Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with Sebastian Junger

jobs with the natural world. Long ago he had the huge international bestseller of The Perfect Storm. He's written an outside magazine where I used to be a correspondent about many things of whale hunters for one, went on to do a ton of work about soldiers and the impacts of war. His latest book, In My Time of Dying, came out last year. It contemplates death and the afterlife after a near death experience. The paperback version. Who knows. If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might

have to wait indefinitely Spring of twenty six. I'd recommend going getting the hardcover. Other works from Sebastian include Fire Tribe. I mentioned Perfect Storm already. I remember seeing when that came out, the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg after I read the book about a commercial sword fishing

boat that never returned. So we're going to talk about his new book and also about his years as a war correspondent and a bunch of our stuff, man Bash and when you're when when one the Perfect Storm came out? Do that hit me hard? Like in a good way. But you know, one of the biggest things is I used to be a tree a climber for a tree service, really, and I know that the story came out of that that you were climbing, you were a tree service climber

had a chainsaw injury. Yep, what was the chain saw injury?

tiny little branch, right, and I just reached down. I was I was in the flow, right, I mean I was sort of moving right, and I would just reach down to zip it this little sucker, to sort of zipp it so it would we wouldn't like tangle up my feet. And I was just slopping in a hurry. And the tip of the bar hit the tree and popped up in the back of my ankle, and uh, it was I wasn't spiking so I was wearing I wasn't wearing big leather boots, right because I wasn't spiking

the tree. It was a prune and and it just went right into the back of my ankle and I it didn't hurt, but I was like something hit my ankle. The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw. I got it, I should just at least take a look to make sure I'm all right, And UH turned off the saw and clipped it on my belt and U and pulled my pant leg up and h sure enough so I could see my achilles tendon. I mean, I was looking at it right, and but it wasn't It

wasn't cut. It just had been laid open. And I repelled down to the you know, the ground, and my crew took me, took me to a sort of urgent care place and they sewed me up. But it got me. I was limping for quite a while, and it got me thinking about dangerous work and that there's all this work in this country that the nation needs, right. We need people drilling for oil, we need loggers, we need all kinds of people doing you know, commercial fishermen, and

no one's really thinking about them. And they're taking casualty rates that you know, are sometimes comparable to units in the US military. Right. I mean, it's like it, there's the commercial fishing industry is deadly right, And so I thought, I'm going to write about dangerous work and because it's no one's thinking about it, and these people deserve some some love.

of course you can get killed up there. But I realized there's no random element, Like if you're going to get killed doing treework is because you screwed up. You know, It's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you rolled the dice wrong, right. You lose a chess because you may bad decisions and the other guy didn't. And treework was the same way. If you don't make a mistake,

you're gonna be all right. So really focus, be in the moment right now and be perfect and there was almost a sort of zen discipline to that mindset that I really really liked.

And I even talked to a guy named Ernie Hazzard whose boat was pitch pulled off George's Bank and flipped end over ends, and he wound up trapped in the cabin in a flooded cabin upside down at night in the North Atlantic, I mean, the ultimate nightmare, right, And he managed to on a lungful of air, swim out through a busted window and make his way to the surface in this huge storm and the life raft popped up right next to him and he got in it

and he managed to survive. So I interviewed him about what's it like to be trapped in a flooded boat upside down at night? What's going through your mind? Because I was trying to recreate the state of mind of those guys in their last day, the last hours, their

last minutes. And yeah, so these captains said that, you know the waves, they're they're huge, and the problem isn't that their individual waves are that big that they will but they'll converge, like waves will they coming get from different directions, They'll converge, and suddenly you have a wave that's twice as high as all the other waves, and they will just overwhelm you.

I didn't strategize it like that. I've never thought like that in terms of my work, but it actually was a kind of good fit for where the marketplace was

at the time, and no one had really studs. Turtle wrote a great book called Working It was an oral history of work, an amazing book, but it wasn't focused on dangerous work, right, and you know, I just I just thought this is you know, there was a sort of class issue here, you know, I mean, the people that do dangerous work are mostly not exclusively mostly working class mails and they get hurt and they die without much fanfare and we're all depending on their work, right,

And I mean we all we live in houses made out of wood that someone cut down, and we're eating fish and you know, gone and on, we're driving cars that oil got drilled out of the ground by somebody, you know. And and so I just all that was really compelling to me. And uh and and it turned out to be a sort of gap in the market. You know, no one had really focused on this yet, and so you.

it's kind of hard to put. Like Randall I talk a lot about with the with market hunters of a century ago, would be they probably if you quiz them, they're probably aware of the broader geopolitical market factors. That are pushing them to do what they do. But there their desire to participate or they're moving into participate is like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's what that's what's available to them.

And so when I was I mean, just to jump ahead a bit in my in my career, but you know, many years later, when I was embedded with US forces in Afghanistan, you know, I had plenty of personal opinions about the war, you know, and some some positive, some critical, but I wanted to write about the soldiers, right. I was one semary third Airborne in a remote valley with a lot of combat. I was interested in those in those guys, and they were not They themselves were not

thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just weren't thinking about it, right, Yeah, And and so when I wrote my book War and made my film or Strepo about those guys, there was no discussion about the larger issues because those guys were not interested in it. And I wanted to. I wanted to make work that made people understand what it was like to be an American soldier in bout Afghanistan. Like end of sentence, and you know, they're twenty years old, they're twenty one years old.

