Soul Boom - The Edge of Death: Exploring Mortality w/ Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Rainn Wilson sits down with acclaimed journalist, author, and war correspondent Sebastian Junger to discuss his harrowing near-death experience, the mysteries of consciousness, and the human connection to mortality. Sebastian recounts his brush with death caused by a ruptured aneurysm and the profound vision of his late father that challenged his atheistic worldview. This episode is a powerful exploration of what it means to face mortality and find meaning in our fleeting existence. Whether you’re a spiritual seeker or a science enthusiast, this conversation will leave you questioning the nature of reality and your own place in it. Thank you to our sponsors! Masterclass (up to 50% OFF!): https://MasterClass.com/SoulBoom Aura (promo code: SOULBOOM): https://auraframes.com Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboomstore.myshopify.com/ God-Shaped Hole Mug: https://bit.ly/GodShapedHoleMug Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to soul. The most terrifying thing about death, not that it can come with mortars and explosions and bullets, but that is also incredibly casual and ordinary and offhand. Doctors started to work on my neck to put the needle in. That was when I had my experience on the threshold of death, the experience that I've been wondering about ever since. Well, since we're there, let's go there.

Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Sebastian, thanks so much for coming on Soul Boom. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. And crawling out here to the hellscape of suburban Los Angeles and being in our fake, homie living room. Your book was my favorite book of last year in my time of.

dying. I've read a lot of near-death experience books. This is not that. Which I greatly appreciated because I get a little tired of hearing about choruses of angels and tunnels of light. If you want to sell a lot of books, proclaim to have proven that there's an afterlife. And then you sell a ton of books. And I just, you know, like, so the short answer is like, I didn't do that because I'm a journalist. But you sold half a ton of books. It did all right. Oh, it did fine. Yeah, yeah. But if you really want to kill it, just say, oh, I've discovered the afterlife. If you had stuck Jesus in there. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you would have tripled your sales. Right. But I really appreciated the sensitivity, the detail leading up to what happened with you. Apparently, genetically, you had something very, very wrong with some capillaries in your abdomen or something like that. The seeds were planted a long time ago for this event. Yeah, so let me just to briefly say I was a war reporter for a long time. I was almost killed several times overseas and I stopped doing that, right? I was like, no, I'm tired of risking my life.

I fell in love. I got married. I had a family, two little girls. And I thought I'd sort of slid into home base, right, in my 50s and the happiest I've ever been. And so what I found out was the most terrifying thing about death, not that it can come with mortars and explosions and bullets, but that is also incredibly casual and ordinary and almost

offhand when it visits as well. And so that's what happened to me. I had an undiagnosed aneurism in my pancreatic artery. No, aneurism is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. It's not high cholesterol, it's not plaque buildup.

It's none of the things that reflect unhealthy choices, right? It's completely random. I'm sure you've made a couple unhealthy choices in your life. Yes, but they didn't accumulate in my arteries. In your pancreatic artery, okay. No, this is a really completely random thing. I have a ligament in the wrong place, and it's just, it's extremely rare. And it's not even the doctor was like, it's not even genetic. We don't know what it is. It's very, very rare. It just happens sometimes. Yeah. And that ligament

caused vascular problems that produced an aneurysm in my little pancreatic artery, which is probably the size of a pencil. And aneurysms grow and grow. And aneurysms grow and grow. throughout your lifetime, undetected, usually asymptomatic. And after decades, they can, will rupture. And when they rupture, you die, right? You just bleed out into your abdomen. It's as if someone stabbed you in the stomach and severed an artery.

It's like that, except all the bleeding is internal. And so the doctors don't know where it is exactly, and it's very hard to get to, unlike a stab wound in your abdomen, which is pretty clear what's going on. So that's the short version of, like, what happened to me medically, and it came, you know, literally in mid-sentence with my wife.

Like literally in mid-sentence, a strange pain in my abdomen, and boom, I was dying. Now, truth be told, because I remember this from the book, you had some clues that something was little off that you kind of ignored in the weeks or months before that. Some little feelings of like, this doesn't feel quite right, but you toughed it out. Yeah, I mean, and those feelings were, you know,

it's not like kidney stone, pain, which have sent me to the ER many times, right? You know, I mean, this was, this was pain that was sort of uncomfortable and, but within the sort of range of stuff that you're like, okay, I pulled something. Yeah, I have a body. It's going to hurt sometimes, right? And if you're, you know, if, if you're a certain kind of stoic, you know, what you don't do is cater to every little, every little pain.

And there's a point where that becomes dangerous and I obviously crossed that line. but it wasn't like I was ignoring just like massive apocalyptic symptoms of a health, you know, health crisis, right? I mean, it was pretty subtle. And then boom, one afternoon, you know, I was dying and I had an hour and a half to live, although I didn't know that. And you were an hour away from a hospital and had an hour and a half to live. Yeah, exactly. I barely made it. I mean, the doctor said, had I got into the hospital 10 minutes?

Were you running? you were running at the time or working out in the yard at the time? No. So this was during COVID and we were living in a remote property in Massachusetts, the end of a dead end dirt road, no cell phone coverage on the property. The landlines were old, so when it rained, they would short out and the landline wouldn't work. It was basically paradise, right? So at that time, we had this sort of little miracle that afternoon,

some teenage girls who lived up the road said, hey, we can babysit if you guys want. And we had a three-year-old and a six-month-old little girls, right? So these teenagers came over, who we knew, we knew the family. They came over for a few hours. And my wife, Barberman. They weren't random teenage girls who came over from the mall. Right, yeah, exactly.

Hey, you and you, come on. Hey, we'll watch your infant for you. Yeah, we pay $1,000 an hour. We're desperate. No, no, no, we knew the family. And so very sweet girls. So they came over, and my wife and I walked off into the woods to a place that was even more remote, this little cabin that a post-in-beam cabin that I built overlooking this little lake,

oil lamps would stove completely off the grid and like the most beautiful place in the world, right? So that's where we chose to spend a couple of hours of babysitting time, like, because we didn't know when that was going to happen again, right? And in mid-sentence, in this place of beauty and peace and intimacy, and like in mid-sentence, like, ooh, what was that? In my abdomen, oh, indigestion, you know, it was indigestion? Like, what was it? You know, I stood up to try to sort of walk it out, and the floor just went reeling away from me. I almost fell over, and I sat back down, and I said words I never thought I'd have to say. I said to my wife, I think I'm going to need help.

You know, I'm a lifelong athlete. I was a marathon runner when I was young. I ran some really good times. I was sponsored by shoe company. Like, I'm not a walking heart attack, right? So it never crossed my mind that something could kill me, that my own body could kill me like in a moment. that never crossed my mind.

A car accident may be cancer, yeah, of course, you know, but not like in the moment, right? And so I didn't take it very seriously, but I couldn't stand up. And so my wife dragged me out of the woods, like literally dragged me out of the woods, my arm around her hand over her shoulder, and down the path,

I got to the driveway, put me in the passenger seat of the car, and they ran in and said to the, pulled one of the girls aside and said, something wrong with Sebastian, and called, called 911 when the landlines were down because it had been raining. So there was no cell phone signal. So this girl

walked around on the driveway until she got one little spot where you get one bar of signal when she called the ambulance. And meanwhile, I'm going in and out of consciousness in the passenger seat of the car and my wife is sort of kneeling next to me, you know, holding my hand saying stay with me, stay with me. Like

every time I lose consciousness, she thinks like that's it, he's not coming back. So and then I sort of rallied a bit. You go into something called compensatory shock. I mean, I'm losing probably a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes into my abdomen. I don't know that, but that's what's going on.

That's a lot. That's a lot. And you have 10 units of blood in your body. You can lose about half before you die. And we were an hour from the hospital, right? You can do the math. Like, I was literally a human hourglass. And finally, the ambulance got there,

and they took me away. And the doctor later said, if you'd gotten here 10 or 15 minutes later, you'd have been DOA, dead on arrival. I barely made it. So I'm in compensatory shock where the body sort of, in its wisdom,

it clamps down on your vascular to your legs, to your arms, to your skin, and hoards your blood where it's needed most. Amazing, right? Evolution is an extraordinary thing, right? So I sort of rallied a bit in the ambulance. And, again, no idea how serious this was. And as soon as I got...

