The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with_Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Steven Rinella talks  with Sebastian Junger, Brody Henderson, Randall Williams, Corinne Schneider, and Phil Taylor.  Topics discussed: In My Time of Dying, The Perfect Storm, Fire, and Sebastian’s other books; climbing trees; embedding with U.S. troops in Afghanistan; dangerous work; swordfish long liners; when you think you’re about to be executed; massive internal bleeding and going into shock; the black void and near death experiences; defining “sacred” as preserving human dignity; consciousness; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart podcast. Steve Rinella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the MeatEater podcast network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique

environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the MeatEater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you

get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams,

hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Good Lord, joined today by Sebastian Younger, journalist, bestselling author, documentary filmmaker. He's reported from the battlefield as an embedded war correspondent, written about humans interacting

with dangerous jobs, with the natural world long ago. He had the huge international bestseller, The Perfect Storm. He's written an outside magazine, Rice to be a correspondent about many things, whale hunters for one. Went on to do a ton of work about soldiers and the impacts of war. His latest book, In My Time of Dying, came out last year. It contemplates death and the afterlife after a near-death experience. The paperback version, who knows? If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might have to wait indefinitely. Spring of 26, I'd recommend going getting

the hardcover. Other works from Sebastian include Fire Tribe. I mentioned Perfect Storm already. I remember seeing when that came out the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg after I read the book about a commercial sword fishing boat that never returned. Um, so we're going to talk about his new book and, and also about his years as a war correspondent and a bunch of our stuff, man, Sebastian, when you're, um, when, when, when the perfect storm came out, Yeah. Dude, that hit me hard, like in a good way,

but you know what one of the biggest things is, I used to be a tree, a climber for a tree service. Really? And I know that the story came out of that, that you were climbing, you were a tree service climber, had a chainsaw injury. Yep. What was the chainsaw injury?

So I was doing a ton of work and I was exhausted. The area I lived in had been hit by a hurricane. Oh, insurance work. I was just doing work for homeowners that needed cheap tree work. And it was sort of a one man show. And sometimes they'd be actually holding the lowering line. Like the homeowner would be on the line, like that kind of thing, right?

But I was doing a ton of work, I was a good climber and I was exhausted. And I had a little climbing saw and I was working in a big elm. And there was a little sucker that was like between my ankles, like sort of getting in the way, like a tiny little branch, right? And I just reached down, I was in the flow, right in the way, like a tiny little branch, right? And I just reached down, I was in the flow, right? I mean, I was sort of moving, right? And I would just reach down to zip it, this little sucker to sort of zip it so it wouldn't

like tangle up my feet. And I was just sloppy and in a hurry and the tip of the bar hit the tree and popped up in the back of my ankle. And, uh, it was, I wasn't spiking. I was wearing, uh, I wasn't wearing big leather boots, right? Cause I wasn't spiking the tree. It was a prune and, uh, and it just went right into the back of my ankle. And I, it didn't hurt, but I was like, something hit my ankle. The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw.

I got it. I should just at least take a look to make sure I'm all right. And, uh, turned off the song, clipped it onto my belt and, uh, and moving down there was the chainsaw. I got it. I should just at least take a look to make sure I'm all right. And, uh, turned off the song, clipped it onto my, my belt and, uh, and pulled my pant leg up and yeah, sure enough. So I could see my Achilles tendon. I mean, I was looking at it, right. And, but it wasn't severed.

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

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

about it and these people deserve some, some love basically. You were already fixing to write a, you were already fixing to be a writer though. Yeah. I'd spent my, I'd sort of muddled my way through my twenties trying to figure out how to be a, um, freelance writer and you know, which, you know, I've waited tables for a while.

Then I got this great job as a climber, which I was really proud. I was a terrible waiter, but I was a good climber. Right. And so one of the things I really liked about climbing is that, you know, it's inherently dangerous. You're 80 feet in the air with a chainsaw or whatever. And of course you can get killed up there, but I realized there's no random element. Like if you're going to get killed doing tree work is because you screwed

up. You know, it's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you rolled the dice wrong, right? You lose a chess because you made bad decisions and the other guy didn't. And tree work was the same way. If you don't make a mistake, you're going to be all right. So really focus, be in the moment right now and be perfect. And there was a, almost a sort of Zen discipline to that mindset that I really, really liked. Did you have awareness of commercial fishing from, from growing up?