They're I wasn't thinking about the economy when I was twenty, Like why why would they, you know, like, why would they think about the larger issues? They're they're they're they're already have their hands full of just doing the job that's right in front of them.

time out there. So I was I sort of participant a journalist in some situations before that. But my first war was in nineteen ninety three on backup for one second.

shelling of civilians they besieged Sarajevo. It was an ethnic, ethnically driven conflict, you know, sort of a nationalistic conflict and grotesque, grotesquely violent, And I you know, I managed to convince a magazine editor I knew at a magazine called Men's Journal, which is back in the day a pretty good magazine, and he wrote, he gave he gave me a sort of letter of passage like Sebastian is working on a piece for us for which wasn't even true for the boar of civil war in Bosnia, and please,

you know, help them in any way you can I just like showed that to some un guy and he gave me a un press pass and the next thing I knew, I was on a relief flight into Sarajevo and then boom there. I was like it was no credentials from anybody, right, But there were a lot of freelancers in Sarajevo who made their made their bones. I mean it sort of like learned the craft because they just put themselves in that situation. They started lansing radio newspaper.

You know. I went there basically the girlfriend I was living with in Gloucester dumped me and I was, you know.

And I was getting married that summer. But you have to to go do what you did, Like tree climb is one thing, but to go do you did, and like go into Afghanistan during the Civil War when for a lot of people, having an American captive is really cool. And then being able to like kill an American captive is enticing. Right, It's like you had to kind of have been like I mean, I don't sound like you know, like you had like like it's like a mental issue,

but you had to be like kind of indifferent to death. No.

I was coming back from a frontline fight back towards Freetown and with a couple of government soldiers and a couple of journalists and a group of rebels stepped out of the jungle and stopped us on this deserted road. And two weeks later they wiped out two cars full of journalists on the same road, like right near where we were. These same guys stopped us and they had their rifles the machine guns leveled, and they were arguing

with each other. We were in an open jeep and they were arguing with each other, seemed to be arguing with each other but whether to kill us all or not. And we just said there was nothing we could do, and we just sat there. And at one point one of them like leveled his rifle at us to fire, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards

so it wouldn't come. So, you know, I had, you know, for about ten or fifteen minutes, I was thinking this really could go down, right, And it was the extraordinary feeling. I became sort of I just associated, right, I mean, my body sort of went numb, and I was so scared that I wasn't even scared anymore. It's like I

wasn't there, and the psychological effect. And then they didn't shoot us, and I don't know why, right, And the psychological trauma of that is way worse than someone shooting at you from three hundred meters and you managed to get behind some sandbags. I mean, that's child's play, right, compared to, Wow, we are totally screwed and they could shoot us or not. And then a similar thing happened

in Nigeria in two thousand and six. I was seized by rebels, the Ejah Warriors, who were fighting in a group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a partly criminal, partly righteous like group. And they seized me in a small village in the creeks and the Niger River and in the Delta, and the accused me

of being a spy. And one guy came up sort of strutted up to me, you know, machine gun and these guys, these Ejoh warriors are they they got feathers and paint and all kinds of Fea dishes on them. And they're wild looking guys, right, and really intense warriors. And he said, very matter of fact, very matter of factly, he said, when we when we kill you later today, I'm going to be the one to do it. He didn't say it meanly, he was just I just want you to know, you know, just by way of introduction.

to maintain myself connection with him. And he was in South Africa, actually he was an arms dealer and Africa but indigenous Ejaw, and I talked with him and he said, okay, give the phone back to the the guy who gave you the phone. And I didn't know what he was going to say, and he say kill him or don't any I gave the phone back and the guy said, okay, sir, yes, sir, all right, we'll do it. And I didn't know what, you know, and he shut the phone, you know, flip

the phone with the flip phone. He flipped the clothes and they said it's gonna be fine, We're gonna let you go. But I didn't know until that moment that it would be fine. So they might have been bluffing. I mean he might You know, I'm an American, right, I mean, you know there are repercussions for whacking America.

I mean, I really this one, you know. So I spent most in beds are a week or two, right, And but I spent a year off and on with one platoon, which was like thirty forty guys at this remote outpost called Bristreppo was named after the platoon medic who was killed, you know, basically at the bottom of

the hill. And so I really became part of that platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of a group, you know, I mean a really ancient and a really ancient and pretty much a way that's been pretty much lost to our society here at home. I felt like, Wow, I belonged to this thing, and they would risk their lives for me, and I know I would for them, and here we are, let's get it done,

you know. And it was. It was absolutely extraordinary, and so that that experience really changed me, right, I mean, I feel like in our society we don't get to enjoy that group affiliation at such a profound in such a profound way. And it is what our evolutionary past consists of, right, that we're social primates. We survived. We survived not because we're rugged individuals, but because we affiliate

very well. And in when we're in groups like that, the individuals in them will risk their lives or give their lives to protect the group.

emotional relationships with. And you can't be emotionally close to five hundred dudes, right, it's not happening. Right, even if you're in the same battalion. That's a rather abstract knowledge, right, But thirty forty people, You're like, wow, these are my people. What wouldn't I do for them?

thirty or forty people. That is the human experience and evolutionary terms, and it's the loss of that experience for most people in modern society is a tragic one.

