Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - What Happened When A Skeptical Reporter Decided To Investigate The Afterlife | Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: May 27, 2024

The surprisingly common experience of near death experiences and what science still can't explain about them.Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War and Tribe, and In My Time of Dying.  As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. In this episode we talk about:Junger’s near death experience and the impact it had on himThe conclusions he came to after investigation the possibilities of an afterlife The mysteries of quantum physics and what they might tell us about life and deathHow he believes we can all experience awe on a daily basis Related Episodes:How Thinking About Death Can Improve Your Life | Alua Arthur Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Why Having a “Cosmic Perspective” Will Help You Do Life BetterGeorge Saunders on: “Holy Befuddlement” and How to Be Less of a “Turd”Sign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/sebastian-junger/Additional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello everybody. How we doing? When I heard that Sebastian Younger, the-selling author and award-winning and intensely skeptical Combat reporter when I heard that this dude had decided to write a book about whether there's an afterlife I was like, yes, please. Let's get that guy on the show He has a wild story which you're gonna hear him tell in full

But the TLDR is he had a pancreatic aneurysm that almost killed him back in June of 2020 and as he lay dying, he says he felt his late father's presence speaking words of comfort to him. He did ultimately survive, although he did also nearly die, and the experience prompted him as a journalist and a self-described stone-cold atheist to investigate near-death experiences in order to, and these are his words, calm his soul. He's written a whole new book about it. It's called In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This comes on the heels of a whole series of huge hit books, including The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, and Freedom. This is a rangy and fascinating and sometimes very fun conversation about life, death, consciousness,

multiverses, awe, and love. We talk about what the science says about the surprisingly common experiences of people who come back after having nearly died, the bizarre and contradictory mysteries of quantum physics, and what they might be able to tell us about the universe, what happens when we die, and the possibility of a universal consciousness. And we talk about where he, Sebastian, netted out on all of this after years of investigating. Sebastian Younger, right after this. But first some BSP, as you've heard me say before, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement,

spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part is forgetting. You listen to a great podcast, you read a great book, you go to a great talk, whatever it is, and the message is electrifying. But then you get sucked back into your daily routines, your habitual patterns, and you forget. So this is the problem for which I have designed my new newsletter, which we just started a few months ago. We're just really hitting our stride. So I'd love it if you sign up.

Every week I list one quote that I'm pondering right now, and then I give you two of the top takeaways from the podcast this week. It's really for both me and for you to get these messages into our molecules. I'm just kind of mainlining the practical aspects of the episodes from the week and listing it out for you. And then I also list three cultural recommendations, books, movies, TV shows that I'm into right now. You can sign up. It's free.

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And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we're exploring the life of Cleopatra. An iconic life full of romances, sieges and tragedy. But who was the real Cleopatra? It feels like her story has been told by others with their own agenda for centuries. But her legacy is enduring and so we're going to dive into how her story has evolved all the way up to today.

I am so excited to talk about Cleopatra Peter. Love Cleopatra. She is an icon. She's the most famous woman in antiquity. It's got to be up there with the most famous woman of all time. But I think there's a huge gap between how familiar people are with the idea of her compared to what they actually know about her life and character. So for Pyramids, Cleopatra and Cleopatra's Nose. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts

or you can binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Sebastian Younger, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. This new book is fascinating and I think you know where I'm going to start. I'd love to get you to tell your story of almost dying. And let me just say at the jump, I'm glad you didn't.

Thank you. Almost everyone else is as well. I appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I had been a war reporter for a long time, years, decades in my life, and had come very close to dying a couple of times that I know of for sure. And I finally got out of that business and had a family. And when I almost died for medical reasons a few years ago, I had two young children. I came to fatherhood late.

My entire life was a domestic one and a precious one to me. And I'm in good health. So I never thought about my health because I've been an athlete my whole life. One day in mid-senates while talking to my wife in a cabin in the woods that we own in Massachusetts, I felt this pain shoot through my abdomen and it was sort of unlike anything I'd ever experienced. And I said, wow, that's strange. I've never felt anything like this. And I stood up to try to walk it off. I thought it was a cramp or something and I couldn't stand up. And I didn't know it, but my blood pressure was plummeting. I had a ruptured aneurysm. I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my abdomen and that's a ballooning in a weak spot in an artery.

It was a structural problem. It wasn't like clogged arteries or something. It was a completely structural problem. It was a freak thing. It was extremely rare. It's a killer. It's a widow-maker. I was looking at maybe a 30% chance of living. That's if you get to the hospital fast. I didn't. It took me an hour and a half. My wife had to drag me out of the woods until we got to a, we could get a cell phone signal and call the ambulance. And by the time I got to the ER, I was

conscious, but my blood pressure was 60 over 40. And I was on the way out. They barely saved me. There's so much more to tell, but there's an expression that's coming to mind from my long time meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein. And it's not going to sound impressive, but the more I've thought it over, over the years, the more it comes to mind frequently for me. And the expression is, anything can happen at any time.

Yes, that's exactly right. And the psychological reality of that is twofold. I think, on the one hand, it could make you sort of hyper appreciative of every moment because you're only here sort of, if you're religious by the grace of God or by random circumstance. I mean, every moment of existence is a totally extraordinary thing. Or it can make you unbelievably paranoid.

Like okay, I'm alive at this moment, but I might be dead by dinner for reasons I couldn't possibly predict. And I felt like I didn't know that this wouldn't happen to me again. And so instead of being sort of shown the glory of existence for a while, I just became very paranoid and I felt like I was carrying around a live hand grenade and then maybe another aneurysm could form that would kill me. And had I been in a traffic jam or on an airplane or on a camping trip, I would have died. I got to the hospital barely, barely in time and I can go through what they did to save me. It's really interesting.

But as a sort of existential matter as a human being, it made me so aware of how lucky we all are to have even a moment of this, that it almost incapacitated me. I eventually climbed out of that, but it took a while. Well, let's go back to the trauma bay for a second, where they're treating you. I think you described yourself up until that moment and maybe still as an atheist, but you had an experience that is hard to explain, although you're going to try to explain it now, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'm a stone cold atheist, right?

I mean, there is no religion in me and at all My father was a physicist and not only am I an atheist, but I'm not certain mystical either, right? I don't hate there's no woo-woo in me. I would say I'm Antimistic. I mean, I just like eschew all that stuff and still do by the way, but sometimes things challenge our our beliefs and I started to feel better during the ambulance ride. I had no idea I was dying, but apparently I was going into something called compensatory shock. So I was losing a unit of blood, a pint of blood

into my own abdomen every 10 or 15 minutes. Right? Like I was gushing blood. It was as if I'd been stabbed in the abdomen, except that instead of blood leaving my body onto the floor, it stayed in my abdomen. So your body goes into compensatory shock to try to slow down the catastrophe. And it just clamps off access to your limbs, to your digestive system. Everything sort of stops and it keeps the blood pooled where it's needed most.