Could you feel blood pooling down there at all? But I had a pain in my abdomen. Right? And so we got to the EER, and as soon as we got there, I went off a cliff. Like, I went out of compensatory shock into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I'm convulsing. I'm deeply hypothermic and sort of like shuddering with, like, convulsions, and, you know, not of right minds, and I'm, like, going off a cliff.

And the doctors immediately knew what it was. And I remember this doctor coming up to me with his big needle saying, I need your permission to put this needle through your neck into your jugular, right, which didn't sound like a whole lot of fun. And I was like, why did they need to put a needle in your jugular? Because you can get more blood faster into a person. Oh, so from blood bags, yeah. Yeah, yeah, right.

I needed 10 units of blood. I needed an entire body's worth of blood. Oh, okay. Total, complete oil change, basically. Did you have a common blood type? Was that an issue there at the hospital? I'm old positive. But, you know, they try to match.

But, you know, I mean, if they have time, they'll do a blood test on you to see. I told them, I said, listen, when I was in combat on my helmet, I wrote O positive in case I got wounded. So I'm pretty sure I'm O positive. I sort of remembered that for my days in combat. And I don't know what they did with that information. But basically, if someone's really dying, they'll just throw some blood in there and hope for the best. Like if they don't have time to do a cross-match, they'll just hope for the best, which, of course, is a good decision. someone's bleeding out.

Once you pass a certain point of blood loss, even if you're alive and they start transfusing you, there's a chemical reaction that happens in your bloodstream that sort of runs away from them and they can't get ahead of it and you'll die. There's something called acidosis, which basically kills you. So at any rate, the doctor started to work on my neck

to put the needle in, and that was when I had my experience. on the threshold of death, the experience that I've been wondering about ever since. Well, since we're there, let's go there. Tell us what happened. Yeah, so, you know, first of all, I'm an atheist, and I'm not like an atheist, but kind of like mystical or... Now would you say you were an atheist and now you're potentially agnostic?

You're tiptoeing to agnostic. No, no, no, I hate the word agnostic. Okay, why do you hate the word agnostic? I think it's a dodge, right? Okay. I think it's a dodge. I mean, you either believe in God or you don't. Atheists don't claim to be able to prove there's no God.

That's not what atheism is. Atheism is, I do not believe in God, right? Claiming to prove there's no God is as absurd as being able to claim there is a God. They're both absurd, right? But when you say I'm agnostic, it doesn't really mean anything. It's like, oh, I don't know. Of course you don't know. You're a human.

There's no way to prove there is or isn't a God. Saying that you can't prove there is or isn't doesn't mean anything at all. We already know no one can. It's a category of $8 billion. I feel like agnostic is someone that's essentially atheist, but hoping that it can be proven to them in some way, shape, or form that there's some power greater than that. Oh, so it's craven as well as imprecise. Yeah.

Right? I'm still not that, right? Like, I don't want to be craven and imprecise. I'd rather say what the truth is, which is I do not believe in God. Right? I can also say, I do believe in gravity, right? I know when I throw something out a window, it will fall, so I believe in gravity. I have no equivalent reason to believe in God, and I would need quite a high standard of proof.

Like there is for gravity, quite a high standard of proof to believe in something that immense, that all-encompassing, that transcendent, that extraordinary, right? It's not, oh, I have a feeling. That's not a proof of anything, right? So I don't believe in God. And if the good Lord exists and decides to, you know, like, straighten me out and present me with proof I can't avoid, then, all right, then you. you got me. But you don't feel like that happened in this series of experiences. No, I mean,

people also mix up God and what they call the afterlife, which is another word that I hate. But you could have a sort of creator god, right, which is, you know, there's some problems with that idea that we can talk about if you want, but you could say, just say there's a creator god that created the universe out of nothing, right? The original creative act, now the universe is 93 billion light years across, four billion light years, four billion years old, that there, there was a God that did all of this, but it's totally conceivable that, and why is God gendered? He or she or it or whatever chose to have living creatures in this universe, this extraordinary universe, who are completely biological beings, right? They live these extraordinary

lives, and when they're dead, they are dead. There's no quote afterlife. There's no soul. there's nothing, right? The creator God could have very easily made that decision, right? And that's what we are. Or you could have a universe that started from, you know, the most current theory is a massive quantum fluctuation that create the big bang, as it's known, that created the universe in this extraordinary, inexplicable way, it went from nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time too small to measure, okay? That that happened for pure. physical reasons, and it created living beings, salamanders, turtles, sharks, humans that retain some of their, some of the information involved in consciousness after their physical bodies

die, right? Like, that's also conceivable, right? And you don't necessarily need a God for that level of continuity post-death to happen at a quantum level, right? So you could have a God and an afterlife, you could have no God in afterlife or an afterlife, no God, you know, whatever. And you mix and match. They don't necessarily go together. So what happened to me, and I should say... We could come back to the whole God thing, but there might be a few holes there, but we'll continue, but I'd love to hear what happened.

Yeah, so... And what happened did rearrange my assumptions about physical reality. Do we understand anything? I will concede that, not the God thing, but yes. So I'm lying there, and, you know, as I said, I'm an atheist. I'm not a mystic. I'm not spiritual. My dad was an atheist.

He's been dead eight years at this point. He was an atheist and a physicist, which is sort of atheist squared, basically. Sure. If not cubed. And so I'm lying there. The last physicist, theist, maybe was Einstein. Right. Right.

Well, Schrodinger. Yeah, and it sort of depends how you, right, depends how you divine theism. intruding or believed in a universal consciousness, which I, on a quantum level, like, is that the isomer or is that just, you know, very out there physics, right? In some ways, they're the same thing. But, in any way, so I'm lying there. I have no idea I'm dying. Absolutely none, right? And they're prepping me for this, you know, unpleasant procedure in my neck. And suddenly underneath me, this black pit opens up. I sense this void underneath me, right? This sort of portal to infinity and it's infinitely dark, infinitely black, infinitely huge, and it's pulling me in, right?

And, you know, I'm terrified of it. I don't know I'm dying, but I... Now, do you see it? Do you feel it? I just sense it. I'm like, oh my God, the void is right here and I'm getting pulled into it. And so you have to give up... How do you sense a void? Listen, I don't know. I just... Because I want to... You know, you're a very practical guy or a science-based guy. How do you sense you sense? I don't have an answer. All of a sudden, I was like, oh, my God, it's underneath me. But you didn't go like this and like there was like shimmering black.

No, no. But I sensed this force pulling me in to what seemed to be a sort of portal to the abyss, right? And why abyss and not a portal to God only knows where? I have no idea. But did you send, was there something abyssal about that? I was getting pulled into the big nothing. And I knew, I didn't know I was dying, but I knew if I go into the infinitely black pit,

that's not the kind of thing one returns from. I just had this animal sense. Like, don't go in there, like dogs don't want to go to the vet. Right? I was like, no, no. Don't go into a cave where a bear's hibernate. Right, I'm going to slip my leash. I'm not going in there.

You know, you can't make me. And so I was like that was this thing. It was pulling me in. It was absolutely irresistible. I mean, I could not stop it from happening. and I knew I couldn't stop it and I was panicking and then suddenly above me

I sensed and I'm not going to say saw because it wasn't quite a visual thing but I perceived my dead father and he was above me I mean you can't imagine my shock I mean I don't know if your father

was alive or not but he passed away about four and a half years ago okay imagine how shocked you would be to see him right up there on the ceiling I was that shocked right I was like dad

And when you perceived him, like, was he the age when he passed? Was it kind of an amalgam of like... It was his essence. Yeah. It was his energy, energy, which is another word that I hate, but, you know, English lacks a lot of useful words, right? So I'm going to stuck with the word energy. You know, it was sort of this intense energy form of sort of his essence.

And there he was. And recognizable as my father, right? And I was like, dad? What are you doing, right? And he communicated to me. Again, I didn't say. It wasn't dialogue, right? It was a communication.

He communicated to me, basically, it's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me, I'll take care of you. Basically, he was like, I know how to do this, right? I'll take care of you. Just come with me. It's going to be okay. I was horrified, right?

And there's a lot of afterlife stories like, oh, it was so good to see, you know, Aunt Mildred. But you were like, no. I was like, go with you. You're dead. You're dead and you're an atheist. And what are you doing here?

Don't follow the atheist into the event, right? Follow somebody else. Yeah. No, so couldn't Aunt Connie be here? She loved Jesus every Sunday. Right. So I was horrified. I was like, why would I want to go with you?