Why was it that along the American frontier at his various points in Pennsylvania and the Ohio and further west all the way to Texas and Arizon, Like why we're pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native society and disappearing in native society and the natives didn't do the opposite, and and what it really seemed to be And in Benjamin Franklin wrote about this because of course, if you're like a good Christian, the idea that like white Christians

would rather live with what they called the savages, like is it flies in the face of the entire sense of Western superiority, right, And Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about this like what is the appeal? And the appeal is that that those kinds of organic hunter gatherer societies are extremely egalitarian. The leadership is not imposed, it's granted by the people. I mean, all these sort of like democratic ideals that are that we do not live up to

actually are acted out in societies of that scale. And and there's community, there's community, really close community. And and of course if you're a young man, instead of having to plow fields all day, you can go hunting, like you know what I mean, like what like what's not to like sort of yeah, and and so that so that was my the genesis of my thought that maybe what people are really drawn to is close connection to each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with,

against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo. They got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars and everything, you know, all the things young men like. He's like, whoa. I mean, A number of them said to me, if we could take a helicopter back to Restrepo right now and do another year out there, we would do it.

garbage for food, competing with dogs in the streets. And he said, and like you get home so fast and as you're just home and he's standing there and here's a woman arguing with a Starbucks employee about the state of her latte, and he's like, I wanted to kill her. He's talking about just the heart, like the very difficult adjustment. But there's this thing I've been and think about what you're you're talking about and the ideas that you explore

and tribe. It's like, I'm kind of struggling with this thing I'm seeing happened later. I'm just becoming aware of it. And it's very troubling to me about American culture, where what when you're on the internet, what you if you solely relied on the Internet, you would get a view of American culture that does not at all match the view of American culture that you have as you're alive being an American outside of the web, right, meaning any

one of my neighbors. Any one of my neighbors would if my house was on fire, any one of my neighbors would go into my house to get my kids. I would go into any one of my neighbors houses to get their kids. And when I say this, I'm not like I have no idea of the political affiliation except for one of my neighbors, I have no idea of their political affiliation zero. But like, you get this. I used to think of people think of the like the radical right and the radical left as being like

diametrically opposed. I'm starting to view it more like that these are just symptoms of a that these are symptoms of an ailment. Yeah, It's like you could have a certain ailment and you might get like like stunning headaches, or you might have a certain ailment and be other people would have the same ailment and be that that they can't get a full breath or whatever, or all the weird shit that would happen to people with COVID.

It's like too much time online is the thing. Yeah, and then the symptoms are you could be radicalized in one direction, you radicalize in the other direction. Don't You're like you want it being that you're just bound by what you hate, Like your culture is my people that I find are people that hate what I hate, right, and that's my team. And dude, and like the part of your time, I was like that need like like build a team that's not based on just that you all hate the same shit.

It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle but also very important feelings of love or sadness or regret. You know, there's a gentler emotions that also are really important for keeping society and people glued together. Right, shared value is shared I shared warmth with each other. You know, those are hard. They don't have the algorithms for that. The algorithms for hatred are very very simple. There's a threat over there. We have to unify, we have to

denounce the threat and unify against it, and then we'll survive. Right, So you're going into very very ancient human history when

you gin up those emotions. And you know, it used to be that at the town hall, someone might stand you know, before the internet, right before the apocalypse of the internet that came along, you got, you know, the town hall and someone would stand up with a different view about you know, paving the streets or whatever, and you'd be like, Okay, I'm totally against that, but that's Joe. I know his you know I have, I have a relationship with Joe, like and I don't agree with them,

and I might even at them, shouting at him. But we're all in this together. We all live in this little you know. That's gone right, And so you can hate on people online and there are no repercussions. You know, the person is not going to come grab you by the shirt front and say, do not speak to me like that in front of my community or in front of my family. You're not any danger, right, You're free to be a sort of cowardly adversary and that's very

seductive to a lot of people. And so I, you know, I don't the internet's a great tool for all kinds of things. I don't, you know, I have a flip phone because I think the smartphones are just like killing people, like literally literally killing people. There. It's a it was a deliberate addiction designed by the tech companies, right, It's a very powerful addiction. It's particularly powerful with our children. And I think it's you know, I think it's destroying

the society. I just refuse to participate in it.

there's this Italian dude. And he says, like he goes down to he goes down to a gas station or something to buy soda, you know, and everybody's in the gas station's listening because Pearl harvard'st got attacked. He goes home, his dad listens to the address from Franklin. Roosevelt calls his four sons down into the room informs them, you will all fight because we move to this country. We have a house in a car. This country cannot fail.

And he says when he goes to the train station, his dad makes a point that his dad wants to drive him alone to the train station, so he's expecting some kind of lecture. His dad never says a word to him all the drive. They get to the train station, and you know what his dad says to him. He says to him, an Italian, don't do anything that will cause me to hang my head in shame. Wow, that was it, Dude out the door, and I'm like, I don't know, Mad is getting stuf about it, you know, yeah, yeah,

Like it's just like I feel like something's crowding. Like I'm just like, I have this terrible anxiety about culture right now, with with like the internet hatred.

And I'm you know, I was born in this country. Whatever, It's all great. So the idea that we're all unified in this American project is an incredibly powerful one, right, And and it transcends, it should transcend all these other divisions, including left and right. And I think one of the problems right now is that the internet. Look, I have a laptop, I'm online, I research stuff, I get it.

I just don't have a smartphone because I don't want that following me around all day and being where my brain disappears when I have thirty seconds to spare while I'm waiting for the bus, Like, I just that to me is horrible, right for the brain. But I uh, I think that I think I think we've sort of lost sight of the idea that there is one, that there's the ultimate, that the ultimate category we're all in is American.

and also make money. I mean, there's you can sort of monetize this, right, and and what they are sacrificing, maybe not deliberately and consciously, but ultimately what's happening is they are they are sacrificing the cultural and political unity of this country for smaller for smaller gains, for smaller personal gains, you know, including many politicians who do that.