But your body can only do that for so long. And my body failed, compensatory shock ended as soon as we got to the ER. And suddenly I went off a cliff and I remember it happening. And I had no idea I was dying, but I knew something very, very bad was happening. And the doctors were all seemed very concerned. I was like, why is everyone so, I just have belly pain, like why is everyone so worried about me right now? I didn't understand it. And the doctor told me, he said, we need to put a large gauge needle straight into your jugular. And I was like, oh, that sounds like fun. Like why, why do you need to do that? And he said, in case there's an emergency. And he said, no, this is the emergency right now.

Do I have permission? I was like, yeah, okay. So we started working on my, on my neck to get a large gauge needle into your jug, into my jugular. And while he was doing that, my, my blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is the last step before you're dead. I mean, I was right at, right at the end and I'm

lying in the trauma bay. And as he's working on me to get the needle in, to transfuse me, this black pit opens up underneath me. And again, I don't know I'm dying, but I feel myself getting pulled into this pit and I start to panic because I know if you go into the infinitely deep dark pit you're not coming out, right? Just some animal, some sort of animal knowledge, like don't go in there because you are not coming out if you do. And I started to panic and as I started to panic, my dead father appeared above me and above me and slightly to my left. And basically he was like, don't fight it.

It's okay. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. He wasn't speaking exactly. He was communicating and he wasn't like he was hanging up there suspended by theatrical wires. He was there in some sort of energy essence. I mean, very, very hard to explain in coherent

terms, but his presence was there and he was communicating with me. It's okay. Don't fight it. I'll take care of you. I was horrified. I was like, go with you, you're dead. I'm not going with you. I'm alive. I'm staying here. We got nothing to talk about, Dad. And I love my father, right? I'm like, we got nothing. I'm not going with you. I was absolutely horrified. And I said to the doctor,

because I'm still conscious at this point, I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. I'm leaving right now. I'm going. And then my memory is spotty after that, but basically they got the needle in and they started transfusing me and I needed 10 units of blood, it's a huge amount. That's basically all the blood in the human body over the next 12 hours or so.

I needed a full 10 units. Then they rushed me into the interventional radiology suite where they fix the kinds of things that I have. The last ditch if they can't find the bleed, the ruptured artery is they open you up and they just start digging around in your abdomen trying to find the bleeding artery. At that point your odds of surviving are pretty poor. What they prefer to do of surviving are pretty poor. What they prefer to do is go in by catheter and a catheter is a flexible rubber or wire line that they can insert into your vein system into an artery or a vein and they can go anywhere in your body and they go through your groin and that's where they enter

and then they go they loop all the way up and he would they have a little camera on it and they have all they can put all these tools at the end of the catheter, and they were looking for the rupture. They couldn't find it and they finally found it in the artery that feeds the pancreas. Then they found it, but they couldn't get the catheter all the way there. What they wanted to do was embolize the bleed, which means that they would leave something that looks like a pipe cleaner and they leave it in the artery and

it collects blood and the blood clots and that plugs the artery and then scar tissue forms around the clot and then it's plugged forever and you're good. You've stopped bleeding. They were trying to do that and it took them about six hours. I'm in and out of consciousness. I'm not sedated because my vital signs were too low to be put under. I started having these occasionally really terrifying visions. I mean, again, I didn't know I was dying until finally the nurse said, Mr. Younger, try to keep your eyes open. She was holding my hand. She said, try to keep your eyes open. And I said, why do you want me to keep my eyes open? And she said, so we know you're still with us. I was like, oh, is it that kind of situation? I had no idea.

And I was in incredible pain when blood comes into contact with your organs. It's called an insult to your organs, particularly your kidneys. And it's extremely painful. So I was in, you know, sort of like kidney stone level agony and they couldn't really help me much. And, and then in the middle of all this, you know, like around midnight, you know,

they kept trying and trying to get the catheter to the bleed to embolize it and save me. And at one point I saw one of the doctors sort of look up and shrug basically like, well, we've tried everything. It's not working. There's nothing more we can do. And I caught him. I caught that look between the doctors. And I just thought, oh my God, like, are you kidding? You guys don't have this? Like what's happening right now? And I realized at that moment, I may not make it. I was so messed up medically that that was a sort of abstract.

It was terrifying, but it was also kind of abstract. But for the first time I realized what the stakes were and the stakes were my life. And then I might not make it home to my family. And then the other doctor said, I know, why don't we try going through his left wrist instead of his groin through his left wrist. Maybe that will allow another access angle, allow access to this spot.

And the first doctor said, I like the way you think, and then that's what they did. And the next thing, the final thing they would have tried is an emergency laparotomy and the next thing, the final thing they would have tried is an emergency laparotomy and the, in the surgery bay, they would have opened me up and just started searching for the bleed as fast as possible to embolize it before I bled out. And, you know, it was sort of a race to the finish line at that point. And, um, you know, the prognosis, the odds, once they open you up, the odds are,

as I said, are pretty poor and I very well might not have made it. open you up, the odds are, as I said, are pretty poor and I very well might not have made it. So this is several hours of unbelievable pain. You said, you used the word agony, not sedated, going in and out of consciousness. Am I, am I right? Am I describing this correctly? Yeah.

Yeah. Apparently they, they, they were able to give me a little bit of fentanyl, but not enough. Cause I was, I was in agony. I kept telling the doctors, my back hurts so much and doctors, they just ignore you. They got other things to do.

They completely ignore you. I couldn't believe they were ignoring me because I was in so much pain. How did they hold you still? Well, I was holding myself still. I was on the table. It was on the, I was, you know, I was on the, the table, you know, it was a deep pain, like kidney stones, but it wasn't, I wasn't thrashing around, you know, and I mean, I

don't know how that worked. And the problem with that, like with kidney stones, the problem with that pain is I didn't know how long it would last. If someone said you're going to be in incredible pain for an hour, you just got to grit your teeth, you're like, we could all make it an hour because we know, oh, there's the

finish line. Right. But if someone says you're going to be in a lot of pain for an indefinite amount of time, and we'll just let you know when it ends, that will drive you and that will drive you mad. Right. Let me go back to your dad for a second. There's so much great writing in the book.

And I saw, I'll probably make a habit of what I'm about to do, which is reading you back to you and then getting you to talk about it a little bit. Um, here's your quote. He appeared when I needed him most. what I'm about to do, which is reading you back to you and then getting you to talk about it a little bit. Here's your quote. He appeared when I needed him most. It was quite possibly his greatest act of love toward me. He was a distracted and distant father,

a germaphobe who hesitated to pick up his own children and could disappear into his thoughts for hours at a time. And yet here he was. It's okay, you don't have to fight it. I'll take care of you. You can come with me. Can you just riff on that for a little bit? Yeah.

