Guest Spotlight: Near Death Experiences with Sebastian Junger and Freedom Through Music with John Legend

You're listening to Comedy Central. Welcome back to the very show.

My guest tonight is an award winning journalist, filmmaker, and best selling author whose latest book is called In My Time of Dying, How I Came face to face with the idea of an afterlife.

Please welcome. Sebastian Younger.

All right, wow, I.

Mean amazing to hear all that you had a near death experience. You had an aneurysm, you bled out inside of your body.

Did you die? I'm still working on that.

Okay, I'm pretty sure I didn't.

Yes, But that's one of the great mysteries is how do we know? How do we know we're here?

Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you're here, so I know that you're here. But I guess it begs a question of belief, of faith, of well.

I mean, this is the problem.

After I came back from the hospital, I mean, I lost ten units of blood. I came very very close to dying. They barely saved me. And when I woke up in the ICU, I didn't know that I'd almost died.

The nurse told me. And when I came home, I was seized with this fear that I had.

Died and that this was all a hallucination, that it was because I was reading about near death experiences and I thought, maybe I maybe I did die and this is just And I asked my wife, I said, just tell me I'm really here. I was slowly going crazy, right, but I said to my wife, just tell me I'm here, I'm really here, that I actually survived. And she said, of course you are, honey, right, And I thought, that's exactly the kind of thing a hallucination.

Right, Well, tell us what happened.

I mean, you you start the book with this amazing scary story of you surfing and almost dying, which I'm kind of reading this gone Sebastian. You're almost dying a lot. But then tell us what happened with you know, you're talking about losing so much blood. It was unrelated to the surfing, obviously.

Yeah.

I mean when I was young, I surfed and I almost round in the winter in January on Cape Cod, which was just stupid to be doing in the first place, right, But I got then. I was a war reporter for a long time, Yeah, and I had very close calls. I was almost killed a number of times, Yeah, which is different from the experience of dying, right, I mean I had bullets, say close to my head three inches away?

Is that a lot or a little with a bullet?

I don't know, Like it was an right, I've never ever had to ask myself that way, and I don't want it, and I don't want it.

Yeah.

But then I stopped war reporting. I had a family, two little girls. I turned towards life, right, I gave all that optic war reporting now, and then one day, in mid sentence, I felt this pain shoot through my abdomen. And it was an aneurysm, a ballooning of one of my arteries, which is just like a structural defect.

Right, it ruptured. Yeah, And it'd been.

The aneurism had been growing my entire life, and it chose that moment June sixteenth, four years ago, round six pm, to rupture. And I was losing a unit of blood every ten or fifteen minutes.

And how much units of blood can we lose?

You have about ten or twelve units, ok, you, and you can lose about two thirds of it, which I did, right, So, but we were.

I'm not laughing at you, at you dying. I'm laughing that that's so much of your I mean, it's insane, this is wild.

Yeah.

And the problem was we we lived an hour away.

From a hospital, right, and I'm losing a unit every ten or fifteen minutes. You can do the math. I was basically a human hourglass. And when I got to the er, the doctors immediately knew.

Oh, this guy's dying.

And suddenly I saw this doctor above me with this huge needle and he said, do I have permission to stick this into your jugular?

And I was like, not really.

I mean, can I read the terms and condition exactly right?

I had no idea I was dying, And so I said to him, you mean in case there's an emergency.

He was like, this is the emergency right now.

And you talk about that in the book. And that actually gave me chills to envision it from your perspective, looking up, hearing the noises of a hospital, which are just so deliberately hospitally, the noises, the faces, and to hear the doctor say this is the emergency and.

Yes, And so I said, yes, of course.

So we started putting it in, working up my neck with an ultrasound probe and the needle, and while he was doing that suddenly, and I have to stop here and say, I've been an atheist my whole life. My dad was a physicist. He was an atheist. I'm a rationalist. I'm not mystic. In fact, I'm anti mystic. I'm like anti woo woo. Just the works, right, So just to get that, like.

That sound hair comes some wooo.

So all of a sudden, as he's working on my neck, I feel this immense black void appear under beneath me, this black pit, and I'm getting pulled into it. I don't know I'm dying, but I know I don't want to go into the infinitely black pit, Like I have this sense that if you do that, you're not coming back, right, this sort of animal instinct.

And I started panicking.

And as I panicked, my dead father appeared above me and said communicated to me, it's okay, don't fight it.

I'll take care of you. Can come with me. And I was like, you're dead. I'm not going with you, but.

Dad, we have nothing to talk about, right, Like, we'll talk later a lot later.

And I said to the doctor, you got to hurt such a that's such a sun thing to sell you. I didn't ask you to come over here a complex exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, And I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now.

I'm going yeah. And that's the last thing I remembered.

For a while.

So the believer in me wants to think, your dad, who you talk about in this book, maybe wasn't always there for you emotionally. It was this very rational person was maybe spectrum spectrum okay, was crossing over to be there for you emotionally in this difficult time. The skeptic in me thinks, you've lost all your blood and you're going mad?