But so basically what happened to me. I have a I have a ligament in the wrong place, my median arcuate ligament, which sort of goes across your abdomen about where your sternam is.

get the blood to where it needs to go. There's a lot of uh, sort of redundancy in the vascular system, so the blood flows to where it needs to go through smaller arteries, these branch arteries that are not designed to take that kind of blood flow, right, that kind of pressure. So what they do is they dilate so that they can carry all this blood they're not supposed

to take. It works fine, right, the problem they're meant to dilate, but if there's a weak spot in one of the arteries, instead of dilating, it will bubble out. It will balloon outwards, and it's called an aneurysm. Okay, and the artery wall will balloon outwards and it will get bigger over the course of decades. So it's there's no symptoms. Uh, it's very hard to detect, and it very slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then when it ruptures, and it will. When it ruptures, you

are suddenly bleeding. You're bleeding out from an artery. You know what arterial bleed is, deadly right, You're bleeding out from an artery, a smaller artery into your own abdomen. So if someone stabbed you in the stomach and you made it alive to the hospital, the doctors don't have anything to figure out. They're like, oh, we know what the problem is exactly. They know where to stick their

finger almost literally to stop the bleed. Like it's there's no mystery there with internal hemorrhage, it could be anywhere, right, And so this happened five years ago and it was during.

rains they short out, so there's no landlines. We're surrounded by atlant It's basically paradise, right. It's an old house from eighteen hundred, and we were there during COVID, and I built a post and bean cabin deeper in the woods, and one day we managed some teenage girls who lived up the road that we knew called When does this ever happen? They called and said, Hey, we're free this afternoon.

Would you like some babysitting time? Right? And I was like, yes, we pay one thousand dollars an hour, Like how long can you how long can you stay? Right? Yeah? So they came over a few hours and my wife and I went out to this.

was tanking, and I was graying out right. And I sat back down. I said to my wife, I'd never thought i'd have to ever say these words to anyone. I said, I think I'm gonna need some help. And you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young. I was a really good competitive runner. I've always been very fit, very healthy. I just never thought that I

would need physical help from anybody. You know. It's just like never, never, And now my wife's dragging me out of the woods, like literally dragging me down a trail to get me to help, and we finally got there was no cell phone.

blood before you die. And we live an hour from the hospital, so you can do the math like it was. I was a human hourglass and they, you know, they their ambulance got there, and I had sort of rebooted it that you go into compensatory shocks, so your body,

it's extraordinary. Your body knows when there's a five alarm fire, even though even if you don't, right, I didn't know I was dying, had no idea, right, and so it it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body that you don't need to survive your your your surface areas, your skin, your legs, your arms, and it pools it in your brain and in your abdomen, in your heart, around your heart. So when it does that, your blood pressure goes back up, and and I became sort of

clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there. They were like, you know, it's a hot day. You probably dehydrated, sir. You know they're looking at me. I'm fifty eighth. They're like, you're an old man, you know, twenty right, dehydration thing man, Yeah, and why don't you sit in the shade and drink some water and call us if you still don't feel well? And my wife, oh my god, my wife said, you got you're taking him to the hospital, like he couldn't walk a few minutes ago.

So they didn't know I was thirty beats up. Had they known that, they would they were like, oh, this is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But I my fitness level was masking it, right, So they were totally cavalier about it.

a cat scan. They saw that where the blood was pooling, and they and oh, so I'm in the trauma bay and well, h yeah.

of blood fast right. And he asked my permission to do this, and I still didn't get I was like, you mean, in case there's an emergency. He's like, this is the emergency right now. If you say so, my life, you know. My wife seemed worried also, But if I you know, whatever, do what you gotta do. And I'm lying there while he's working on my neck and all of a sudden and I have to stop and just explain. I'm an atheist, right, my dad was an atheist and a physicist. She's like as well, yeah, well sort of

atheist squared right, like hyper rational. And I'm a lifelong atheist. So you need to know this for what I'm about to say, because it flew in the face of a lot of of my understanding of reality, understanding of life in the world. A little bit, uh so beneath me, into my left, this sort of yawning blackness opened up, like the universe had sort of cracked open. He said, this just infinite black void, and I was getting pulled

into it, and I didn't want to go. I was like a wounded animal, like I didn't I wasn't thinking about my family. I didn't know I was dying. I just didn't want to go into the vast darkness, right, like when you take your dog to the vat and dog doesn't want to go to the I was like that, like, no, no, no, I'm not going in there. And I was getting pulled in and I couldn't stop it, and I was panicking. And then above me, to my left suddenly appeared my

dead father. He'd been dead eight years and he was there in this just energy form, like it wasn't even quite vision that I used to perceive him, like, it was a sense that I it was a sense that's not familiar to me. But it was absolutely like, Oh, there's my dad, Like what is he doing? He was very benevolent and he was communicating with me. He was hovering right above me, and he was communicating with me basically, you don't have to fight it, you can come with me.