So my father, I, you know, I realized later. He was probably, you know, I think he probably had spectrum disorder. He was a physicist and a lot of, a lot of, you know, a lot of physicists are, are God bless them, but they're sort of challenged in the human realm in a way that I think is sort of understood to be spectrum disorder now. And my father was definitely that way. And he just had a very hard time understanding and emotionally connecting to human beings, including his children. And he was a lovely man. He was brilliant. And I learned a lot from him. I love him very, very much. but he was hard to connect to. You know, I just realized later, like, after this happened, he showed up for me, you know, and it wasn't clear that he was showing up for a lot of my childhood. I mean, he was there

physically, but his mind was out there as many physicists and mathematicians as they are. And there he was. Like, when I really, really needed him, he was above me. And you know, it's still for me an open question. Is this just a hallucination? Like it's just these neurochemicals kicking in, producing a comforting vision. Is there something real here going on that we just don't understand how death works?

And you know, like that's what one of the inquiries in the book and obviously I don't, none of us have the answer to that. But I just will say on a personal level that that experience with him, after I got through the trauma of the whole thing, I realized, wow, he came. I needed him and he came and he came to take care of me. it was an extremely, extremely powerful thing for me. And in some ways saved the whole experience from being just pure trauma.

So you mentioned, you kind of brought me to where I was gonna go next. I think for a quote unquote normal person, a civilian, and I use that term facetiously, this would have just been a thing that happened, but you're a journalist. And so it set you off on this exploration of, you know, how do I explain as an atheist and a journalist what I experienced beyond the pure medical

explanation of why you got sick in the first place. And so I'm just curious, what what did you learn about what science has to say, or not say about these experiences? Yeah, so my journey into that weird realm began the next day in the ICU. So I woke up in the ICU in the morning and there was a nurse there, middle-aged woman, pretty heavy Boston accent. This happened on Cape Cod at the hospital in Hyannis and she said, oh, good morning, Mr. Younger.

You almost died last night. Congratulations. You're still alive. You made it. No one can believe. No one can believe you made it. And you know, indeed the stats for what I had are like pretty grim.

So, so I didn't know that of course. And, but she's, I was absolutely shocked that I'd almost died. I had or like pretty grim. So I didn't know that, of course. But I was absolutely shocked that I'd almost died. I had no idea. And then I remembered my father and it all came back to me. And she walked out of the room and I sat there thinking about, just in shock that I'd almost died. And I have these two young children and I was just sort of like, oh my god, I almost left them fatherless. I mean, I was just wrecked by this information. And my father was, and I saw my father, I couldn't believe it. And then this nurse came back about an hour later and said, Mr. Younger, how are you doing? Sebastian, how are you doing? And I lied, I was doing terribly. I mean, my body, this is, you know, this, this is very, very hard on your body,

what I went through and I was throwing up blood and I was a mess. And I lied. I said, well, I'm okay. But what you told me was really terrifying. Like I had no idea I almost died. And she said, instead of thinking about it as something scary, try thinking about it as something sacred. And then she walked out of the room again. So having nothing else to do, I sat there with tubes coming out of me thinking about her wisdom. And you know, what I came to was this, that I'd been allowed to go to the very edge of existence. I've been allowed to go to the edge and look over the edge at what's waiting for all of us. But instead of having to having to go, like instead of having to leave life, leave this planet, I was allowed to come back. So what did I learn? I've been a frontline reporter for a long time. I go to these places

of death and annihilation and desolation. Then I come back and I write about what I learned, what people might need to know about this place. So this was just another version of a trip to the front line, the ultimate front line. So I came back and I recovered quickly, I'm otherwise pretty healthy and so I was out of the ICU in five days and home in a week and boom, suddenly I'm back at home as if nothing had happened. And the thing about what I had is that if you survive, it's not like a heart attack where there are these issues to deal with later that produce the problem. If you have a ruptured aneurysm and you survive,

there's no issues. I mean, you're just like, you're good. You're as good as if it had never happened. So I got home and I started to, I got very, very paranoid that maybe I, this, I got very, very paranoid that maybe I, this is gonna sound crazy, but I started to worry that I actually didn't make it, that I was a ghost. And I was looking at my family

and that I actually wasn't there and that I didn't know I was dead. And I started to get into this crazy circular thing. Like, how do you know that you're not dead? Like, and you know, you can say to your wife, which I did, honey, just tell me I'm really here. Like just tell me that I didn't die, that I'm not, that I'm here. And of course, of course she said, honey, you're here.

You're fine. Like you're fine. We're all good. But in my mind, I'm like, that's exactly what a hallucination would say in a situation like that. Right? And you can drive yourself crazy, which I promptly did. And so my sort of investigation into all this began not so much as a journalistic enterprise, but as an attempt to sort of calm my soul, calm my mind, because I got into a very, very strange, crazy place.

And I thought if I read about this, maybe it'll sort of comfort and reassure me. Information is reassuring, right? So information is always helpful. So it turned out that what happened to me is very, very common. And, you know, 20, 25% of people that have a heart attack and die and are brought back or survive or almost die. Something like a quarter of them have visions very much like what I had often. And they often see the debt and they're often, this didn't happen to me because I actually

never medically died. My heart never stopped. But often when someone's heart stops, their memory of that is that they're actually on the ceiling looking down at the doctors trying to save this person who they don't even realize is them. And they're like, oh my god, that's me. I'm not up here, that's me. And so the subjective experience of dying in retrospect is extremely confusing. And the point of view of the dead person does not stay within the body. It's very mysterious, right? So as I'm doing my

research and I'm sort of rooting for the afterlife, right? Because at this point I'm terrified and I'm like, oh, maybe, and keep in mind, I'm an atheist, right? So I don't have God to turn to. And, you know, people ask me later, like, well, after your experience, did you, now do you believe in God? You're right. And I'm like, look, I didn't see God. I saw my dad. Like, I mean, it's possible that there's some kind of after existence and there's still no God, right? It's also possible that there's a God, but God created completely biological beings, us, and when we died, that's it. And there's no nothing afterwards. Both are possible. And a quote, afterlife and God

are not one and the same thing and they don't require each other. So at any rate, I'm redoing my research and I can feel myself rooting for an afterlife. And I'm like, oh yeah, I read some case where someone was dying. And then very often, and my mother did this, my father did this as well. It's very, very common in hospice that the dying will see the dead in their room. And that hours before they die, they will be talking to dead people who are there to receive that. No one else can see these people. It's very, very common. In several cases, the dying person is talking to someone who died very recently and they don't know that. In other words, they're talking to someone who they didn't know had just died. How do they know that? So there's some seriously mysterious questions