You're dead. I'm alive. The party's over here. Like, we'll talk later a lot later, right? Like, go away. and I said to the doctor, because I'm still conversant. I'm still conscious, right? I'm like...

So they're doing stuff on you. There's people around. You've got... There's an abyss here and there's a dad here. Yeah, and they're pushing a needle through my neck into my jugular, right? And I said, you go to hurry. You know, whatever... They seem to be taking a long time, right?

And I said, you know, you go to hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going. Now, I didn't know where I was going, but I had the sense that I was being taken away and would never come back. And I was terrifying to me. One thing that's interesting about your near-death experience,

because I've read and heard hundreds, is this, I've rarely heard or never heard something about, like, a black hole or black abyss. And then also, it's interesting your feelings of, like, kind of fear and revulsion of this happening and not kind of blissful joy. Now, listen, if I'd been 85 and riddled with cancer, I might have been thrilled to see my dad.

Like, oh, thank you. Right. It's time to get out of here. here. Right. But I'm in my 50s. I'm healthy. I have young children, a wife, a life that I love. And it was horrifying to me. It was horrifying because you knew what this meant. This is like, I am at death store literally. I didn't know it was death, but I knew I, wherever, whatever this was, I'm not coming back from it. And I wanted to stay where I was. And it wasn't reassuring to you. Your father's like, I'll take care of you. I'm going to show you around here

a little bit. No, well, I didn't know. I'm going to take you to atheist heaven. I'm going to Right. There's pool tables, though. There's pool tables, though. There's longer. Yeah, one dollar pints. Yeah, it's great. It's kind of like in Pinocchio when he goes to the land of the lost boys, they turn into donkeys. Oh, right, right. So, no, I, I, no, I didn't, my heart didn't stop. I didn't, medically, I did not die.

There's so much I loved about your book. One was the medical research that you undertook to kind of understand. understand exactly what was happening inch by inch through your body, hour by hour in the hospital. Fascinating. And then with great humility, I think, you research near-death experiences around the world. And like, I seem to have had one. There are tens of thousands of these. They're in every culture in the world.

So what did you learn about near-death experiences as a whole? So there's a huge body of literature on them. You can divide them into two camps, basically. They're the people who study near-death experiences and want to sell a lot of books, and they come to a sort of mild conclusion, a kind of soft conclusion, that these stories are so extraordinary, they have so much commonality, that they amount to an evidence of some kind of afterlife. Hsu, close, you know, that was a close one.

We thought we were dead forever. Actually, you can exhale, you can relax, it's going to be okay, right? And those books sell very, very well for understandable reasons, right? And then there's this sort of hard-nosed pragmatist, the rationalist, the realist. It was like, nunts, the neurologist, the, you know, whatever. Here's what's happening in your brain. Here's the endorphins that are being released. Here's the hallucinations you're undergoing when you're, you know, under sedation.

Right, all these different things. So, you know, I came back from the hospital, and I was very traumatized by this, right? And it was way worse than any battlefield trauma. and I'd been in a lot of combat. Well, there you are. Your dad's like, come with me. There's the abyss. Your doctor's like, hey, hurry up and save me.

What happened in the next hour? Okay, so they couldn't sedate me because my vital signs were so low. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. They brought me into the interventional radiology suite, which is this sort of magic that they can do, right? So instead of the old days, which is like 30 years ago, they would have had to cut open my entire abdomen,

push aside my organs, and start looking for the ruptured artery in this sort of gory mess of one's abdomen. and try to find it and embolize it before I bled out in front of them, right? The outcomes of that are very poor, and if they'd had to resort to that, which they almost did with me, they would have brought my wife in to say goodbye before I went to the OR. They didn't have to do that because interventional radiology is this extraordinary thing. They will pop a hole in your groin, thread a catheter up into your femoral artery.

You're lying on a fluoroscope, so they're watching everything in real, in, in sort of, a fluoroscope is basically an x-ray machine, but instead of taking still images, it's video. It's X-ray video, right? And they can watch the catheter, snake through your body, and they twist and turns, and they can theoretically get it anywhere in your body, right? Wow. And so there's, it's not surgery.

It's like, it's a miracle, right? So this went on for hours, and because I have a strange vascular because of this strange ligament that's in the wrong place, they couldn't get the thing to the place, right? As tried as they, try as they might, they could not get the catheter there. And they were looking at an OR, you know, the operating.

They go up one vein, like, oh, dead end there. Let's go up this one. Well, the vascular. My vascularatures is very contorted because of this ligament. And so they just couldn't navigate all those turns. They couldn't get it there, right? And, you know, and I'm an incredible pain, right? And as nurse is holding my hands, say, keep your eyes open so we know you're still with us, you know.

And I'm just puzzled. Why is this taking so long? I'm in for belly pain. Just do your thing, and let me go home, right? Take out my appendix already. Right, no, exactly. Right. And while you're out, can you give me some painkillers?

Right. So at one point, around one of the morning, I see one of the doctors shrug and say, well, we tried. There's nothing more we can do. Wow. And that was the first moment where I realized in my addled brain, oh, my God, I might not make it. Wow. And no. That was before the vision, shall we call it? No, it was afterwards.

So they stabilized me, sent me into the interventionalry. radiology suite and they're working on me for hours now and they finally gave up. Like we tried, what they were saying is we're going to have to send him into the OR and in the OR his chances are negligible. Right. I didn't know that, right? But in my mind, I'm like, oh my God, you don't have an answer for this? What do you mean you're giving up? Like, this isn't working? What do you, and I finally realized, oh, I might die. It finally dawned on me. So they went through my left wrist, which was a very innovative approach, it allowed a different angle of attack. It was sort of brilliant by this one interventional radiologist, Dr. Dombrowski, was sort of a brilliant move, counterintuitive move.

He saved my life, right? And I woke up in the, I woke up in the ICU. And the first thing I heard, and I'll sort of leave it with this last story about what happened, the first thing, I was in the sort of wild darkness, right? Sort of vast darkness. And I hear a Boston accent. Right. And you know how harsh, hush, how harsh the Boston accent is, right? Like, it's that kind of... Yeah, it's like that kind of accent, right? And a woman's talking in a Boston accent, I'm just like, where am I? Like, what? What? There's probably no Boston accent since heaven. There's a special hell for Bostonians because they're terrible drivers. That's right. That's right. And right, so I open my eyes and it's the ICU nurse. And she says, congratulations. Congratulations, Mr. Youngert.

You almost died last night. In fact, no one can believe you're alive. It's sort of a miracle. Like, welcome back, right? Damn. And I was shocked. It's shocking to be told you almost died, right? I had no idea.

And suddenly, oh, my God, I saw my father in the pit. Like, where was I last night? And she came back an hour later to see how it was doing. And I said, frankly, not very well. Like, what you said is terrifying. And I can't stop thinking about it. And she said, you know, incredibly wise advice. She said, instead of thinking about it like something scary,

try thinking about it like something sacred. And she walked out. I never saw her again. And so that was what I set out to do. I will claim a wonderful secular meaning for the word sacred, right? It doesn't have to be a religious meaning. It has sacred meanings as well. For me, sacred means any process, any knowledge, any job, any task

that preserves, protects, uplifts human dignity. that's sacred for me right and you know like the word sacred is something i have a chapter about in my book a soulbum that we have no copies around here so i can't give you one but i'll send you one sacred is a wonderful word because it does unite uh theist and the atheist you know because redwoods can be sacred to all people right uh because of their beauty their majesty their wisdom i mean a you know a hospital where people's lives are saved can be sacred school teachers. There's a special, and in fact, it's a word that bridges the left-right kind of voting divide in the United States.

There's, now, for a lot of people on the political left, you know, a church is not sacred, a cross is not sacred. Even an unborn baby isn't necessarily, a fetus isn't necessarily sacred in the same way that someone on the political right. But this idea of something that has a resonance beyond the mere, you know, pleasant attachment that we have to, like, a cup of coffee is a universal. The flag is sacred. Battlefields are sacred. You know, Gettysburg's a sacred place. It was the turning point of the Civil War. Tens of thousands of young men died there.

The World Trade Center is a sacred place. Yeah, absolutely. Innocent people lost their lives. So you don't need God for it to be sacred. And for me, sacred is something involved in human dignity. Mm-hmm. Right? Journalists on their best days do a sort of sacred job.