I'll take care of you. He was very very paternal and loving and caring, and you know he was so he was a physicist, he was, I realized later on the spectrum he was not a particularly emotional person. Right like I loved him, but my connection to him was not visceral and loving in that in that way that he was at that moment, like he was in some ways the most loving, sort of viscerally loving thing he'd ever done for me. Right in that moment, It's like,

I'll take care of you. And I was horrified. I was like, you're dead, why would I go with you? I'm alive. The parties over here, like what are you doing here? I mean, I was shocked and horrified, offended, almost offended that he would think I would want to go with him and not want to stay alive with my family. I was really offended. I was like, what do you what do you think? And I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. I'm going.

which is this IR is this sort of like magic. Basically, like you're on a fluoroscope, which is an X ray machine that takes real time video, and they pop a hole in your groin and they thread a wire up your femoral artery and they can snake it around to any part of your body. So instead of if they need to put a stint in your orda, they can put it in by wire instead of opening your heart

up right, It's amazing what they can do. And they were trying to get the wire to the ruptured artery to embolize it, to block it so I would stop bleeding. And the alternative to doing that, this is what they would have had to do twenty years ago, is like cut me open and try to find the bleed before I bled out. Right, and the outcomes are terrible for that. And if they'd had to do that, they would have

brought my wife into Sagabye. They told me that later, like we would have brought her into say goodbye, because you probably wouldn't have made it. So they were trying and trying with this wire to thread its way through my sort of weird vasculature because the ligament can totally contorted all my vasculature when it compensated, right, and they

couldn't get the wire to the place. And I was in the on the fluoroscope for hours, and now it's two in the morning, and I remember the doctors giving up, right, and I remember them so when I'm shrugging, is like, well, we tried, we did everything we could, and now I finally realized that I might die, like I didn't know it until then.

The nurse was there holding my hand, and that human contact was so important, I mean literally important for survival. Right. You need the doctors that you know the mechanics, but you also need some because it's very lonely. Dying is being being a patient in a hospital, extremely lonely. Right, everyone's mask, there's very bright lights. You don't know what's going on. And to this nurse she was holding my hand, she was like, breathe with me, It's okay, keep your

eyes open. I'm right here. And you know, I was choosing by like lifeline. And one of the reasons I survived. I shouldn't have survived. The doctors didn't think I would and they're sort of amazed that I did. But one of the reasons I survived was that human connection along with amazing medical.

they brought me up to the ICU. You know, then they sedated me, they put me under, and you know, I was in this sort of wild darkness for like one hundred years or something like. I felt like I was gone for a very long time. And then the next thing I knew, I heard this really intense Boston accent a woman speaking in a So this isn't on Cape cod at Massachusetts, right, You all know the Boston accent not the loveliest accent on the planet.

have young kids. I was absolutely shocked. Then she left because she was doing her rounds, and I'm a mess. I'm throwing up blood, I got wires coming out all over the place. I'm a total mess. But I couldn't stop thinking about what she told me. And she came back and she said, how you doing. I said, well, not that great, actually, Like what you say is terrifying. I had no idea. I'd almost died and I can't

stop thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing I think just about anyone has ever said to me. She said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.

you know, it might be a minister. Sacred work happens in church as well, right, you know, So anything that preserves human dignity. And as a journalist, on our best days we bring back information that our country, the world can use responsibly to help alleviate human suffering. That's a sacred job, you know, on our best days, that's like sacred work. Right, So I thought, I've been going to front lines my whole life. I stopped. After my buddy Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate

front line my own mortality. I was allowed to come back. Did I come back with sacred information that would help myself and others face the terrifying prospect of our mortality? We're all going to face it. Do I have sacred information from this? That's the meaning I took, right But I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, like what did you mean by that? And I couldn't find her. And not only could I not find her, no one at the hospital in the ICU, no one knew who

I was talking about. All there is no one here by that description, like why did she totally disappeared? And she might have been, as you know, I'm not getting all woo woo here, like she might have been a visiting nurse and just I mean, who knows. But I couldn't find her, and it contributed to what afterwards was a terrible sense of unreality, Like I worried when I finally got home, I started to worry that I had

died and that I was imagining everything. It was my dying hallucination that I actually didn't survive and.

They fall into three or four basic buckets, one of them being that you know, the dead show up to either tell you to go back or help escort you across. And it's very very common as every society in the world. It's quite a mystery. And I started researching NDEs and there's some pretty good rational explanations rooted in medicine and neurochemistry for many of the visions that people have when they're on the threshold. I'm a rationalist, and I'm like,

all right, that that sort of makes sense. I get at the tunnel, the out of body experience. You can do that with drugs, you can do that in a human center views like fighter pilots undergo. You know, there's way The one thing that didn't quite make sense to me is the consistency of the vision. Right, so the many many people see the dead when they're dying in hospice in ers, and like, I mean, it's a really really common thing. And you know, if you give a

room full of people LSD, they will all hallucinate. There's no mystery there. The chemistry of that is well known, but they won't all hallucinate the same thing. What's odd about dying is the consistency of the hallucinations that they involve the dead, even people that don't know they're dying, even people who don't like the dead person who showed up. Right, it's not a comforting vision necessarily. And that's the only part of this that really made me sort of wonder,

like do we really understand anything about reality? And you know, I started I went into quantum physics to try to sort of understand, like, maybe the problem is that we think we live on a flat earth and it's actually a globe. You know, Maybe the problem is this boundary between life and death that we assume is absolute, maybe it actually isn't the boundary we think it is. And you know, I hate the word after life. I think

it's a misnomer and misleading. But there might be at some sort of quantum level a reality that we don't understand, involving consciousness and life and death and time and all these sort of basic components of the universe. I don't know. I'm an atheist with questions, which is a huge step for an atheist or for a person of faith. Also, you know, if you're a person of faith and have questions, that's also a huge step in the right direction.