about how the hell does this all work? What happens on the threshold of death exactly that seems to give the dying a universal knowledge. So anyway, I'm reading this stuff and I'm starting to be comforted by the idea of an afterlife. Then you read the counterpoints by the rational people, by the doctors, by the scientists. And they're like, look, we can explain all of this

through neurochemistry, through epileptic seizures and the temporal lobe. They have all of these medical explanations for all the near death phenomena. And they say, and this is worth taking seriously and considering because it's tested and true. Virtually all of the near death experiences that people experience can be reproduced in other ways through low blood oxygen, epilepsy, endogenous DMT

and ketamine in the body, all these things. And so here's the body, all these things. And so here's the argument. My father was a supreme rationalist. My mother was sort of a mystic. She was an artist. She loved to believe in energies and past lives and all that other stuff. And then there's my dad. It was a physicist. And he'd be like, come on, Ellen was my mother's name. He's like, come on, that's ridiculous. That makes no sense. So what I was seeing in the literature was an argument that I heard played out my entire childhood between my rationalist father and my romantic and mystical mother.

Now I'm reading this argument that, frankly, society has been having for hundreds, thousands of years. Basically, the conclusion I came to was that a lot of this, everything about what I, all these visions that people have can be explained through neurochemistry, can be explained rationally, except for one thing. And it's basically this,

if you give a room full of people LSD, you know that they will all have hallucinations. 100% of them will have hallucinations because that's what LSD does in the human brain. But they will not all have the same hallucination, right? They will not all see a waterfall or whatever, right? When people die, the hallucination that they have, not every time, but an enormous fraction of the time, is that they see the dead. The dead come for them. Even people that they don't know are dead, right? And we know this from survivor's accounts. And that one fact, like why is it that only the dying see the dead? The doctors, the families, the relatives,

no one else sees like Aunt Maude up in the ceiling. When my mother died, as she was dying, she looked up and she scowled and she said, what's he doing here? She was furious about it and she scowled and she said, what's he doing here? She was furious about it and she had an estranged brother named George. And I just took a guess. I said, mom, that's uncle George and he's come a very, very long way to see you and you have to be nice to him. And she scowled and she said, we'll see about that. So it's not even, one of the theories is that the dying sort of hallucinate the dead as a way to self comfort, self soothe because they know they're dying. But that doesn't quite work either,

right? Because a lot of people who are dying don't know they're dying, right? And a lot of people see the dead like me and are not very happy to see the dead. It's not a comforting vision. It's horrifying. So that opens up, the book is divided into two sections, what and if. The what part is what happened to me. The if part is what if there were something that we don't understand that happens after we die that doesn't conform to our understanding of reality of the atomic world, of the macroscopic world. What if there's some reality we don't understand? And I liken it to this. I say we might have the same understanding of reality that a dog has of a television screen. And that's where I go into the realm of my father. He was a physicist. And there are some ideas, some conversations about a post-death reality that are in the realm of quantum physics, which is an infinitely mysterious realm that's not understood by

scientists. It's understood well enough to know that there is a completely contradictory mystery going on at the quantum level. It totally contradicts what we understand about the macroscopic level that we live in. I finished the book with that may be where the answers lie about these post-death experiences that we just don't understand. Coming up, Sebastian Younger talks about the fundamental mysteries of quantum physics that even troubled Albert Einstein. The question of whether consciousness is part of the physical makeup of the universe, you know, like gravity and the

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I wouldn't say I have an ego problem, but I'm extremely competitive. All of the competitors are used to being the best and the brightest, and they're all vying for a huge cash prize. This will probably be the most intense that you've ever gone through in your life. I remember that feeling because I was one of them.

I lost. But now I'm coming back as a judge and also a kind of teen girl anthropologist. Because if you want to understand what it's like to be a young woman in America today, the competition's not a bad place to start. Hopefully no one will die on stage tonight. From Pineapple Street Studios and Wondry, this is The Competition. Follow The Competition on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to the competition early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Before we get back to the show, a quick reminder in honor of World Meditation Week, we're offering 40% off a subscription to the 10% happier app. Head over to 10% dot com slash 40. That's 10% spelled out dot com slash four zero to get started. In what way would the quantum realm hold the answers to these mysteries?

Well, there's, I mean, I'm gonna try to explain this briefly and simply because it is quantum physics and no one lasts very long in a conversation about quantum physics. So there are, as I understand it, there are a couple of fundamental mysteries, contradictions in the quantum world that thoroughly spooked people like Schroeninger and Einstein who sort of discovered them and didn't understand them.

And one is known as the double slit experiment. So if you shoot photons, which are subatomic particles, if you shoot photons at a pair of slits, if you don't observe the photon while it's heading towards the slits, it will pass through both at the same time, and we know that because of the signature on the strike plate on the other side. So one particle will go through two slits at the same time. In the macroscopic world, you cannot walk through two doorways at the same time. We all know that, right? At the quantum level, a particle can. It has been described as a statistical smear where it's all things. It's all possible outcomes until it's observed by a conscious entity, humans, at which point it has to pick a slit and it can only go

through one. And that's the sort of mystery of the double slit experiment. And then it gets weirder because they found that particles can be what are called entangled. And that means that entangled particles can be separated by a foot, by a mile, or by the entire universe and they act simultaneously in identical ways. And if you subject one entangled particle to a force, the other one reacts simultaneously, which means that some kind of quantum information is traveling faster than the speed of light. The speed of light is fast, but it's not instantaneous. It makes no sense at all. And then finally, they've done something called delayed-choice quantum erasure, where

they take entangled particles and they send one through a double slit while watching it, and it has to pick one and another through a double slit and not watching it, and then it picks both slits. But because they're entangled, they have to do the same thing. And what happens with the results is that somehow time goes backwards as it were. And the results are rectified to be identical in a way that is not understandable by humans and they don't know how this works or why it works. So that is my civilian attempt to explain quantum physics. I'm sure I

absolutely slaughtered it if any physicists are listening. But that's the sort of essence of this mystery. And so what scientists have done with this information is present a theory where consciousness becomes part of the physical manifestation of the universe. What they know is that when you observe something, the quantum world instead of being a statistical smear of all possibilities, it becomes one thing. And that it's possible that when consciousness arose in the universe, it might have been us, it might have not been us, who knows? But when consciousness arose in the universe, it forced the universe to become one thing instead of all things. And that poses the question of is consciousness a part of the physical manifestation of the

universe like gravity? Without gravity, there is no universe. It doesn't cohere. It doesn't work in physical terms. It's possible that without consciousness, the same thing would happen. We would not have the universe that we have. It gets really, really out there. But there's a theory called biocentrism, where the entire universe is a consciousness. And, you know, there's no way to prove or disprove this. And so biocentrism is sort of like treated very skeptically by sort of straight ahead physicists because you can't test for it. But you know, it may be the testing for a universal consciousness requires the consciousness

testing itself and which may be a logical impossibility. So you get tangled up, it's sort of like an existential game of twister. And then finally, you can't put your arm around behind your back and you're stuck. So that's sort of where we're at. But that might provide some answers to when you die, you enter a sort of quantum level existence, which intersects with the macroscopic existence that we live in, in ways that we just don't understand. That was the best explication of quantum physics I've ever heard on this show or perhaps anywhere. And maybe it's because you have no idea what you're talking about, but it definitely landed for me in ways that previous attempts did not.