Like they go to these front lines of whatever sort, and they come back with information that's crucial to making a responsible decision for how to run this society and protect human life, human dignity. Right. So that, and on our best days, we do sacred work, right? And so I just thought,

I've been going to front lines my whole life. I went to the ultimate front line, which is my own mortality. And I looked over the edge into the abyss. I was allowed to come back. Did I come back with sacred information, something that will help other people face their own fears, their own mortality?

And so that was the sort of task that I gave myself. How long was the whole father black pit thing, do you think? It could have been a minute. It was it kind of timeless, amorphous, five minutes? You know, it could have been a moment. I don't know. I mean, I had a very distorted sense of time

and of everything. It's kind of like when you're getting in a car accident and your car starts to, to like spin or something and it feels like it could be half an hour. But yeah, and if it's a moment that transcendent, the amount of the point is you've crossed over into another place you didn't know existed, how long you're there doesn't really matter.

Like you've gone somewhere that totally extraordinary. So it could have been literally a moment. I have no idea. But the point was I experienced something that I had no explanation for and that threatened to realign, to rearrange my understanding of reality and life and death and everything else.

So a moment, an hour, whatever, it doesn't really matter. The point was I got there, right? And so what am I going to do with it? So I got home, I started researching NDE's. And I'm very traumatized, right? Way worse than combat. I've been betrayed by my own healthy body

in my own driveway, basically, right? Is there a fear that something might happen again? Oh, totally, yeah. You kind of are like, have you since then been, like, gotten full body scans and, gone into the doctor much more religiously. And no pun intended.

Yeah, I mean, I had to make sure that there was no other aneurysms that were going to rupture. But there was a more metaphysical fear. Like, oh, my God, I didn't realize any of us could die on any day. I did the comedian Neil Brennan's podcast and I was talking about the number of friends

that I've lost in my 50s. And he's like, sniper's alley, babe, sniper's alley. It's like you get to your 50s, sniper's alley. It's like Sarajevo. Like people just get picked off. Like, boom, cancer. Boom, heart disease.

Because weren't human beings? meant to, you could argue, and for 100,000 years lived till about 50. So anything past 50 is kind of golden years in a way? Oh, totally. Yeah, absolutely. So I, so I, you know, I, I was very, very fearful when I came home. I was very traumatized. I was very anxious and, um, which aren't states that I'm not a, I'm not a naturally neurotic person, right? But I became one, right? And I started researching NDEs. So at first, I mean, look, I'm human. I've got, you know, whatever. I was reading these accounts.

I'm like, whoa, wow, maybe there's hope. Like, maybe there is something. You know, I mean, even me, my craven atheist heart. I'm like, ooh, a little flicker of like, oh, maybe there is, maybe there's nothing to worry about. And then I read the rationalists, right? And the scientists, the neurologists, the physicists, their take on this extraordinary body of literature, which is the thousands and thousands of cases of NDE's.

And one of the interesting thing is that they have such commonalities, right? Like if you distress the human brain or if you give it LSD, you know, you can produce hallucinations. You can produce all kinds of crazy illusions and visions and behavior. That's no mystery. What is slightly odd for me as a rationalist is their consistency, right? And seeing... Across cultures. Cross cultures.

Yeah, exactly. So the dead seem to show up to receive the dying, right? Even people who don't know they're dying. So what are some universal components of NDE's for people that don't really know? There's oftentimes some kind of tunnel or light or portal. You had the black one. Most people have a light one. Right.

So what I would say is that a lot of the common phenomena, like a light... Life flashing before your eyes. That those they can reproduce in other ways in the lab. With drugs depriving the person of oxygen, a blood flow to the brain. You can produce the tunnel vision, all kinds of other... In a human centrifuge, which is what they put fighter pilots in to test their resistance to the G-Force. You can produce a lot of this. in basically in the lab, if you distress the human brain.

And when people die, obviously their brain is being fatally distressed, right? So those commonalities are there, and I think most of them are explainable through neurochemistry, neurology, right? So hear me out for a moment, right? The one thing that I don't understand, and this is me as a rationalist, right, because rationalists have to play both sides of the game, right, both sides of the fence. Which I greatly appreciated in your book, yes. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, so you must be rational about your skepticism about rationality. itself, right? And if you're not doing that, then you're not really a rationalist. What does not make sense to me is, I mean, we know if you give a room full of people LSD, they'll all hallucinate. There's no mystery there, right? The dying brain is suffering from lack of oxygen. It produces visions. No mystery there. Yeah, I get it, right? What's hard to explain is the consistency of the vision, which is the dead. Like, the dead show up to receive the dying. And that consistency, to me, is not explainable through conventional neurology. I don't understand the consistency of it.

And when you say consistency, what do you mean? Oh, it's just such a common thing. Like people that don't know they're dying or that die. It's almost rare to have a near-death experience and not have that. Well, I think it's something around 20%, like cardiac arrest. People who suffer cardiac arrest have a classic NDE, something like 20%. So that, but that's a huge number, right? And this is across all cultures, too.

You go to South Africa or Mongolia and the idea that there's ancestors or a close family member guiding you. Right. So the tunnel, the light, all that stuff has, you know, it's like, yeah, yeah, you can do that with a centrifuge, right? But I don't understand in case after case the dead showing up to receive the dying. And often accounts of people, the dying person will see someone they didn't even know was dead because that person had died recently. right? Or someone that they didn't want to see, right? Like, I didn't want to see my father, and I didn't know I was dying. I know a woman who died in a car accident, you know, like out of the blue, boom, front end, like, had on collision, dead.

She was driving. Next thing he knew she was running across the field towards two long dead friends, right? And right before, joyful, like, oh, my God, there you are. Right before she reached them, she got yanked. She felt herself getting yanked back. and she had crashed right in front of the fire rescue building of the slow town. The paramedics ran out literally in seconds, paddled her, brought her back. She had no idea she was dead.

Right. So one of the explanations for these visions is, oh, it's the dying person comforting themselves with a benevolent vision because they're scared of dying, and so they project Aunt Maude, right? That's not, that doesn't explain many of these cases, right? And the other problem I have with that theory, and I'm not saying all this in order to build up to, so I believe in the afterlife, right? I'm not doing that. I'm just trying to pick apart the arguments on both sides, because I think they are both for and against a quote afterlife,

because I think they both have sort of fatal flaws. So the other skeptic, you know, this sort of one of the skeptical arguments about this is that, okay, well, you know, the dying person is scared and it's just projecting this sort of comforting vision. But if you think about it, like we're a product of evolution, right? So if you have across cultures, people who don't know they're dying, people who are very compromised neurologically as they're dying, and they're producing these visions, that would come from a very deeply rooted brain function, right? That would come from very, very deep in the brain. That would be those structures, those behaviors, those traits would have to be the process, the product of an evolutionary process. So as we know, evolution

um, reward, genetically rewards, um, behaviors and traits that either help with reproduction, help you have more children, or help with survival. And you survive long enough to have more children.

That's how evolution works. So my question to those people who are using the comforting vision as an explanation for the consistency of seeing the dead, right? My question to them is what evolutionary process would possibly produce those structures in a brain, right? because by definition, you're talking about a situation where there is no evolutionary reward. You are dying. You will not reproduce again.

And evolution doesn't care if you're scared when you die. It's irrelevant to our Darwinian process. So tell me, again, like how would the brain develop these structures that would produce these visions, even when the person is unconscious? Like, that's a very, very deep structure. So my rationalist sort of pushback against the rationalist is, you know, you know, you know, you're not making evolutionary sense. I do not understand this.

And for me, that opens the door to a rational conversation about quantum physics and whether we do, even, whether we have any understanding of the basis of reality and consciousness and life and death. I mean, do we have any clue what's actually going on?

It opens that conversation, but for me it's a rational conversation, not a spiritual one. You must have heard from a lot of people with NDE's on your book tour. What was it like to kind of be in the, in this very kind of fru-frew, you know, airy-fairy-feeling world of... You know, I wouldn't even call it that.