You grew up in Massachusetts, right? Yeah, I mean, no, except that at the time I'd moved up to a fishing town called Gloucester with my girlfriend at the time, and I was doing tree work from there locally and in Boston and writing, you know, working on this writing project and that writing project. My girlfriend was a violinist and, you know, pretty typical sort of bohemian, you know, young person's life for a while. Very nice. And Gloucester was a really, you know, rugged fishing town. And I was there, we were there, and I was limping around from my chainsaw wound when this huge storm hit the coast of New England. And the next day I found out that a Gloucester boat, the Andrea Gale with six men,

had been lost a thousand miles offshore, a long line. What year was that again, that storm? 1991. And then there were these crazy rescues as well, and the seas offshore were measured at a hundred feet, which was sort of record setting. The offshore data buoys were registering a hundred feet. And dude, you can't even like,

do you know what I mean? You can't picture it. Oh God. I mean, you gotta picture it. Five feet in a skiff it's like oh my god I'm gonna die. Yeah when you're, yeah you gotta like, I'm just trying to think how to, you could probably explain it to listeners but I mean a five foot swell obscures everything, a five foot swell, if you're in a small boat and a five foot swell, you're sub wave. Do you know what I mean? Like when you look, it's just water. 100 foot waves. Yeah. And this was a 68 foot steel hauled longlining, longliner. But still, 68 feet

in seas of 70, 80 feet, 90 feet, it'll get overwhelmed, right? It can be flipped end over end, pitch polled, rolled, all kinds of things can happen. Did that boat ever get recovered? No, no. They don't ever find it. They lost radio contact, they don't know where it went down. I don't mean to jump ahead to the movie,

but the visual, one of the visuals, I mean the visuals in the movie of the boat going up these waves and down the visuals, I mean, the visuals in the movie of the, the boat going up these waves and down these waves, I think like always stands out in my mind is something that's in, you're watching it and you're like, this can't happen on earth. Did you ever talk to people who had been in seas like that and what, as far as like what they're,

how, how accurately that captured the. Yeah. I mean, I didn't, I, I talked to them to research the book, so I didn't after I mean, I didn't, I talked to them to research the book, so I didn't after the movie, I didn't because I'd done my work on that topic. But yeah, I mean, the boat disappeared and I was trying to understand what it was probably like for those guys before they went down.

So I talked to other captains of other boats sort of in the area that had survived. And, um, I even talked to a guy named, um, Ernie Hazard, whose boat was pitch pulled off Georgia's bank and, um, flipped end over ends. And he wound up trapped in the cabin in a flooded cabin upside down at night in the North Atlantic.

I mean, the ultimate nightmare, right. And, and, uh, he managed to on a lung full of air, swim out through a busted window and, uh, make his way to the surface in this huge storm and the life raft popped up right next to him and he got in it and he managed to survive. So I interviewed him about what's it like to be trapped in a flooded boat upside down at night? What's going through your mind? Cause I was trying to recreate the state of mind of those guys in their last day,

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

Oh man. Yeah. Uh, when you, like when you developed, I don't want to call it, um, shtick seems real condescending, that's not what I mean, but like when you decided to focus on that, the, the, the dangerous work thing, was that, did that become like a, I guess like a strategic professional decision or was it, was it personal obsession or was it just like that you wanted to make a living as a writer and this would be a way that you could develop expertise and establish a name for yourself? So I've always been a sort of purist about only working on things that I find so compelling

that I would do that work for free if I had to, just in order to find out about that topic. And this was a case where I've never made purely commercial concerns. I think that sort of ruins your work. But this was a case actually where a sort of personal decision about what fascinated me actually coincided with something that turned out to be a great commercial decision. And I didn't strategize it like that.

I've never thought like that in terms of my work, but it actually was a kind of good fit for where the marketplace was at the time. And no one had really, Studs Terkel wrote a great book called Working, it was an oral history of work, an amazing book, but it wasn't focused on dangerous work, right? And I just thought this is, there was a sort of class issue here.