Thank you. Let me just go back to the sharp end of the stick there, which is what does all of that have to do with all these questions about what happens after we die? I might make myself an object of ridicule by saying this, but is there something like about the multiverse at work here that somehow consciousness comes into play in the universe and that forces everything to become one thing. Therefore, there may be lots of one things with different consciousnesses and those are realms of existence where other versions of

us are living and perhaps dead people too. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, this is in the realm of like you can't test for it. So it doesn't mean anything, but there's no reason not to discuss it. So yeah, the multiverse as I understand it is that, I mean, the one thing there's plenty of in the universe is space-time, and it's basically unbounded. So you could have an almost infinite number of universes that include

every single possibility at the quantum and atomic level, macroscopic level, including you did or didn't order the chicken sandwich yesterday. I mean, there's no space problem. I mean, there's no sort of like storage problem in space, right? It's an infinity. So you're not going to run out of space for all of these permutations of reality to happen. And so yes, it does have something to do with the multiverse.

The way I understand it, it's very tricky talking to physicists about physics because they're explaining it to you in physicist terms, which as an ordinary human, you're not going to understand. And what I had to do, the reason that our conversation might be a little easier on both of us, is that I'm not a physicist and I tried to understand these concepts in sort of quote, civilian terms. I tracked down an old colleague of my father's, again, trying to find sort of solace and clarity in all this. I told him, I said, I had two of these guys actually, I had lunch with them.

And I explained to them what happened. And I said, what are the odds of my father just appearing above me? I just figured that that was an unanswerable question. I was trying to be like, I don't know, a little funny maybe. I was like, what are the odds of dad appearing like above me in the trauma bay? And the thing about physicists is they're completely literal.

One of them looked up at the corner, he was like, what are the odds? He actually gave me a number. I was like, what? 10 to the minus 60? How did you get that number? He said, well, it's the same as the odds of all the oxygen molecules in the room,

randomly collecting in a one little corner of the room and asphyxiating us. There's some odds of that happening. They're just incredibly small. And those are the odds of your dad appearing. So I was like, okay, so you guys really, it's just, it's all numbers, huh? It's just, is that the world is just all numbers. And it was sort of an extraordinary like glimpse into the, the mind of, of, of a mathematician or of a physicist. And so they're, they're looking at the universe like this and they, you know, basically in an infinity of times, all things happen because it's infinity. And all things inevitably might include the universe coming into existence. You know, it may just be that simple. Like you give

me an infinity of time, eventually every single thing will happen including one unimaginably huge thing which is the universe coming into existence going from a Planck length, which is the smallest subatomic distance possible, going from a Planck length to a universe hundreds, thousands, millions of light years wide in an amount of time too small to measure. That's what happened when the universe was created. And it may simply be a function of an infinity of time, allowing for every single possible thing eventually will occur. So it seems like the punchline,

the conclusion you landed on is that it is unlikely there's an afterlife, but it's unlikely there's a universe in the first place. So who the fuck knows? Yeah, exactly. Like, I mean, you just sort of think about what are we doing here? My father hovering above me is the least of it. The universe existing is inconceivably unlikely.

And I don't have the numbers in my head. They're in my book and my memory is not that good, but they are the chance of the universe existing as it does is there's like I think 30 or 40 values in physics that have to be exactly what they are, you know, the attractive force between an atom and electron and the force of gravity and all these are sort of arcane things have to be exactly the values they are to allow for this universe to exist. And that those odds are going from memory. They're the odds of finding one grain of sand, the one grain of sand you're looking for in

all the grains of sand on earth, the first time, it's those odds except millions and millions of times less likely than that. That's what the odds are of you, me, and this entire thing existing at all. In that context, my father appearing above me in a form that the human brain doesn't or can't understand after he died, it's conceivable because the universe is almost inconceivable. It pales in comparison to any of this. Will that comfort people on their deathbed?

Probably not. But it did make me, I'll say this and I remain an atheist, but it did make me think that, in my research, a lot of these physicists believed in a sort of universal consciousness. They believed in a transition at death that actually was strangely similar to the kind of visions found in religious enlightenment, sometimes in dreams, in the shamanic experience. There's a sort of similarity in all these transcendent experiences. And they are sort of echoed by some of the opinions of these

physicists like Schrodinger, for example. And so the comfort it sort of gave me was that it's possible that when we die die instead of it being a Ending of something over of our individuality It's an infinite expansion of our individuality. In other words, we are joining something more than we're leaving something and that idea Total conjecture no way to prove it or even test for it obviously no way to prove it or even test for it, obviously. But it was something that some extremely smart people who were themselves the pioneers of quantum physics eventually came to as a conclusion about reality and the universe.

If that's comfort for you, like, I'm glad of it. This is as close as I can get myself to a reassuring vision of what happens. I have not thought about this deeply. So what I'm about to say could be really, you know, it almost guaranteed to be cultish and awkward and, and, and gainly and embarrassing. Um, but on the level of our atoms, we are definitely inextricably a part of the universe and we will return to dust and ashes, etc. And on the level of our consciousness, I mean, who knows, but consciousness is nature too.

And so we are going to return to something greater. We are actually right now part of something greater. Whether there's another realm where my dead grandfather lives, I have no idea, but interconnection seems non-negotiable. Well, here's the thing about consciousness and that itself is a very hard thing to arrive at a firm conclusion about. It's hard to even define what consciousness is. But I mean, the people who study consciousness argue endlessly about what actually it is. One definition is the ability to imagine yourself in the future. That's one of many definitions.