There were a lot of puzzled people. I mean, there were a lot of religious people who had an experience like this and were like, see, there's a god, right? I'm like, okay, I mean, that's fine to believe that. I don't, but, you know, good, go for it, right? And then there's a lot of people who don't have strong religious beliefs who are truly puzzled, right? I mean, I just heard from this one woman who's one of her parents,

I think died, or grandparents died, um, grandparent died of cancer and she, this woman was quite far away, you know, on the other side of the country or whatever, and she was woken, from a sound sleep, woken in the middle of the night by her grandmother, who had been dying for some months, right? Suddenly appeared to her to say goodbye, like right in front of her, like,

she, and she, the woman, the grandmother was scared, but she was saying goodbye. She was being pulled off into this sort of, into these sort of dark woods. and there were people waiting for her. That's what this dream was. And this woman woke up and like, oh, my God, what was that? She looked at the clock and it was whatever the time was. And she was in school.

She was a teenager and she was in school. And this was quite a long time ago. And the teacher, the principal came into the classroom and said call home. And so she went into the principal's office and called home. And she got the news that her grandmother had passed the previous night. And she asked what time it was. And it was the exact time. that she was woken from a dream.

So what I would say with that is there may be modes of communication, even in our dream world, that we just don't understand. And modes of communication that are sort of akin to the puzzle of quantum entanglement. I mean, there are, we know through experiments, the physicists know, that one particle can be in two places at once, including on the other side of the universe and interact with its twin. at faster than the speed of light. And we know that to be true, right?

So if that's possible, surely, surely some kind of telepathic communication is possible between people and opposite sides of the country. Like, why not? We just don't understand it. And that's what I mean by a rational conversation rather than a spiritual one. We have such limited means of understanding the world around us, right? We have our five senses, and we have the scientific method, and we have very limited tools to gals.

to gather data. We're like the dogs trying to explore the internet. You know, we're dogs with our paws on the keyboard and like, oh, some light colors come up on a screen and look when I do this, you know, a cursor flashes. But the dog has no idea what Google is or AI or chat GPT or even Netflix. So is it not possible for us to be taking in, you know,

one one thousandth of the end? information about beingness itself, beyond the physical universe, whatever multiverse kind of state we might be living in, and that these experiences are fine. You want to set aside evidence of some kind of higher power, father figure, creator, in my book, call him Sky Daddy, you know, presence, fine, but the possibility of the plurality of existence and the, and the, and, and, and the kind of the power of interconnectedness that we just are seeing a tiny, tiny sliver. And that's where I guess, I guess,

I bump up against the rationalists or atheists a lot is there's a kind of a certainty of like, this is what we know from science, and that's it. And it's like, wait a second, when I was going to school, I was told that there was stuff and not stuff. And then all of a sudden, all of a sudden the rug was pulled out about 20 years ago,

It's like, oh, sorry, we missed it. Actually, dark matter and dark energy is the majority of the universe. And it's like, oh, okay, great. But can there not be infinite discoveries beyond matter and dark matter? And what does that mean? Is there a dark matter universe?

I mean, Marvel seems to think so. But you know what I mean? Like there's the possibilities are endless and also the possibilities for the continuation of existence because consciousness itself is one of the great, mysteries. Science thought 20 or 30 years ago, they were going to have consciousness all figured out. We do enough brain scans and enough MRIs. We'll get this consciousness thing. We'll probe this

part of the brain. Oh, that's your feeling. We'll probe this part of the brain. Oh, that's where you fall in love. This part of the brain. Oh, there's your memories. And they cannot figure out the consciousness and how they've linked consciousness to kind of the gut and how consciousness kind of lives in our gut experience through science, through biology. So just an impassioned plea for you, Sebastian, to like, perhaps this is evidence of a thread that if you start to pull shows like you're talking about quantum entanglement can lead to a more expansive vision of the human experience. Well, yeah, but I think what you're describing is the scientific process.

Like scientists will say, we don't know. but we're going to devise experiments to try to figure out what we don't know and be able to demonstrate that this is true, right? But isn't time and time again, from the materialist standpoint, they come back to like prove it, we don't know it? And it's like, well, I can't prove anything beyond,

you know, what we can't learn from the scientific process, obviously, but can we stay open to possibilities that are beyond, And even what you're talking about, like the neuroscientists that are saying, hey, all of this can be, you know, all of this can be, what is it, what is it called? Remulate, replicated. All of this can be replicated. I like remulated.

Remulated. That sounds like a word waiting to happen. I think it involves like a lamb chop, slow roasted. Like you've got to remulate it. Yeah, yeah. But these things can be replicated. but in a strange way that there seems to be kind of an arrogance there of like, I'm entrenched in this idea.

There's no possible way there is a continuity of existence beyond the physical realm, and I'm going to do everything I can in my, in my, possible to prove that it's naturally released, you know, brain hallucinogens when you're sedated. Yeah, but those same scientists would, if you gave them proof of, say, universal consciousness, if you could devise an experiment that demonstrated human universal universal consciousness, which is one of the scientific theories about all this. So universal consciousness is a construct of the scientific mind that proposes that the entire universe is suffused with consciousness,

and that consciousness creates the physical universe that we observe. So that is a... There's scientists right now rolling their eyes that even the possibility of that supposition. Oh, of course, but there are scientists who also developed it. Right? So that, of course, there's arguments within the scientific world just as there is within the theological world, right? But the point is the process of scientific inquiry is actually quite, is actually quite humble in some ways. Like, well, we can understand this far, we can prove this much, and then beyond that. I think you're a neat, naive idealist about the humility of the scientific process because most scientists kind of live in certainty.

But as maybe, right? Just like a lot of evangelicals live in a kind of a certainty and an evangelical certainty. As long as some don't, there's progress, right? Okay. So the ones who don't are like, wait a second. I mean, this is what happened with Newtonian physics, right? After a certain, which involves the macroscopic world, right? And then quantum physics came along and started showing the impossible, right?

That a subatomic particle could be in two places at once. that a photon will unobserved, will pass through two slits at the same time, and when you observe it, it has to pick one and go through one slit. And those are impossibilities for the macroscopic world that we live in, and a lot of scientists were like, no, no, no, that's impossible, and then scientists showed that's entirely possible and can do that experiment and prove it over and over and over again, and science evolved, right?

So is there a frontier where we don't understand consciousness and some kind of post-death continuity of the individual. Of course there is, right? And a responsible scientist, and there are many, will say, I cannot prove, and therefore I cannot assert that there's nothing. I cannot do that. Some scientists might, but there's plenty that don't. And that's how knowledge evolves.

And for me, as a journalist and as a rationalist, I can't assert that there is a quote afterlife or is a God, right? I mean, there's no proof of either, right? but there's certainly some reasons to wonder about a post-death continuation of the individual. Absolutely. And I came to that question because I encountered something that I couldn't explain with the knowledge that I had at that moment. How has that affected you now three or four years later? Especially the vision of your father.

How is your life different now than it was in 2019? I mean, the vision of my father affected my intellectual world. like do we understand, I started researching quantum physics and, you know, do we understand anything about quantum reality, about consciousness, et cetera. So that, that changed me intellectually, enormously. Almost dying changed me emotionally, right? And, you know, one point as I sort of struggled with this sort of strange madness, I mean, let me, sorry, this is a part of the story that I didn't tell, but it's interesting. I came home from the hospital and, you know, I had had 36 hours prior to almost dying, I had a, I was, oh, that's right, the dream that you had,

that vision you had had. Yeah, so I had a dream that I was hovering over my family, which is a classic NDE, although I didn't know that, right? But before any symptoms? Before anything, right? And I'm, I'm, it's dawn, 36 hours prior to almost dying. It's right before dawn. And I'm hovering over my family and they're crying. My wife is holding our children and I'm trying to, community, They're crying about me, and I'm trying to, like, hey, I'm over here. I'm waving my, like, I'm shouting to, and they, they can't perceive me, right? And I don't know why. And why am I hovering?

Like, what, what's, and then I'm made to understand that I, they can't hear me because I'm dead. I'm a spirit. And this is. In your dream, in my dream. In my dream. I am. Six hours before. Yes.

I'm dead. I'm a spirit and I'm headed out. And I'm not coming back. And I was just anguished, because I thought this was happening. I didn't know it was a dream, of course. right? Like, I thought this was happening. Oh, my God, I'm dead. It's too late. I fucked up, basically. Like, how did I let myself die? And now I can't go back. And I was so anguish that it woke me up. And then suddenly I'm in my bed, right? We co-sleep. The family co-sleeves. I wake up next to my oldest daughter. And I sort of gripped her like she was a stuffy or something. Like, oh, my God, that was terrifying. I'd never had a dream like that. I'd never even heard of a dream like that. And then 36 hours later, this is exactly what happened. How do you explain that? Well, I talk to a...