few days later. He describes going back and looking into that hole. Yeah, he's in such a weird state mentally that he went back looking in that hole, half thinking that he would see himself in that hole. And he was so tripped up that he did what you said where he's like, maybe I did die, Yeah, and now I'm in a weird spot. And he went to look yeah and weird like he was in. It got that weird for him over those next few days.

not a mystic. I mean, I'm I really am a rationalist, right, but our rationality doesn't understand everything. And this is that's where I have questions. But so the dawn of the day before, right right before dawn that we could my family and I co sleep, right, So my wife and I am are little girls sleep in the same you know area on the pad on the big pad on the floor. It's like we're camping basically, except at home. Right,

it's very very nice. And I had a dream that I didn't know was a dream but at the time, but I had a dream that my family was below me, my wife, my little two little girls, and they were crying. They're crying about me, and I was waving. I was like, I'm right here, it's okay. I'm like and they didn't couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me, and I was I was floating above them, and I was made and I was in this sort of darkness looking down at them, and I was made to understand that they couldn't see

me or hear me because I was dead. I was a spirit. I had died, and that I was headed out and there was no going back and that's it. And I woke up in a panic. I mean I woke up and then it was shocked to realize that I wasn't dead. I mean, that's how real the dream was, right, And God, that was just a dream, and I was really shaken, and thirty six hours later it started, I

started dying. Right. So, when I started researching NDEs, another common ende is that you're floating above the doctors, above your body, above your fans.

see the dead. And but another common experience is sort of floating above your loved ones. Right, And so I was seized by this fear. Oh my god, maybe I died in my sleep. Maybe the rest of it is a dying hallucination, the trip to the hospital, the return home, the tearful reunion with my children, my reading a you know, a story to my to my daughter who's on my lap right at this moment. Maybe it's all a hallucination.

I actually died in my sleep and my wife woke up next to her dead husband, Right, How would I know that's not true? Right? So it's really really this. It's called derealization. It's really really common with people who have almost died, either for medical reasons or from a near you know, a near miss, like your like your friend. And so I got pretty crazy, right, I really started. I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma

is anxiety and panic, and another is depression. And I actually went through those phases, a classic trauma reaction, but I didn't know at the time. At the time, I thought, oh my god, it's been revealed. The word apocalypse means the revealing of all things. Right, as I've gone, I've experienced the apocalypse. I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing of what reality actually is. It's actually I'm we're not here, you know, Like, I really got crazy, And at one

point I went up to my poor wife. Her name is Barbara. I said, honey, just can you just tell me that you see me? No spouse wants to hear this, right, Can you just tell me that you see me, that I'm right in front of you, that I survived, Like, just tell me that that I'm here. And she's like, yes, sweetheart, you're here, I see you. You survived for the last time. You're fine.

that this happened to you? Right? Not that you survived, of course, you're lucky to survive, But if you could push a button and have none of it have happened, would you push that button? And I know what she was talking about, because, on the one hand, yourself sort of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead or the reality doesn't exist, or would all these existential epistemological sort of terrors. Right. On the other hand, I was sort of allowed to look over the final precipice and

return home. I had a special trip, right, like when I was granted special access, I didn't have to pay with my life. I was allowed to come back and like, was I lucky or unlucky? And I couldn't answer. I didn't know, And it really torment me that I couldn't answer that question. And I finally answered it by putting it in more sort of mythological terms. I was like, all right, she's really saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right?

And often when I'm at a sort of dead end in my work, I will look up the etymology the origins of the important words in the topic that I'm researching, to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what significance they attached to these words.

no one knows. With blessing, they do know what the origin is and from the Anglo Saxon word bletson, which means blood, and the idea was that there is no blessing without a wounding, that the shedding of blood actually confers the blessing. Right, So battlefields are sacred because blood was shed on them, childbirth is sacred because blood blood

is lost. And they think it might date back to the pre Christian rituals of animal sacrifice where you kill the sheep or whatever, and the spilling of the sheep's blood is what makes that moment and that place sacred. And so it's suddenly I got it. I was like, oh, it's not that, it's always they're twin. Blessed and cursed are twin. They're part of the same thing, right, And see, you actually it's a false question. You don't choose, You

don't even get to choose. If you're blessed, you're also cursed. If you're cursed, you might also be blessed. And the story of Jacob actually goes right back to that. He's crippled by he wrestles with God and is crippled by God, but also blessed like God bleod unjo his hip and cripples him for life and blesses him at the same time. And so it's a very ancient human human thought and that just believed me for some reason and helped relieve me of this sort of like unanswerable terror.

and being taken away felt unimaginably tragic. And so if I live long enough that my girls are okay on their own, that my wife is not left as a single mom, that everything's okay. You know, I'm going to miss them, but you know, but I'll be at peace with it. You're not you know, you leave children behind. You're not a piece. I mean you know what I mean, like you you're a dad, I mean, imagine, right, Like so.

of my identity. My existence and if I can get through to where they're okay, like, you know, I'm good.