So our understanding of consciousness is that it's a product of the brain, which is a physical, a biological reality. And if you destroy the brain, you destroy consciousness, presumably. The problem though, is that that consciousness, right, that's a product of the biological brain and our vision and our senses. When this brain observes quantum phenomena, it changes them simply by knowing what's happening. It creates, the brain creates the physical world that it inhabits. It gets very, very circular because

the brain is made out of physical stuff. It's made out of cells. But the physical reality seen at the quantum level seems to be created by consciousness observing it. So consciousness is creating the physical reality that then becomes the stuff that the brain is made out of that is observing and creating the physical reality. So how many times do you want to go around that circle? So we don't know does reality come from consciousness or does consciousness spring from physical

reality? It's sort of both and that's where the enduring mystery is. And so you're right, consciousness seems to float around apart from our physical reality, except that if you put a bullet through your head, you're provably no longer conscious. Your EEG goes to zero, flat lines, there are no detectable thoughts going on in your damaged brain. But then what do you do with the fact that consciousness is required for reality to take the form that it takes, including to create the bullet that went through your brain that destroyed your brain. You know, so we just, you know, that's what I mean by we, our understanding of reality might be as simplistic and as flawed as a dog's understanding of a television set.

reality might be as simplistic and as flawed as a dog's understanding of a television set. Like we just may have no idea or not be neurologically capable of having an idea of the larger framework around this TV set that seems to be so fascinating. I guess when I was spewing words out of my mouth hole a few minutes ago, what I was getting at wasn't necessarily the nature of reality per se, but your idea of comfort. And I find it comforting to know whether consciousness requires a brain, or whether it's non local or whatever the term of art is. It's still a natural phenomenon has to be right. And so everything I'm experiencing, every body part I think I own, it's all part of nature and it's all going back into nature when I die. And I guess what I'm getting at is you don't have to believe in anything metaphysical,

esoteric, unprovable, et cetera, et cetera, to derive some comfort from that. Yeah. Right. And I think where people get hung up or where I get hung up is, oh, do you mean there's an afterlife where I will continue to think as me for eternity and I'm going to get to see my dead friend and it's just going to be a big party with everybody, right? Like, isn't that, you know, that there's the afterlife includes a individual identity that continues on for eternity. like isn't that, you know, that there's the afterlife includes a individual identity

that continues on for eternity. That's a simplistic idea of the afterlife. And I know that's not what you're talking about, but that, I think that's where people get sort of sidetracked because they want something comforting where, okay, I'm going to die, but I keep, I get to keep going, right? Like that's not just because I shed my body doesn't mean that this is over. But when you talk about the soul, and I'm using the soul as the clumsy substitute for whatever it really is, and again, I'm not religious, but bear with me. You would really have to be talking about something that doesn't have a conscious

individual identity. You would really have to be talking about a manifestation of some kind of universal consciousness that manifests as what you perceive to be yourself as an individual. Then when you die, it goes back into the universal consciousness that all of the universe is composed of or affected by, determined by, created by. On that level, it's conceivable in physical terms, but not the, oh, great. Now I get to just go on without my body and it would be so nice to see grandma. Like that's, that's probably not what's on the menu. But isn't that, that unitive experience isn't that, and I'm not, I'm talking not

now about the I, Dan, you, Sebastian get to go on in our current conscious form in some other realm. The idea that we are woven into some universal whole, which again is not mystical, it's just obvious. We get molecular experience of that if we get the right dose of psilocybin. And many, it seems to be the core of all mystical experiences, exogenous molecules or not. And so I think it is properly understood, comforting. People come out of those experiences,

at least at first there's some terror, and then for some people, and then eventually it's deeply comforting. It is, I mean, that's one of the interesting things about it, I mean, I didn't die. My heart didn't stop. It's, and I was terrified and I was horrified that my father was there. Had my heart stopped, I might have thrown myself into his arms. Like, oh my God, it's so good to see, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't know like what I was deprived of. The part that I got was the scary part. And it might've changed had the doctors failed in their attempts and had I actually died.

So I interviewed a guy, a former forest firefighter in Montana, who was a guy in his early seventies, I think fit, obviously very fit guy. He was out hunting with his son in the mountains of Montana. And he had, suddenly he got the same thing I had, he had abdominal hemorrhage. And he's trying to get him to safety, his son dislocated his shoulder. So the two of them are very, very compromised and he had a slower bleed than I did, but they had to spend the night by campfire in the wilderness, sub-freezing temperatures. And then his son left on foot to try to get help and left the father there. And the father was lying in this field and realizing my son's going to survive, but I'm not. And he started to have these visions.

And the visions were the mountain started rippling and he could see all of these animals and the souls of animals. And he realized, oh, the animals are going to die. I'm going to die. We're all part of the same thing. We're all part of the mountains. We're part of the world, part of the universe. And it was an incredibly comforting thing. And of course he did survive and where we wouldn't know this help got to him in time and they saved his life.

But that's sort of like what would otherwise seem like a drug trip, right? Like, oh my God, we're all, you know, I was lying in a field and I became one with the animals. I mean, that just sounds like someone who's taking a hit of LSD, except that that is a very, very common vision or illusion, as you will, that people have when they're dying. And it's extremely comforting. Now, because it's comforting doesn't mean that that's what's actually going to happen to us, but it is comforting and there's nothing good about human suffering or any sort of suffering. And if people's suffering can be alleviated by

a hallucination, I'm good with that. So much the better. And the truth is it may not even be a hallucination. It may actually be a glimpse at a form of reality that we can't understand, but that we are all headed towards, who knows. Well, that leads me to my question, which is for you on a molecular level, forget what you've learned.

What do you suspect? Well, okay. I'll say this. I've learned to say, because of this, I've learned to say, I don't know. We don't know. Like I started out as an atheist thinking, come on, you died, that's it. Enjoy life while you have it. Like an eternity of consciousness kind of sounds like hell.

Like I couldn't even get through math class in high school, right? Like 50 minutes of math class, you're going to give me an eternity of consciousness, like thank you, no. So part of this sort of cynical part of me was like, all right, I'm good with it. And now because of my experience, I think, wow, I don't know. Like, I just don't know. I no longer have certainty. If I had to guess, I say, I can easily imagine a reality, a quantum reality where

consciousness is so determinative of physical reality that we as living creatures, conscious living creatures, are part of that and return to it in a way that we don't have awareness and consciousness of, but that we get subsumed back into the fabric of consciousness in the universe that determines the nature of the universe and that we rejoin that. And I have some comfort in saying that, intellectual comfort in saying that because some of the smartest people I've ever heard of, which are these physicists starting in the sort of 19-teens, 1920s who pioneered all this work, including Einstein, pioneered all this work in quantum physics and Schrodinger, that was more or less where they landed about reality.

I'll go with those guys. That's not a bad bet. But again, the individual survival, I really reject. Even on the logical level of, there's something called entropy, which is the increase in disorder in the universe. And the laws of entropy mean that all the energy that's stored in the universe from the big bang, it's a huge battery.