Rationally, and how do you explain it emotionally? Well, I mean, an explanation is a rational process, right? Like, I mean, that's what an explanation is. The emotional consequences of it we can discuss, but... Well, you could say, you know, a reaction to my son hugging me is... I love him and... Right, but that's a... And I'm expressing...

Right, yeah, but that's a... It's not a rational process. No, of course it is. I mean, it's, I mean, it doesn't mean you're... Expressing love is a rational process? Well, the existence of love is, it can be rationally shown, of course. Like you love, we often love our children. And when humans, we're social primates, when we love something, we often want to touch it.

That's what an explanation is, right? There's other conversations to have. But an explanation is a rational process to explain why when you throw a rock out the window, it falls instead of rises. That's an explanation, right? and it's a rational one. So the rational explanation for, the most obvious one is that our bodies

sort of have a sense of what's going on and they signal to our mind unconsciously in our dreams, right? There's plenty of evidence for that, right? It's kind of your body kind of tap, tap, tap, tapping on the glass. Like something. Hey, buddy, wake up. Something might be going on here.

Something's about to happen. You might want. That might. Yes. Right. That occasional pain in your abdomen, you're like, right. Right.

So another rational explanation that is, way farther from any kind of proof is maybe all time is simultaneous. You're having that dream because in a different, in a slightly different universe, at a slightly different time scale, you are dying or you did die, right? I mean, you know, that's a rational conversation about things that we can't prove rationally, but it's not a purely spiritual one. You know, that's God waking you up or something. Like that to me is a spiritual conversation without a rational basis.

So, so I, you know, I don't know. but the truth is there's a whole body of literature on predictive dreams, and clearly there's a mechanism within our minds and our bodies that alerts us to a threat, right? Absolutely. I would tweak that a little bit because sometimes I find when you bring up stuff

about spirituality, it can be a little reductive. And I would say that a deep intuitive sense, like you had a deep intuitive sense of a pit and of a father, of a vast interconnectedness, certainly can be processed in a brain, again, but that is also a spiritual process. It doesn't involve some kind of big daddy God saying, like, I love you, my son, and you'll be saved when you go to heaven or something like that.

Like, it's a sense of the interconnectedness of all things as found in so many indigenous faiths is a spiritual process and a link between love and beauty and truth and justice and how those connect can be spiritual. You could also define it rationally, but you know what I mean? I think there's a little bit more to the world, to the word spiritual than something involving, you know, God telling you something. Right, yeah. And it depends how you define the word spiritual, right? So if you define spiritual as an ineffable experience of love and connection and understanding, yeah, that's a great word. We need a word for that, right? And you may be able to break that experience down into a neurochemical phenomenon. But regardless,

You want to call it spiritual? Great, right? I think people often think that the word spiritual, they think that it's a process that's sort of guided by God, right? That is somehow you're in touch with a divine danger. There's a certain percentage of the population that believes that. Right. I get that.

So I stay away from the word a little bit because to use the word in that sense would require a belief in God, which I don't have. So if you want to talk about, oh, yeah, it's the realm of the human spirit, which involves our emotions, our capacity for love, our feelings of connection to the natural world to each other, yeah, great, that's a very nice word, right?

But for me, there is, there also is an embodied reality that that spiritual thought is, it happens in, right? Whatever the explanation, and I'm open to all kinds of quantum explanations for the predictive quality of dreaming. Like, you know, whatever, what do I know, right? But the result was that it predicted something that was about to happen and seemed to protect. something that was about to happen.

And then when I came home from the hospital, I suddenly was seized, I couldn't explain the dream. My father, like, okay, you know, whatever. I couldn't explain the dream. And I started researching NDE's, and I realized one of the most common is that you're hovering above the doctors, above your family, above your own body,

and you're headed out, right? And I knew nothing about this when I had that dream, right? And had someone told me about it, I mean, like, you know what? I don't need that. Like, I'm not interested. that's just hokey. And yet, right, I had that dream.

And then I had the experience with my dad. And so I was seized with this terror that I had died. That my dream was actually an NDE. It was my experience of dying. And that everything that followed was a dying hallucination. And I'm the only one who doesn't know that I'm dead. And everyone in my family is mourning me. And I couldn't disprove it.

You were the first dead person on our podcast. Congratulations. Right. And yeah, I'm still not convinced you're entirely real. Sorry. But, no, but it was a, it was a serious epistemolo- Isn't that Jacob's ladder? Isn't that movie with Tim Robbins? It's exactly. The whole thing was a death hallucination? Yeah, it's exactly. It's many things, right? And so it's a real epistemological crisis. Like, how do I know what I know? And do I actually know what I think I know? And I got really quite terrified about it. And, you know, at one point my, my, my, I went up to my wife and I said, I mean, it's hard to explain how traumatized I was when I came home to the hospital. And this was

just classic trauma reaction, right? I was having a sort of like intense panic, you know, panic reaction. Wow. And so, you know, and you were embedded in Afghanistan, often on for years with bullets flying past your face. Right, but that's, that's easy compared to thinking that the world doesn't exist because you're dead. Bullets are nothing. That's child's play compared to questioning. But that's so irrational for such an irrational. No, no, no, it's not irrational. It's not? I cannot prove the world exists. Can you? No. Yeah, exactly. No, I, but I have no problem with that. To me, it's not a trauma response. It's just a human response. Right, but if you were deeply traumatized, you might have a problem

with it, right? And one of the reactions, it's called derealization, right? It's a known psychological process that often happens to trauma, victims of trauma, where they question everything. Like who they are, what they are, whether the world exists, they question everything is a massive epistemological crisis, right? And it's a known thing, and it's part of, you know, PTSD, right? So I, and I didn't know, I didn't understand that that's what was happening. So I went up, at one point I went up to, is I was sort of slipping into madness, right? I went up to my wife, and I was like, can you just tell me I'm really here that you see me, that I'm here, that I survive, just like, tell me, right? It's a fool.

because she said, of course you're here. We love you, you made it. In my mind, I'm thinking, that's exactly what a hallucination you tell you. I mean, you can start just start going in circles. That's hysterical. Right. That's awesome.

It's like, I'm doing a Samuel Beckett play right now, and it sounds like an absurdist existential play from the 1950s that you're describing. No, no, exactly. No, that's, and you know, Sartre and come you wrote about the same, like, how do we know? Like, how do we know what we know, right? And so, you know, I finally dug my way out of there with, um, You know, my wife said, listen, you're going to be a little hard to live with. Can you go seek some help?

Right? Okay. So I talked to a shrink who specialized in trauma. I did some other stuff that helped. And, you know, but it took a couple of years to dig my way out of that emotional pit. Wow. That I'd fallen into. Did that emotional pit separate you from your family, bond you to your family more?

No, no, no. Because ultimately the lesson, you know, because I've read several of your interviews and and other things in talking about, this experience in my time of dying is like a renewed deeper appreciation for your daughters, for your wife, for the connection that you have, which is the great life lesson always, isn't it?

Kind of like, oh, I, no one's on their deathbed going, I should have worked more and harder. It's all about, like, I should have connected more. But that, but there was several years and that took you away from the kind of connection. People who are terrified and terrified and depressed and anxious and in a state of semi-panic do not connect very well to others. Right.