I mean, the people that do dangerous work are mostly, not exclusively, mostly working class males and they get hurt and they die without much fanfare. And we're all depending on their work, right? And, uh, I mean, we all, you know, we live in houses made out of wood that someone cut down and we're eating fish and, you know, going on and on. We're driving cars that the oil got drilled out of

the ground by somebody, you know? And, and, uh, so I just, all of that was really compelling to me. And, um, uh, and, and it turned out to be a sort of gap in the market, you know, no one had really focused on this yet. And so it, you know, it works. Do you, do you intentionally steer clear of some of the broader

geopolitical concerns when you get it? Like, like if you get into, if you're talking about oil workers, you, you don't want to set it up. Like it's a debate about dependence on oil, right? Right. If you're talking about timber, you're not setting it up that it's a debate about how much old growth logging is too much. Like you try to really focus on these people that are focused on the lives of people who are, it's kind of hard to put,

like Randall I talk a lot about with the, with market hunters of a century ago would be, they probably, if you quiz them, they're probably aware of the broader geopolitical market factors that are pushing them to do what they do. But their desire to participate or their moving in to participate is like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's what's available to them. Yeah, so there are great journalists, better journalists than I am in

many ways, that are writing about the sort of macro issues. I'm not an economist, I'm not a scientist, whatever. There's people doing really good work about the urgent issues of our day, the economy, the climate, whatever, you name it. I'm not that guy. It interests me because I'm a part of the planet and part of this country and I'm invested in good outcomes, but I'm not,

intellectually it doesn't interest me that much. What interests me is people's experiences and that often gets lost in the reporting. And so when I was, I mean, just to jump ahead a bit in my career, but you know, many years later when I was embedded with US forces in Afghanistan, you know, I had plenty of personal opinions about the war, you know, and some, some, some positive, some critical, but I wanted to write about the soldiers, right? I was 173rd airborne in a remote Valley with a lot of combat. And I was interested in those, in those guys and they were not, they themselves were not thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just weren't thinking about it.

Right. And, and so when I wrote my book War and made my film Restrepo about those guys, there was no discussion about the larger issues because those guys were not interested in it. And I wanted to make work that made people understand what it was like to be an American soldier in combat in Afghanistan, like end of

sentence. And you know, they're 20 years old, they're 21 years old. I wasn't thinking about the economy when I was 20. Like, why would they? You know, like why would they think about the larger issues? They're already have their hands full just doing the job that's right in front of them. When, if you go back to look at your work with,

your work with swordfish long liners, where there's a disaster and lives are lost and then you come in after and explain that to go to become a war correspondent you're like you're you're not in the after it's like you're in the mix right do you Do you mean that, that like, it puts you on the long line boat. Yeah. In the storm. Yeah. What was that? Like, what, how would that, with your family, friends, did they think you were nuts? Like, like how did it come about that you're like, man, I want to go and I want to like be

with soldiers in combat. Right. Do I call the Pentagon? You know, how do I, how do I get this rolling? Yeah. I mean, I done a little bit of that in the early nineties. I was in Idaho on some hotshot crews. They're fighting these big fires.

I was really interested in wildland fire and, and, uh, myself, I would have loved to have been on a hotshot crew. I just didn't know that sort of from the East coast where I live, the bureaucracy, like trying to figure out how to do that just on a bureaucratic level was almost impossible. And so, so I ended up reporting on them, spent quite a lot of time out there. So I was a sort of participant, a journalist in some situations before that, but you know, my first war was in 1993. Well, back up for one sec. When you were doing the fire stuff though, did they really let you get in there? Or was it two? They did.

Okay. Oh yeah. I didn't know if it was like, if it'd be like sort of too easy to constrain someone and keep them out of harm's way for. No, they just put me on a helicopter and drop me in and yeah. Yeah. It was amazing. And I mean, with absolutely no, I had absolutely no credentials or anything.

I mean, I just showed up. Oh, it's refreshing to hear that someone didn't be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no up in the, you know, mountains, North Idaho, North of Boise. On a huge fire, yeah. Was the process a lot different becoming a war correspondent? Like were there, was there certain training you had to go through or like security clearances and? Well, you know, most wars don't involve the US military. Most wars in the world. Right. So there isn't a government agency involved in whether you can

go to Sierra Leone. Right. So, I mean, I covered civil wars in West Africa. I was in Afghanistan in 1996. I watched the Taliban take over. I was with the, uh, in Kabul. Yeah. Cause you interviewed, you interviewed Ahmad, the, the, Ahmad, uh, Masood., yes. Ahmad Shah Massoud, yeah. He was killed by later interviewers. Yeah, I interviewed him. I spent two months with him and his forces in Barakshan in the fall of 2000. And I was with his commanders when they liberated Kabul after 9-11.

And- That's incredible, man. Yeah. It's amazing. So the US government has nothing to do with that decision of yours to go seek out Masoud and spend a couple of months with him fighting the Taliban and Northern Afghanistan. They have nothing to do with it.