And eventually it runs down and it runs down to absolute zero and it will take I don't I can't remember the number but it will take many many tens of billions of years and eventually the universe will have absolutely no molecular or atomic movement at all absolutely no heat no time no nothing right that's what happens when you deprive the environment of all traces of energy and heat. And the idea that a soul could survive in a maximum entropy environment when the universe itself can't survive, like we're not going to survive anything the universe doesn't, and the universe will die, we know that for a fact.

So at the end of the day, like, our souls are, whatever souls are, are tied to the universe and that's headed off a cliff eventually. So, I don't know, is that dismal or is that comforting? I don't know. Coming up, Sebastian talks about where he nets out after all of this investigation, why he believes the flip side of terror is reverence and why he says when it comes to living his daily life, a traffic jam is better than nothing, so enjoy the traffic jam. Remember those stories and fables that would capture your imagination and you couldn't wait to see how they would unfold? And now, when you read them as an adult, you think, some of these old tales could use a

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or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Once Upon a Beat early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or Wondry Kids Plus in Apple Podcast. Once Upon a Beat. For more than two centuries, the White House has been the stage for some of the most dramatic scenes in American history. Inspired by the hit podcast American History Tellers, Wondery and William Morrow present the new book, The Hidden History of the White House. Each chapter

will bring you inside the fierce power struggles, the world-altering decisions, and shocking scandals that have shaped our nation. You'll be there when the very foundations of the White House are laid in 1792, and you'll watch as the British burn it down in 1814. Then you'll hear the intimate conversations between FDR and Winston Churchill as they make plans to defeat Nazi forces in 1941. And you'll be in the Situation Room when President Barack Obama approves the raid to bring down the most infamous terrorist in American history. Pre-order the hidden history of the White House now in hardcover or digital editions wherever you get your books. So the bet you would make is that there's some unfathomable soup of

consciousness out there that we will return to. And in this form, we're just like a ladle, one little ladle full of that soup that we're in this incarnation right now on Earth. So that bet that you're saying you would make, that doesn't comport neatly with the vision of your dad. So maybe your suspicion is that the vision of your dad was a useful hallucination? Well, yes, it could have been a useful hallucination. Although again, I didn't know I was dying and I was not at all happy to see him. But the quantum information associated with my dead father, whatever even that even means.

I mean, the idea that as you die and you transition to a non-physical consciousness, if that indeed is what happens, that there starts to be some interchange between the two at this moment of transition, I mean, conceivably, right? So I mean, I just don't think we're smart enough to actually answer a question like yours in precise terms. I should also add, and this is another very, very mysterious, the other very mysterious and troubling part of my experience. So like I said, I've been an athlete my whole life. My heart rate's 60 beats a minute.

My blood pressure is whatever. I have no reason to worry about my health and I've been that way my whole life. Never had to think about my body and in concerned terms. And about six months before this happened, I started to get this odd pain in my abdomen. Apparently when aneurysms get to a certain size, they're asymptomatic, but sometimes they can be painful. And particularly if they're near the pancreas, which is which mine was, which was super rare.

I mean, what I had is really, really rare. But I started to get this sort of pain and so it was bearable, right? So of course, because it was bearable, I ignored it. And I just thought nothing that's bearable can kill you, right? Like if you can bear it, then it's not a danger, which is completely false, right? Utterly completely false. But, you know, for six months off and on I had this just strange pain that was sort of debilitating for a few minutes at a time, then it would kind of lift. 36 hours before I almost died, I had a dream of a sort that I've never had before. I've never even heard of anyone having one. I had a dream that I was dead. And I was above my family, floating exactly like my father had floated above me two days later, 36 hours later in the trauma

bay. I was above my family and they were grieving, my two little girls and my wife, and they were grieving me. And I was like, hey, I'm here. I'm fine. I'm right here. Look, and they couldn't hear me and they couldn't see me. And I was made to understand, not through words. I can't even explain how I was made to understand this, but I was made to understand that I died, that there was no going back. This was irrevocable. And that I died out of sort of carelessness. And then I hadn't taken

my life seriously. I hadn't taken things seriously. And as a result, I died and now it was too late to go back. And I was just annihilated with remorse. I mean, I was just devastated. I like, ah, I want to go back. And I was getting pulled away from them. And I was getting sent into a huge, huge circle through the universe that I would never return from. And in this moment of incredible anguish, I woke up. And my wife and I co-sleep with our children.

And so at that point, my little girl, Aisha, was happened to be right next to me. We have a pad on the floor, we all sleep on it like we're camping or something. And I woke up next to my daughter and, and, oh, thank God, that was just a something. And I woke up next to my daughter and oh, thank God, that was just a dream. Here I am, I'm okay. And I put my arm around her and sort of touched my wife. I was like, oh, thank God. That was just, and I have no explanation for how I knew that I was

going to die. Absolutely none. But that dream became a source of paranoia because I started to think maybe I did die. Maybe my dream was actually that I did die. And this right now is a hallucination. The trip to the hospital, coming out of the ICU, everything right up until now is a hallucination, the hallucination of a dying man. And I can't tell the difference. And, you know, frankly, there's no answer to that. I mean, there's no empirical answer like, no, no, no, we can prove otherwise. Like that's actually not true. And it could have happened.

And I almost dying is very traumatic. It was way, way more traumatic than anything I've experienced in combat. Way more traumatic. And, you know, I just sort of worked my poor brain into a, into a pretzel thinking about this stuff. This is an unusual interview for this show because normally this show is intensely practical.

We do some biographical stuff and some theoretical stuff sometimes, but generally speaking, the emphasis is on the practical. And now with very little time in this remaining in this interview, I'm going to try to turn us there because you do talk about sort of what we can learn from your experience and operationalize in our daily lives. And just off the top of my head, I think some of those, some of those lessons would be, you know, gratitude, awe, which is linked to gratitude, I think, and love.

Let me read one more passage from the book back to you and then maybe you can, I'll stop talking and you can say whatever you wanna say. You're referring in this passage to a camping trip that you remember taking with your dad. I'm now much older than he was that night and I finally understand how much my father must have trusted me on that trip How much he must have loved me?

We're all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it's gotten dark The only question is whether we're with the people we love or not. There is no other thing No belief or religion or faith. There is just that just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes Someone will be there to watch over us as we head into that great soaring night. Yeah, so that's referring to something that happened when I was about 16. I went into the woods a lot when I was a kid. I went camping a lot.

My father was a European-born physicist and had never slept outside. And when I was 16, I was like, we're doing it, Dad, we're going camping. And I took off into the White Mountains in the fall in New Hampshire and we were way up and all alone. It started to get dark and he got hypothermia. He got very, very cold.