So while I was in that pit, my connections to my family were severely disrupted, partly because I wasn't sure I was there, right? I mean, it's hard to explain how profoundly terrifying that fear is that you actually, that this actually isn't happening. Wow. Or that you could die at any moment. I mean, there was the other fear that I'm too here, right? that I'm here with my body, my vulnerable body,

and at any moment I could feel a pain in my abdomen. And you could just be gone like that. Like if that had happened on an airplane flight, I would have died on my seat. Right. You know, hiking in New Hampshire, sorry, buddy, you're gone, right? Like, so I started to map the world

in terms of how fast could I get to an interventional radiology suite, right? And so it's the opposite terror. I was too there. I mean, I both feared that I wasn't there and that I was too much here, that I was too vulnerable, and I could die at any moment. the two terrors, right, which are the sort of like extremes of human neurosis,

those two twin terrors, I had bracketed myself and I was in the middle and everywhere I turned, it was a scary idea. And it took a couple of years to come out of that and actually, and you know, you just don't connect to people when you're depressed and anxious. That's part of the problem. It's a disruptive feeling. I've been there, yeah. And I eventually worked out of there. What helped you get out of it? Because, you know, a lot of what we talk about on Soul Boom is mental health issues and there might be people watching right now that don't, haven't had a traumatic near-death experience

that are feeling this disconnection, why am I alive, you know, and I could die at any second, and what does it all mean? Are there some handholds that brought you out? Yeah, so recovering from trauma is a process that takes time, but you do recover. Most people do recover. I mean, you know, you lose your spouse to cancer. The first day is unspeakable. The first day is unspeakable. The the first week is unspeakable, the first month, you're a little more manageable. 10 years out, you're remarried. You still grieve your spouse who die, but you're functional, right? Like, so there's a curve, there's a curve for recovery that, so time went by.

I got a great shrink and who sort of, like, specialized in trauma. I treat, and so when talking about this, I also sort of did the sort of spade work of dealing with trauma from combat that I'd never dealt with, right? So all of that stuff sort of, it was like this log jam. So there was a lot of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And, but also my wife, she posed this sort of unanswerable question at first. She said, Sebastian, you know, in her frustration with my sort of like craziness, she said, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you, right?

Not that you survived, of course, but, you know, if you could push a button to make it not happen, would you push that button? And I didn't know how to answer her because my experience of it was, okay, I went I had this crazy experience. A few people have. But now there's this sort of like black raven perched on my shoulder, calling in my ear, you're going to die, you're going to die, you know, like it was horrible.

I couldn't shake this bird, right? Just like, get out of here. Like, I'm tired of here. I can't live my life with this racket in my ear, this mortality message, right? And then I looked up, I decided, okay, I'm going to phrase this in a sort of more mythic way, right? Not am I lucky or unlucky? Am I blessed or cursed? So if I can resort to some religious terminology,

am I blessed or cursed, right, with this experience that I had, this vision that I had. And I looked up the origin of the word blessing because there's nothing I can't nerd my way out of, right? And it's like, all right, the origin of the word blessing, it comes from the Anglo-Saxon word blotzian, which means blood.

And the idea is that there is no blessing without a wounding, without the shedding of blood. And battlefields are sacred because blood was shed, on them. 9-11, the spot, you know, the ground zero is sacred because, like, they are twin. The two, you don't get one or the other, you get both. And so it was sort of a false question. And I realized, like, yeah, you're going to die. You're going to die. So how do you want to live? Like, life doesn't come into folks until death comes into focus. And death just came into focus.

I'm blessed and cursed. You might die today. You don't know. You might die today. Okay, who do I want to be today? If this is my last day, and I don't know, and it might be, who do I want to be today? How do I want to act today? Do I want to spend my day scrolling through social media? Probably not, right? Like, who do you want to be? Well, I can see you've got a dumb phone there. Yes, yeah, flip phone. I prefer flip phone, but that's okay. But is that part of this equation of how do you want to live? No, I've never had a smartphone. I hate those frigging things. I think they're terrible for people. Chat, GPT. Tell me about the perils of the smartphone. Yeah, no, I mean, they're clearly an addictive force in our society. A hundred percent. Yeah, and particularly

children are very vulnerable to addiction. I have that exact phone sitting in a box that I ordered three months ago and I've been to chicken shit to hook it up and get rid of this one. All you lose is your email not chasing you around all day long. I get my email at my desk when I'm at my desk

otherwise the world leaves me in peace. I know how to read a freaking map if I need to drive somewhere, right? I know how to walk around until I find a restaurant. I don't need to find out the best Italian restaurant within 10 blocks. Like it's just, I mean, there are advantages to many of these things, but the downsides are enormous, and people don't compare the advantages to the disadvantages. They just, you know, the debit side of

the column just goes away. Yeah. And but it's huge. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's well, that's well said. I guess going back there, there are some spiritual tools that Eckart Tolly talks about, but way before him, Zadartha Guatama, the Buddha talked about, like, all we have is the moment. All we have, is this breath. And if you're in your head, because of trauma, and God bless you for, sorry for, God bless you. Bless you, blood bless you. May the blood bless you for sharing your story

because I think it's really profound about, like, do I exist? What do I know is real on one hand? And a blood vessel could pop at any second and I could be dead at any second and have those two whirling dervishes kind of going on at the same time as I can imagine it's how overwhelming. Is there, did you find any kind of, for lack of a better word, kind of, well, I guess a

mindfulness practice doesn't have to be spiritual. Sam Harris would attest to that. That in breathing and being in the moment, like, I'm taking this breath with my daughters, and that's all I have. I'm taking this next breath with my daughters and my wife. That's all I have. Under this tree, I'm taking a breath. That's all I have.

all narrows down just to this present moment. Yeah, oh, absolutely. And I don't know if I would call it a practice, but I remind myself, you know, at my lesser moments, right? I mean, you know, life is frustrating, and you can get carried away with that frustration and feel victimized and, you know, oh, my God, I can't believe I'm in a traffic jam on the 405, blah, blah,

hey, bro, you're in a traffic jam on the 405, awesome, you're alive, you exist. Yeah, right? You know, like, come on, how entitled and self-indulgent you want to be here. You feel unlucky to exist anywhere? Unless you're in agonizing pain, just like understand how privileged and lucky you are to be composed of mostly carbon molecules and to be able to capable of conscious thought and love and emotion. Yeah. Shut the F up. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's really beautiful you said. And one of the great

spiritual lessons, dare I say it, of the millennia. I have no problem with the word spiritual as long as God's not involved. So use it at will. Like, no problem. I got no problem with it. I say in my book that the thing I usually say to an atheist is I don't believe in the God that you don't believe in. So that's kind of how I would put it.

But recently in these fires out in Ventura County, I almost lost my house. two of my neighbors above the hill and below the hill lost theirs. We lost two rooms, a lot of smoke damage. It's a pain in the ass. But all I can go to is gratitude. I mean, just like, holy fuck, I almost lost my house. Holy fuck, I almost lost my life. Does gratitude, is that a tool that you go to?

And if so, how does that work? How does that manifest itself? I mean, I use it all the time, right? I mean, it's the final maturity is to appreciate the fact that you're alive and capable of love and capable of self-reflection and inquiry and thought. Yeah.

But like I said, you know, life doesn't come into focus until death comes into focus. And that, you know, hopefully that doesn't happen for a good long time because it's quite wonderful to be 25 or 30 and not thinking about life or death with any kind of focus.

It just, just experiencing it as it comes and not really being aware of the fact it's all going to end one day. Like, I mean, eventually you will have to encounter that. So maybe we can have a decade or two in the early in our lives where we're not thinking about it. Lovely, right? But eventually, eventually you got to focus on it because that is the universe we live in. I tell a story in my book about a woman who was in Canada who was woken up, she lived alone,

and she was woken up by this explosion, the sound of an explosion. And she turned on the light and next, right next to her head on the pillow was a meteor, a meteorite the size of a man's fist, as she described it, the size of a man's fist. Three inches to the left, it would have knocked her brains out, right? That's the universe we live in. And so what she did what she did? And it hurtled hundreds of millions of miles, probably from like 11 billion years ago and came through our atmosphere and landed on her pillow in Saskatchewan next to her head. That's right, inches away, where her husband's head would have been if she was married, right? So, and so she got up, She made some tea and she sat in an armchair and looked at it for the rest of the night until dawn came.

That's the universe we live in. And then she sold it on eBay and is now living in Sarasota, Florida. Retired the same part. Yeah, right. That's amazing. I love the story that you tell of almost dying in Afghanistan. I know there were, you know, dozens of times that that almost happened. but the story you tell it's so beautiful.

I'm going to tell your story for you. Okay. You're sitting there on a quiet afternoon in a bunker embankment, and then all of a sudden you feel this like, poof of sand blowing across your face. Hitting the side of my face. Hitting the side of your face.