the brain that like are part of consciousness. They got

to watch them change around the moment of death. And one of the things that happens as you die is that the parts of the brain that are engaged in memory activate when you die, right, So you you know, like when you're dreaming, like you can have a dream that feels like it takes you know, ten minutes, right, And they know that those you know, supposedly ten minute dreams happen in seconds, right, So one of the things that might be happening when and this is in the

neurochemical part side of the explanation for what for NDEs. One of the things that might be happening is that equivalent to a dream that you have an experience of a long you know, vast amount of time and a vast sort of perspective, right, you're seeing all of life in one moment, the kind of overarching knowledge that you can have with dreams, Like in dreams you you sort of understand things that you can't understand, you know, there's

this sort of all encompassing knowledge sometimes. So that might be what's going on with that. And let me just say that there could be neuro perfectly good neurochemical explanations for NDEs, and also a part of NDEs which neurochemistry can't explain that do tie into some basic question about

quantum physics and what is reality? What is consciousness? I mean, the quantum physicist of one hundred years ago realized that conscious observation changes quantum reality, like if you observe quantum reality, if a conscious observers observes quantum reality, it changes it. And so the obvious question is does consciousness in the universe, human and other otherwise, does consciousness in the universe create the universe that that consciousness then exists in, right? I

mean it's a profound question. So when you're talking on those terms, the idea that the consciousness that you enjoy as when you're alive, that there's some other version of it that continues on as part of the universe, a kind of universal consciousness continues on after you die. You know, it's not an insane question, right, It's a legitimate question.

I can't understand quantum mechanics quantum physics. But uh, there's a thing that there's a trippy thing like if if everything, if everything in the universe, like if everything's electro chemical with life, it's all electro chemical, you get into this problem where there cannot be free will, right, like if everything is happens according to physics, and you go like, well life is electro chemical, right, right, there's no room then like then someone then a really good person who's

really good at predictive modeling, would be able to you'd be able to like run all of it and predict the future because everything is electro chemical, everything conforms to physics, you know, So when you get lots of it's just like it's kind of when you say, sitting there and you're looking outer space and you're like, even if there was like a big brick wall out there, there's shit on the other side of the brick wall.

explanation or a good definition of it. And they have no explanation for it, right, and the exp you know, the fact that consciousness can can determine outcomes in the physical world simply because it is exists and is observing that. You know that. So basically, if that's possible, all bets are out, all bets are off sort of right, So you're right in a purely mechanistic universe, But how do you fit consciousness into a mechanistic universe? And it doesn't

seem to be it. Consciousness resides in the brain, which is a sort of electrical chemical like process, but it doesn't itself have it's not itself manifested physically consciousness itself, right, but it can affect the physical world in profound ways, at least at the quantum level. So, and let me just say, you don't understand quantum physics. Neither do quantum physicists. Yeah, right,

I mean that's the great mystery. Like, you know, what they've shown is that things happen in the quantum world that sort of don't make sense in the macroscopic world, right, But it doesn't mean they can't explain why, right, And and for that matter, they can't explain why there's a universe. I mean, there really shouldn't be a universe, and you know, the universe basically religion and physics are. They're closer than you might think. So when religion, you have to believe

that God is self creating. Otherwise you're stuck with, oh, well, someone created God, why aren't we worshiping that entity? Right? Like it, God has to be self creating. From that point onwards, it all works fine if you just take that leap like work with me here Gods self creating, and then from now on where we was believing that God, we're all good. Right, Quantum physics is the same or physics is the same way in some ways, like the

universe is self creating. After that we can explain everything. Right, So there's a similar act of faith, this this leap that both have to take. I'm not saying that they're intellectually equivalent. I think religion is a story and physics is an attempt at an explanation, and stories and explanations are very very different beasts, right, but on some level they both required active faith that is probably beyond human comprehension.

wouldn't be planets, there wouldn't be anything, right, magnetism. Likewise, these sort of like invisible forces. And you know, we get used to the idea of gravity. But if you didn't know anything and someone said to you, you know what, there's this invisible force, and the closer two objects are to each other, the stronger the force is. And if you throw a rock out a window, like, why wouldn't

it float in mid era? Right? It doesn't because of this invisible force called gravity, and it exists throughout the universe and we don't know why. Right. That would sound like the rantings of a schizophrenic, Right, I'm sorry. Likewise, with conscious and there's a sort of serious proposal that consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe like gravity is, and that our individual consciousness returns to that great, greater entity when we die, and it's you know,

you can't prove it or disprove it. It's a sort of pleasing theory for me as an atheist. It gave me a sort of slightly more comfortable place rather than the just pure nihilism of where a bunch of salism when we die, we're done. I also don't want to have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now for eternity, like thank you no, right, like they I had a moment of.

of faith wanting an afterlife. I think they want to see their loved ones, is what's going on?

people near and experiences. It's not so much near death experiences, but people in proximity to that that there's like two paths. And the example that I read about one day was that there's a there's an explosion, okay, and there's chaos. Some people can be in that moment and they there's an arm on the ground. The only thing they see is the arm on the ground, and it's they just get lost in like a sort of timeless consideration of

the arm on the ground. There's people that all they see is everything right, it's utter chaos, nothing makes sense.

And then there's people that are like that guy needs help, right, that's happening, that's gonna fall right, And in certain disciplines, they're looking for the people that don't have those And your and your experiences in war and your experience with the with with death, like, have you have you ever grappled with that or did you find any of that in your research about these different these different sort of responses people have.

much preparation you have. And you know, one of the things they do when they train environment and they train soldiers what have you is they just get them to rehearse and practice the actions they'll need to take in a crisis moment over and over and over again, so that you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out airplanes.