I was 16, we had no way of getting out of there. I was like, I got to make this work. So I put him in a sleeping bag and got a fire started, and got some warm soup in a woman, brought him back. But for a while, it was like I was the parent, like I was the father and he was the child. And then as he warmed up, as he sort of came back to health, he resumed being my father. And I went back to being his 16-year-old kid. But for a little while, I was looking out for him.

And then, of course, if you're a parent, you watch your children fall asleep all the time. And one of the things, I mean, they know you're there. And that's one of the reasons they can relax enough to go to sleep. Like there's this profound comfort. And then, there I was on the trauma bay doing my own version of going to sleep. And then there was my father looking out for me. And that just, this is the baton that human beings, generations of human beings hand off to each other. As we go around the track in life, he was like, I will take care of you

and you need me most and I'm gonna be taken care of. And we just keep doing that. And you know, that is salvation. Whether we are just biological beings and we end utterly and completely when we die, and it's a completely physical universe that has no transcendent meaning whatsoever, and then it's going to flare out like a Roman candle and go dead and dark in 30 billion years. Or if there's something more, something we're connected to, something completely transformative that happens. Whatever it is, the fact that we take care of each other

when we need each other most, that is what saves us psychologically and physically. It's what makes life worth living and it may frankly be the most essential component of existence. So do not miss out on it. Do not miss out on the moment. Right now, you don't get the past and you don't sure as hell don't get the future. You get right now and it's all you're ever going to get. Do not spend it on your phone. Do not spend it watching TV. Be here. Right now. That's life. What I realized having almost died, that is the only way to live that honors this extraordinary freak show that is the universe. Do you think your behavior has changed subsequently? Yeah, I'm way more, you know, whatever.

I mean, I'm totally, I don't have a, I don't have a smartphone on purpose. I have a flip phone, so that keeps me off of that damn thing. We don't own a television. I've done a lot, purpose. I have a flip phone. So that keeps me off of that damn thing. We don't own a television. I've done a lot and I never have. So we don't, we don't, um, you know, those distractions are not in our lives anyway, but it's a, you know, it's a sort of Zen practice. Like, okay, be here now.

Like what's happening right now? Maybe it sucks. Maybe like, I don't like this very much, but it's actually better than not existing at all. Here I am with my child. Like, what do you think life's for, asshole? Come on, wake up. You're getting all of it right now.

It doesn't matter if you're in a traffic jam. Traffic jam is better than nothing, so enjoy the traffic jam. You can get to that and there is some real vision and wisdom and comfort in experiencing traffic jams like that. A thousand percent. I mean, a thousand percent. I'm going to, again, in our remaining time, read back to you some of the passages I liked. And this one, I think, picks up on what you just said.

You write about how the flip side of terror is reverence. If you're not sufficiently reverent, you're not sufficiently terrified and vice versa. My appreciation for the current moment rose to such levels, and now you're speaking about the aftermath of your near death experience, rose to such levels that it could be almost paralyzing. There was virtually no activity that couldn't come grinding to a halt because I realized all over again how unlikely the whole thing was. Why wasn't everyone crying all the time over this? I thought, have you seen the trees really seen them? Or the clouds? Or the way water droplets form digital patterns on the porch screen after it rains?

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don't need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder. Just stand on a street corner and look around for a while. Yeah. I mean, exactly. I don't know what to add to that. If you can go through life even doing that once in a while, you're going to be living life in a slightly different way than you were before.

Look, when you're young, there's this rush and tumult of life and the heartaches, this and that. Of course, you get caught up in these transitory experiences. And then, you know, I think as you get older, you may slow down a bit, but really ultimately at any age, if you can just stop and engage with the kind of awe that you were allowed to exist. Like if you can just do that, it makes almost everything okay. And with the exception, I think, and of course, I don't have this by experience, thank God. But in my imagination, the only thing that I think might be impervious to that is the death of a child. Like if something happened to one of my

children, I don't think I could apply any of this. I think there'd be absolutely nothing for me. I didn't put this in the book, but in my thoughts, I'm like, having always derided the idea of heaven and all that stuff, like, oh, come on, that's so lame, da-da-da. Now that I have children, I understand where that idea comes from. Something bad happened to someone's kid and they have a desperate need to believe that that child went someplace good. And I completely get that. And I for one, I'm not going to repudiate it because I think it's just too badly needed. So. Final question for me. What about the value of contemplating our mortality? Do you have a view on that after everything you've

been experienced and now written? Of course, like our mortality is the most defining thing about us. Like if we never died, if we were eternal, our lives would have no meaning because there'd be no choices, there'd be no limitations. All things could happen eventually in an eternity of time. The whole thing becomes meaningless. The fact that we die is what makes us us and what makes us us. eternal, our lives would have no meaning because there'd be no choices, there'd be no limitations, all things could happen eventually in an eternity of time. The whole thing becomes meaningless. The fact that we die is what makes us us and what makes life sacred and important. And so if you

don't think about that once in a while, you're kind of missing out on something essential about yourself and about reality. But it can be paralyzing. I mean, I, you know, I got to the point where I was sort of paralyzed by it and, and I don't know if there's a diagnosis for that kind of psychological trouble there should be, because I really struggled for a while. And, you know, I think the trick is to find a balance where you're properly appreciative of your existence and not so mesmerized by it that

you can't function. And, you know, I think there's a lot of evolutionary history has gone into, you know, as our brains developed from chimpanzees, we, we departed from chimpanzees six million years ago. Our brains got more and more complex and we have a real understanding of ourselves as individuals, which allows us to speak, allows us to think into the future allows it makes us super adaptive as a species. The only problem is when you understand

that you're an individual, you inevitably understand that you're gonna die. And then that's this crushing weight that can destroy you psychologically. So humans have figured out this way of sort of like not thinking about it too much so that they have the benefits of individuality without having this sort of existential hammer

come down on their head. And the trick for all of us, I think, is to sort of navigate between those two poles. So you're not going through life oblivious and you're not going through life paralyzed. And I think religion is one of the things that helps people with that. I just chose not to use religion as a way to get there. Well, we're pretty much out of time. So let me ask you the two questions I habitually pose to people at this juncture. One is, is there somewhere you wanted to go in this interview

that we didn't end up going? No, it was wonderful. It was wonderful. Thank you. I know I'm good. The second is, could you just remind everybody of the name of your book and anything else you've put out into the world that you want to direct them to? Sure. So the name of my book is In My Time of Dying. And the subtitle is How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

And I have many other books out there, starting with The Perfect Storm. My last book was called Freedom, about how freedom works and why it is so precious in the human experience. This was an extremely interesting and enjoyable interview. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks again to Sebastian. It's great to have him on the show. Thanks to everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Our producers are Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson.

And we get additional production support from Colin Lester Fleming, Isabel Hibbard, Carolyn Keenan and Wanbo Wu. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post-production. DJ Cashmere is our managing producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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