And like, that's weird. Where did the sand come from? Half a second later, it's a, bullet because the sound of the bullet travels behind the bullet itself and a bullet had embedded itself inches from your head. Yeah, that's right, right? And the equivalent of the meteor story, except the bullet had only traveled 500 meters instead of like 5 million. 500 meters. You think about the trajectory of that bullet that caused it to go here and not here. Miss me by

an inch or two, yeah. But you have come face to face with death. I know you're your writing, documentary producing partner Tim Hetherington passed away, died in Libya, and you know lots of young folks that met their death in combat zones. How do you rectify these two experiences? You experienced death firsthand in a way that very, very few people have other than the most die-hard soldiers. And then you have this. What, what, has anything shifted? What, and what was your experience of, of seeing mortality and, and dealing with, with, with, with, with

the, with the suffering and the grieving and mourning that would happen in these divisions that you were embedded with as a journalist? Um, and then going through this. Is there, is there some connective tissue between just like death on a, on a meta level? So for me personally, when I would go to war zones, which I, no longer do, obviously. I was very conscious I was taking a calculated risk for a calculated reward, professional reward, right? And if I, and if it scared me too much, I would, I could just stop taking those risks and stay home, right? What was scary about almost dying for medical

reasons is, you know, it's like owing the mafia money, right? It's like, they will find you. There's nowhere remote enough for them to not track you down and reclaim their $20,000 or whatever you And that's what it felt like about death. Like, oh, you're not going to avoid the issue by not going to wars anymore, you idiot. Right. It will track you down and find you. It's going to track everybody down. And that's what was so much scarier about this compared to the combat, which, you know, when the risks seemed intolerable, I just stopped going to war zone.

After Tim was killed, I was like, no, I'm out. I'm done. I'm tired of rolling the dice. And, you know, I rolled the dice a few times. I got back for those for those rounds of those risks that I took I got back what I was looking for and I personally professionally I'm good I'm leaving the poker table I'm good I don't need to I don't need to get you know cleaned out in the next hand thank you and and then it turns out you cannot leave the poker table you're stuck at the poker table until in the house always wins right like always wins and that that's

what was so chilling about the experience you know at age 58 in my own in my own property on a beautiful June day. That's what was so terrifying about it. Did you learn anything about death being embedded with those platoons in Afghanistan? The more stressful, the more dangerous, the more terrifying the situation, the closer we feel to other people, because we need them and they need us. And that's how the human race has survived for 200,000 years, survived and flourished, right? And we die alone in the wilderness almost immediately, unless someone else comes and saves us. but in groups we survive and we thrive and obviously have maybe too well. And so what I learned in combat with American soldiers was the incredible power of that bond

to get people to put aside, to not even really experience their fears, their terrors, their selfishness, their whatever, and function like a good social primate for, largely for the benefit of the group. And if everyone does that, everyone has a higher chance of surviving and that's how all this works. what I found out about death in some ways was in other wars that America's not involved in. You know, I was in the Civil Wars in West Africa, Sierra Leone and Liberia. I was in Cossable, a horrible bloodbath and saw terrible things, vast graves, and, I mean, just unspeakable things. And, you know, one of the things emotionally that has stayed with me from that, I mean, almost getting killed is a fairly easy trauma to recover from, I ain't killed in combat.

It's like it's happened to me a few times. I recover from it fairly easily. What's very hard to recover from is seeing the suffering of others, the deaths of others, of civilians, of children, like see, you know,

you know, the sort of proverbial pile of bodies. Like, you don't recover from that emotionally. And I actually have to be even now careful about how I talk about it because I will start to tear up and it's been 20 or 30 years. Right. And so that,

that's where I really found out about death, frankly, of the West African Civil Wars and Kosovo. Wow, that hits hard. We're so inured from death in contemporary American society. Is that the right word? Enneered two, yeah.

Yeah, enured two death? One of the things that I've noticed about life in suburban Los Angeles over the last 10 or 20 years, this is totally crazy sidebar, is when I was a kid, you had pets, and they occasionally and eventually died, and you buried them in your backyard,

and you know, you shed a tear or two, and you moved on. To me, I think that the fact that we are so inured to death, I don't know if you've noticed this, but I've noticed this among various friend groups, that when pets die, people stop their lives. in grief that we're so disconnected from the meat we eat.

And there was a story of Mark Zuckerberg killed a cow, I think, like in his backyard and dressed the meat and served it to his friends or something. And I was like, that's the first thing you've done that I fully respect because we're so disconnected. You drive up the five freeway and you go past Cowshwitz, you know, where all the cows are that are about to be butchered.

And the smell, they call it Kauschwitz. Wow. I don't know, whoever thought of that deserves a medal. But we're so disconnected from the meat that we eat. And from death itself that, you know, a family friend in Sherman Oaks and their poodle dies at age 11, and a poodle has a lifespan of 8 to 10. And for months, they can't function because their poodle died. If you get a dog, if you bring a dog into your life or a cat into your life, 10 years from now there is going to be an emotional time bomb.

You just need to know that. And when you live on a farm like both of my parents did, you absolutely know that animals die or they're butchered. And that kind of the line between pet and meat, you know, is a very fine line. But we're so, we're so separated from death in our real lives. You've, you've experienced it on the front line of wars. you've experienced it personally. Do you have any thoughts on, you know, death and contemporary America?

Well, yeah, and I think the word you want isn't in your two, which really means you've been so overexposed to it, that, you know, and no longer... That's not the right word. I knew it was not the right word. No, I think just sheltered from. Sheltered from, protected from...

Yeah, I mean, our society protects us from everything, every process that makes it clear that we're an animal. Like birth happens behind closed doors, defecation, sex, death, everything. right and and eating which of course is what animals do we've we've reduced and I will say reduced to this like absurdly elegant like ritual uh and it's been ritualized in these sort of silly cooking shows and all that stuff it's like no no no you're feeding right you're feeding

because mammals need food and then you will then digest and poop out and et cetera but we just sort of we don't want to know our animalness and so we just put it all behind the curtain That makes me think there could be a good reality show of just foodies and chefs taking shits. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that's the other side of the coin that no one wants to talk about, right? And so, you know, I think in that emotional vacuum, when a pet dying is probably one of the few instances when a young American, certainly of a certain social class, gets to experience the dying process. because, you know, 100 years ago, people's siblings died all the time, right? I mean, most people had a sibling that had died. Yeah.

And they would have watched that happen of yellow fever or whatever. You had a 50% child mortality, right. Right, right. So in the vac-and, you know, thank God children aren't dying, right? But in this sort of emotional vacuum, the death that we encounter, and this was true for me, right? I mean, you know, at age 14 or whatever my dog died, I was obliterated by it. I'd love that dog. But I was probably obliterated because I didn't have a...

a younger brother who died and this and the that who had died and I had never seen my mother give birth and everything else, right? Like all those natural processes had not happened in my experience. So my dog dying was the most important biological experience of my young life. And it would divide comprehension. And that's silly. I mean, it's just a, it's not silly. It's, it's, it, it shows the level of safety and protection and privilege that we have. But isn't there a certain obligation on the parents' part? Like, hey, we're going to adopt this poodle. Hey, this is a great opportunity to learn about death.

Hey, Sally, let's sit down and talk about the fact that at some point this animal may die. And that's part of the, let's watch some nature documentaries and see how cheetahs kill, you know, little baby zebras. Yeah. And also, I feel like American society right now, particularly with social media. is very performative, right? And what people want to be at the focal point of other people's thinking, right?

So your pet dies and you produce a slight drama around your grief that might go on for some weeks, you're basically saying, you know, look at me, I'm important, pay attention to me, right? And so, you know, I think part of what's going on with that is, you know, everyone's sort of making these grabs for attention. And one way to do that is to amply your level of psychological distress so that elicits sympathy and concern and focus.

And I think people do that in all kinds of arenas in our society. I think sometimes vets do it. I think, you know, men and women who get broke, get their heartbroken, do it. People who have lost, you know, whatever. Like, that's just like, oh, okay, something bad happened. I will extract the maximum amount of social attention. Capital. I can from it. On social media. And so, yeah, don't stop grieving too fast because you can, you can run this. thing into the ground if you want, you know. So I think there's a certain amount of that as well. Another reason I hate smartphones.

Sebastian, thank you so much. And thank you for all of your incredible work over the years. But in my time of dying, it was a very profound book for me. And I hope that folks will go out and pick up a copy and check it out. And I love mixing it up with you a little bit here on Soul Boom. It was just a delight and a pleasure to make. you really truly thank you for coming well likewise i really enjoyed the conversation thank you so much thank you the soul boom podcast subscribe now on youtube spotify apple podcasts and wherever else

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