Is that? Are you there too?

I'm very sympathetic to both ways of thinking. So this is what happened. They saved my life. I went home five days later.

There's such an unbelievable description of the doctors. And I had just I've already had respect for trauma doctors, but what they know about the human body, what they're able to do with in matters of seconds to save people's lives as tremendous.

It's incredible.

And they did so.

They saved me with a catheter, right and and so what they do is they put a catheter into your femeral artery at your groin, and they can thread it up through your vasculature and wiggle it around and get to almost.

Anywhere in your body. Right.

This was discovered by a guy named Forsmut, a German physician a long time ago.

Talk about it in here.

Yeah, he couldn't get permission to do this on a patient, so he did it to himself, threaded it all the way into his heart, and then he walked down the hall to the X ray room and asked the technician to take a photograph of his chest to prove he'd been in his own heart with a catheter.

Right that.

Imagine how good the kids will be today after all. The video goes totally right exactly.

Yeah.

So I was on a fluoroscope for so long. It took them so long to do this that I was lying on this sort of square plate where they it admits X rays basically right.

And I was on this.

Thing for so long that when I got home, I had this square burn mark on my back from the plate. I had radiation burns on my back and this perfect square. Of course, my wife didn't like that much, neither did I, And then I tried to make it better by saying we can just call it square noble, and.

It didn't work.

You're a journalist, and I'm like, come, idiot, let's let's talk about having this experience touching death. How has it affected your life? I mean, does it give this more meaning? Should we all get close to death so we appreciate this tiny moment we have? Are these all the things you're grappling with?

No, No, don't do that. Okay, there are shortcuts, right, I mean.

Psychedelics, ayahuasca, So.

My eyes, I mean, I'm still an atheist, but what I can ask you that, Yeah, I'm still an atheist. I don't believe in God, but my mind was sort of open to the possibility that there is a some kind of post death reality, maybe at the quantum level. And I'm sort of reaching into my father's field of physics, maybe.

At the quantum level. That we just don't understand how this all works.

I say in my book, we might understand reality like a dog understands a television screen, Like there's no concept of the greater reality that's producing the image that the dog sees that we see. So God and an afterlife are separate, separate things. They don't need each other. You could have a God and no after life, and after life and no God either or both. So I'm still in atheist, But what I would say is that the greatest and I say this in my book, I don't.

Go to church, but.

I believe that the greatest worship of what some people call God's creation, which is the world and life and what atheists just called creation, the greatest worship of that is being fully engaged in your life, all in the moments of your life, in all of its emotional reality. If you none of us know that this isn't our last day. No one in this room, no one on this knows this isn't their last day. So who do you want to be on your last day? Be that person on every day.

It's amazing to me that you you've survived an ied attack in Afghanistan, you're a war reporter, but you are back home on a normal day. Is when you kind of came to this realization.

Well, that's why I got so crazy after rest, right, So I'd go to war zones and I had to deal with myself like, Okay, you're rolling the dice. You're gonna do this to get that and you know whatever. It was a deal that I made, and I had a few close calls, and then I stopped doing that. After my friend and colleague Tim Heatherington led out in the back of a rebel pickup truck in Libya. I'm not okay, I'm out right, and I turned towards life.

In the woods. They will find you for their money, right, they.

Will track you down. And that's what That's what it felt like.

What will you do on the anniversary of this moment or do you just kind of speed past that you don't need to honor it because June's coming up? Is there something is something you'll do?

You know, it's a day, It's a thoughtful day, you know. And there's a number of days during the year where people very close to me have died like Tim, their thoughtful days. And you know, mortality is terrifying. But if you don't let it be terrifying, it could make life miraculous, and you can kind of choose, and if you're not sufficiently terrified, life isn't going to be sufficiently miraculous, and vice versa. And so that to me is how one lives one's life.

Quickly, talk about some strangers that you didn't know helped save your life by something we all can do every day, which is provide blood.

Yeah, so ten I needed ten units of blood. I'd lost two thirds of my blood. Right, I was sixty over forty when I hit the er, and ten anonymous donors gave a unit of blood that saved my life. Right, So now I give blood as much as I can. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't even take an hour. And there are very few opportunities where you can be part of something greater than yourself. In this modern society. The chance doesn't come up very much. It only comes up in three context.

You need to vote right, you need to serve jury duty, and you need to give blood.

If you don't do those three things, you're an awesome human being.

I would say one more.

You have to buy Okay, you have to buy Rudy Giuliani's coffee. Thank you so much for being here.

And sharing your story.

I very much appease all.

My guest Tonight is an EGOT winning multi platinum artist and activist who hosts the new original audio documentary Afghan Star.

Please welcome John Legend.

Thank you all.

Here we go.

He got winning multi platinum. I wasn't expecting to see your name on audio documentary Afghan Star.