You know that, you know, they got that muscle memory of whatever they do, you know, count to count to five and whatever, you know, whatever it is like, they get that muscle memory down, so that doesn't depend on deliberate, deliberate thought. And so there's a lot of tactics in combat that are somewhat formulaic, like football is, right, I mean, there's this sort of team team coordination that doesn't have to be thought about in detail in order to be enacted.

And if you have no training like that, your brain hasn't been properly formatted for that kind of situation and it's scrambling to get enough information to make a good decision, and then of course people go into shock. And so I've had all I have. I've had all of them. I mean one time we got hit very when I was with American soldiers. We got hit very unexpectedly, very hard, and I, for I don't know, about twenty seconds, I

was frozen, like I just couldn't move right. I mean, there's bullets hit in the ground around like, and then I snapped out of it. And that was hyper functional. Other times I've.

If you're in a situation and you have a job to do, you're a medic, you're a journalist, you're a soldier, you're a parent with a child, who's indeed, you know, whatever it is you had job to do, like that's a refuge from your fear. The job you have to do provides a shelter from your own feelings of fear and self concern. If you have no job to do because you're not holding your camera, you know, your fear

just moves in and sets up camp. Right, And so Tim threw across you know, we we were this far away, like between me and you, like five feet. We couldn't there was too much gunfire to He threw me my bulletproof vest and my camera. And as soon as I was like geared up, boom, I was good. Huh right yeah, And and so it gives you insight into how soldiers perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they got it, you know, they got the gear, the tools

they need. They have something they have to do. They're not thinking about their own fear because they are charged with such responsibility for their for each other. And and and it looks from the outside it looks like bravery. Actually, those roles that soldiers play in combat are a very powerful protection from fear. To understand, you don't have to overcome fear to do them. They are a protection from the fear, as would be true if I mean, I

find grizzly bear is absolutely terrifying. Right, if my child was in danger from a grizzly bear, I don't think I would find the grizzly bear terrifying. I would try to distract it, you know what I mean, like totally changes that fear equation.

you could hand my daughter anything on the planet. She's gonna grab it if I said to grab it, unless it's got a cobweb on it. And he said, he says, for me, as eyeballs, that's that seems avoidable. Not my line of word.

anything except except spiders. Like we're camping in the Southwest and there's a transla it's yours, Like, I'm not doing it. And you can tell it's a phobia because someone people with phobia phobias have trouble even looking at a photograph of the thing you're scared of, right, I.

the act of running. So I still run, and I love the act of writing like it's just it's it's one of my one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.

see them, you know. And I feel like it's and you know, I feel that way about God as well. Like sometimes people are like, are you kidding, You're still an atheist? You haven't found God. I'm like, look, God has to find me, right, I mean, if I'm making a decision to believe in God. It's a decision and it doesn't have much content to it, right, Like.

you know, maybe maybe He gave me a break. That isn't what religion really should be about. Religion should be about an overwhelming feeling of connection and love, and that like love for another person, I think it has to find you if you're out seeking it.

know what I mean. And it was like he had like an epiphany. Well that's like he got overwhelmed, right, and that's that's very powerful. I mean For me, I would need evidence to believe in God.

which is my dead father hovering above me. But it may just be I can't explain him because our minds, our human minds, are sufficiently did that that that ultimate reality is not accessible to us.

months old my parents. We lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. My parents were building an addition to their house and one of the three carpenters was a guy named al Al de Salvo and he a couple of years after they finished building the additions to the house, Al confessed to being the Boston Strangler and he actually he was killing people while he was working at our house. And there was a murder down the street that was a classic

Boston strangling. But a black handy man from Mississippi happened to have cleaned this lady's house that day left his phone number on the counter. The police got the phone number, chased him down. He was convicted, convicted, and sent to prison. He died in prison for a murder. He says he didn't commit. And no one knew that al DeSalvo was down the street at our house that day all day by himself, then he might have committed the murder. So a death in Belmont is about that possibility. It's a

it's a cold case who done it? Basically. After that, I wrote a book called War about this platoon in the one seventy third Airborne that I was with off and on for a year in the Corngall Valley. I also shot a lot of deal with my buddy Tim and we made a documentary called Verstreppo. I was nominated for an Academy award a couple of months after we

were at the Oscars. We didn't win, but a couple months later we were supposed to go on assignment to Libya together to cover the Arab Spring, and at last moment I couldn't go and Tim was killed he died of blood loss from a shrapnel wound and scroin in

the city of Masrada. And after that I decided to give up war reporting, and I wrote a book called Tribe about community and how it works and how soldiers experienced that Native Americans and how the loss of community has affected people in this country and the nation as a whole. And after that I wrote a book called Freedom.

It was an examination of successful underdog groups and how they defeat greater powers, Like if smaller individuals couldn't defeat larger individuals in combat, or if smaller groups couldn't defeat larger groups, the empire would always win, right, I mean, the world we've been made up of like fascist coalitions, And but that's actually not true, Like under smaller underdog groups are very actually very good at winning as long

as they have certain attributes. And so the book, my book Freedom goes into what those characteristics are that allow smaller groups or smaller individuals to win over a larger, more powerful adversary, like.

lack of size and strength. So with out, without that unique trait, it's unique to humans and every other species, size winds, size dominates, right, Only in humans can the smaller entity win, and that allows for human freedom, for human autonomy, self definition, you know. And then finally, my

recent book is called In My Time of Dying. It's about my near death experience and what that might mean for all of us facing our mortality and what it might mean for how we understand the universe to function.