part of that. And I think it's just absolutely disgusting that capitalism, which has brought enormous good to this society, right? Has also brought that. I hope there's a time of reckoning coming for that kind of thing. Absolutely. Well, I want to hit one more area and speaking of children that you get back to yours, but you touched on DMT and ketamine when you were talking about the kind of neuroscience side.
One thing that I've seen, I'm sure you have as well being so well embedded in the military community is the incredible healing that is happening with some of these psychedelic therapies when it comes to trauma in uniform, this particular example, talk to me about just your observation of that entire philosophy and conversation. Yeah. So I haven't, I haven't actually researched that per se. I've heard about an anecdotal
myself. I'm, I'm the trauma that I dealt with. I've dealt with successfully through talk therapy and just the passage of time. And if I were in a more extreme situation, I might turn to that kind of remedy, but I'm not. So that aside, I'm completely sober. I don't do drugs. I don't drink it all once in a while. I smoke a cigarette, but really very occasionally that's the limit of my sin. I don't do drugs. I don't drink alcohol. I don't do drugs. I don't do drugs. I don't do
anything. And, you know, one of the reasons I don't want a smartphone is because I enjoy being sober and that includes digitally sober. So, you know, like just to explain sort of where I'm coming from, but I have heard that those kinds of drug therapies, DMT, ketamine can be incredibly
therapeutic. And I, I just, I'm, I'm, I cheer that, right? I mean, I don't know, but if that's, anybody that's great, they seem to reproduce something, the, the, the hallucinations they produce seem to have some things in common with the visions, hallucinations, experiences, whatever you want to call them of people that are on the threshold of death. And there seem to be some common elements, you know, as there are with, some of the ideas around shamanism and
every society in the world has some kind of idea that there's the, the world of the living. And then there's this other world where the dead reside and that the, the interface between them is mysterious and fluid and not entirely understood. And certain people can go to that threshold and come back with knowledge of the other world, of the after world. Those would be shamans. Those might be people who almost died and came back and saw their dead ancestors. Like I saw
my dead father. Certainly the drug ayahuasca is used by shamans in the Amazon basin who travel to the world of the dead and come back. There are all these commonalities around that threshold. And it does make me, it does make me wonder, I mean, as an atheist, like it does make me wonder, I mean, a lot of the near death phenomena that are known can be explained through sort of neurochemistry, right? I mean, your low blood oxygen and the release of neurochemicals that
stimulate hallucinations and you can explain a lot of it through neuroscience. But the one thing that actually sort of fails those, that way of thinking, that rationalist way of thinking is why do the dying see the dead and only the dying see the dead, right? And hospice nurses will tell you that people in the backs of paramedics, in the backs of ambulances, the literature, the NDE literature is filled with it. I mean, if you give a room full of people, LSD, you know what
100% they will all have hallucinations. Like science will tell you that. And we know that the neurochemical mechanism for producing that, no mystery there, right? But they will not all this have the same hallucination. And what's strange about the shamans and the dying and sometimes people on DMT is that they see the dead. And that to me, actually, if there's a great mystery here, it's that and how do we explain it? And so my book is divided into two sections, what and if.
What explains what happened to me? If is basically what if there were something else? What if this physical reality that we experience as life isn't the only reality and there's something commonly called the afterlife, which is a term that kind of loath, but what if there was something, how would it work? Like what's the thought experiment for how that would conceivably work? And that's where my book lands towards the end in quantum physics, which
is really the sort of deep mystery of science is how things work at the quantum level. And as I say in the book, if there is some post death reality that we just don't understand, then if there is some post death reality that we just don't understand, the explanation would be somewhere in my opinion, would probably lie somewhere in the quantum realm. And we may not even be capable of understanding it. Likewise, we're not capable of understanding why the universe
exists at all. We just can't, we cannot wrap our minds around it. I think we'll probably never know. Well, likewise, it might be tied into one of the secrets about a post death existence. They don't know gravity, for example, is a force that pervades the universe. And it's the reason the universe exists and exists the way it does. It's possible that consciousness is also another fundamental element of the physical universe and creates the universe as it is known to be. And that that is
not lost when the mid when you biologically die, it's possible. It just good luck trying to prove it. As I was reading the science part at the end, although that knot in my stomach came back when I was 19 and my friend was talking about, I was like, Oh no, but then a red cardinal flew into the garden. I'm sitting on my back porch and I was kind of pulled back to, you know, what I know, what matters to me at this moment, the gratitude element again, just one more area, just super
quick. One thing I've heard that I think is beautiful is with some of these psychedelics, they found that people who are terminally ill, who are literally knowingly counting down some of the days of that, you know, their particular diagnosis are finding a lot of peace doing some of these journeys and feeling that belonging of something bigger than just this. Have you, did you stumble across any of that kind of conversation when you were researching?
I did. I didn't include it in the book, but that's, you know, that's part of the conversation right now. But, you know, I interviewed a number of hospice nurses and, you know, my mother was talking to her dead brother in her last hours. My father was talking to his dead sister. Hospice nurses will tell you that one very common thing is to have people engaging with the dad in the room, right? No one else can see them, but they're right there and the dying person is engaging with them.
Talking with them, interacting with them. And that's very, very common. And it was one very moving story. This hospice nurse said that she was taking care of somebody, a man who was, you know, elderly in his last hours. And he, unlike most dying people, he was not in pain and not on morphine. He was completely clear minded. And his wife had gone into the kitchen and she was in the kitchen. And he was in the kitchen. And he was talking to this gentleman, and his wife had
gone into the kitchen to make some lunch and the nurse was with this gentleman. And he started talking. He said, Oh, thank God there's Barbara and started talking to Barbara, whoever Barbara was, right? And seemed enormously heart and desir. And so the nurse went into the kitchen and said Barbara, do you know who that is? And the wife mortified the nurse for a moment by saying, yes, Barbara was the love of his life. And of course the nurse was like, Oh, no, oh my God.
And then she's the wife said, that was our 19 year old daughter. And if you're a father, I mean, you can't, I can hardly say that without choking up, right? I mean, and so that, and he went out, you know, Barbara came, just like my father came, Barbara came to help him over, to help him across. Right. And my, so my, my enduring question is like, how does that work? Cause no one else sees the freaking dead, right? Like, how does that work? And so the rationalists and the neurochemists and
all this, they could have lots of great theories about why dying people might hallucinate. They're utterly mute on the idea of why they all hallucinate essentially the same thing, which is that the dead show up. And even sometimes people that they didn't know were dead because the other person had just died. Like that's also extremely strange phenomenon and it's been documented many, many times. Well, I think that's the perfect place to end. I want to say thank you
again for your generosity coming on the show again. And not only that, but with a sick child and having shingles. So I'm so honored that you suffered through that and did the interview, but I truly appreciate it. And again, I've, you know, shouted from the rooftops about your book, you know, tribe is held as such high regard from, you know, so many communities that have shared
suffering, freedom was phenomenal as well. And then now we have the new ones. So I want to thank you so much for writing the book and kind of getting this conversation even out there and for coming on the behind the shield podcast today. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. I always enjoy talking to you.