Yeah, I'm a podcast host. Now my biggest aspiration finally come to life.

Tell me about this new project. How did you get involved?

Afghan Star is the name of a competition show, so it's like American Idol or The Voice. But the revolutionary fact was that it was in Afghanistan. Yes, and prior to the US invasion, the Taliban was in charge and they had basically outlawed music in the country, so literally they would have bonfires, burn CDs and records and musical instruments, and so there was a whole generation of people that were growing up not having access to the most basic thing that we all.

Love, that's a part of all of our lives. Music.

And so when the Taliban was deposed and there was this new freedom that was permeating through the country, one of the producers there who had started this network.

Called Tolo TV.

He decided to start a singing competition show, and he had no idea how revolutionary it would be, because not only was it displaying music on television, but it was giving women opportunities that they never had before. It was challenging a lot of the societal norms and some of the religious.

Strictures that had been on the country for a long time.

And it was quite a cultural moment that impacted the entire country.

I mean, you talk about in the podcast how the Taliban used to stop people cars and if there was a cassette tape in there, yes, they would beat up the driver and then rip up the cassette teve and hang it from a tree.

They would unspool the.

Actual tape from the cassette and hang it up so people would know you can't have this.

As an American, I listened to this stuff, it almost seems fictitious. Yeah, I just that's never even I mean, it's how spoiled lab It's never crossed my mind that people cannot have music. YEA, is your approach to music any differently now?

Knowing that?

Is your approach to music now any different?

Knowing that?

Well, I always knew music was such a gift, but I think you can take it for granted because it's something that's just part of your lives. And you know, we've had it as part of our culture forever, and every country's pretty much had it as a part of their culture forever.

But to have it taken away it is quite a thing.

And to see the links people went through to get music back into their lives, the underground networks that they would have to use to smuggle in records that they want to listen to, the parties they would have with live music out of the reach of the government and police. All of these things just shows you how important music is to our lives and how meaningful it can be, and to see it taken away makes you really appreciate it.

It's almost like the Taliban hasn't seen footloose.

I know exactly know what of these things.

Do music, And you know what's happened since the tali End's back in charge again, So you know, you would think maybe there is no music again in Afghanistan, But once you let the genie out of the bottle, it's really hard to suppress the people's desire to get music and now, with the Internet being more prevalent and everyone kind of getting used to the fact that music was in their lives, it's kind of hard for the Talviion to stop them so listening to music now.

One of my favorite parts in the pod was when he decides to have auditions and he's like, is anybody gonna show up?

Oh my god?

And then he gets to this hotel and security is furious at him because there's hundreds of people there.

Everybody wanted to be probably moody.

But but then he starts rolling cameras and he's like, guess what, everybody's a bad singer, which wasn't the case. There was good singers, but there's also a lot of bad singing, sure, as there is everywhere.

You have to go through the audition process exactly.

You know.

It showed a lot of things because one of the things that Afghanistan hadn't done was vote for anything, right, and so this was like an opportunity for them to vote.

And they were like we laugh.

I mean, I'm laughing at this, but it's like, holy shit, that another thing Americans just.

We take for granted. You know, it's like, yeah, vote, let's talk.

And another thing I mean, let's talk about the role of women in Afghanistan. This was such a this was such a groundbreaking cultural change for them.

Yeah.

So one of the most controversial things at the beginning of the show was when a woman was performing on the show and she started dancing just a little bit, a little shimmy and and they were very upset about that.

And then her job starts to sneak back a little bit.

You see a little bit of her hair, and these are you know, norms that had been enforced right with with the with the gun, with with with the threat of death, and so the fact that people were doing this on national television was quite daring. And then we had a judge named Ariana Said, who was a pop star and she was very well known in Afghanistan and she became a judge, and her life was under threat all the time because she was a symbol of women's liberation just by the fact that she was there as

And there are some unique pieces of art per episode there's art created or something.

Yes, we have unique pieces of art.

I've signed some of them and each of them represents stories from the episodes, and so they're very vivid and and beautiful and people can check him out.

Cool.

It's nice to have you here in New York. I mean Trump's in the Bronx today. I was wondering, you know, is that why you're here to Uh.

You're politically outspoke.

Feel like he would be here a lot of days nowadays.

That's true.

I think he has true.

How are you feeling this election? I mean, you're politically outspoken. What can people be doing? What should people be doing?

Well, of course they should vote, and I'll be voting for Joe Biden. I think it's a clear choice.

You know, it's a clear choice.

And we talk about things we take for granted, but there is one candidate that isn't too keen on democracy.

Isn't too keen on us having the right to vote.

He literally tried to steal an election and nullify the votes of the American people, and I feel like that is utterly disqualifying and he should not ever be anywhere close to the nuclear codes, the White House, the oball, and I'm gonna do my best to make sure he doesn't get back there.

I appreciate you chatting with me. Thank you very much, John Legend.

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