Right. And so I wasn't embedded with U S forces until 2005 was the first time. So most of my war reporting has not been with U S forces. It's just been, you try to get closer, closer, closer until you're in it Yeah, so I was you know, my first war was Sarajevo in 1993

Besieged by the Bosnian Serbs. It was a you know, I would say I mean I'm showing my sympathies here But I would say it was quite similar to Russia in Ukraine Except on a much smaller scale, right? It's not Russian and Ukraine, it's the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia. But the same sort of awful shelling of civilians, they besieged Sarajevo, it was an ethnically driven conflict, sort of a nationalistic conflict and grotesquely violent. And I managed to convince a magazine editor I knew in a magazine called Men's Journal,

which is back in the day a pretty good magazine. And they, he gave me a sort of letter of passage like Sebastian is working on a piece for us, which wasn't even true for the war, civil war in Bosnia and please help him in any way you can. I just like showed that to some UN guy and he gave me a UN press pass. And the next thing I knew, I was on a relief flight into Sarajevo. And then boom, there I was. Like it was no credentials from anybody. Right. But there were a lot of freelancers in Sarajevo who made their bones.

I mean, it's sort of like learn the craft because they just put themselves in that situation. They started freelancing radio newspaper. You know, I went there, basically the girlfriend I was living with in Gloucester dumped me. And I was, you know... Look, I'll show her. I'll show her.

That's a tough... Right. So I was sort of heartbroken and like, oh, I can, you mean I can do anything I want right now? Are you kidding? Right? So it was that heady mix of heartbreak and liberation. You know what I mean? It's sort of an interesting moment in your life. And so I went to Sarajevo and there was a lot of other freelancers like me and I would say

80% of them were young males like I was and I would say 80% of those guys had just been dumped by their girlfriend. You know, eight, so, oh sorry. I was gonna say there's a book, Oh, sorry. I was gonna say there's a book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Yeah, I met him in Bosnia in 93. I mean, I remember reading that, probably read that 15 or so years ago, but yeah, it was a very similar story.

I mean, it's like in hotel rooms and. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He was probably dumped by his girlfriend also. Yeah, he seemed like it. You know, it was 17 years ago this summer that I first decided I didn't want to die. Okay. Um, and I realized when I was, I topped my last,

I topped my last big tree and um, and you know, that thing, when you relieve that top load, it really bucks, like bucks huge. And I used to just, I liked it, but it wasn't different to it. Didn't think about it. And I was like, man, I don't want to, I climbed down to that tree and never like, I changed my behaviors and I was getting married that summer, but you have to, um, to, to go do what you did, like tree, tree climb is one thing, but to go do you did and like go into Afghanistan during the civil war when for a lot of people having an American captive is really cool.

And then being able to like kill an American captive is very enticing. Right. It's like you had to kind of have been like, I mean, I don't want to sound like, you know, like you had like, like it's like a mental issue, but you had to be like kind of indifferent to death. No, I wasn't indifferent to death, but I felt like I was taking calculated risks that were manageable. Like I would, yeah, I would never have gone into Syria. I mean, Syria, there was an open market for Western, Yeah, yeah. Right. So when I was. Afghanistan didn't feel that way when you were there. No, I mean, I was, I was with Masoud and the Northern Alliance and there

were absolutely zero issues with them about, they were my hosts and my protectors. Right. I mean. Well, but he was also blown up. Yeah, of course. I mean, right. But I don't. Including people around him.

Right. But you know, it's not like they would have seized me and decided to cut my head off. Right, I mean, I was among people, I mean, I was there to report on the, frankly, the tragedy and the outrage of what the Taliban, backed by Pakistan, were doing to the Afghan people. Right, I mean, and they were full, the people, the Northern Alliance and Masood were fully on board with the fact that someone from the Western press

had come in to shine a spotlight on this. So I was very, I mean, they would. You felt protected. They would have died protecting me. Right. I mean, I seriously, not true in West Africa. West Africa was a lot scarier. Even the indigenous forces that I was with, I didn't trust them because they were traumatized child soldiers all high on drugs.

So, you know, like it just, there were a lot of variables that were terrifying and I had some incredibly scary situations with them. What would you categorize, when you say that, like what would be the kind of scenario or situation you'd be in that you would categorize as scary? Cause I think most people would find that every moment was scary, you know, just to be in the proximity of shelling, to be in the proximity of war.

Well, I've been shelled plenty, and that's very scary. I mean, I've been shot at. I mean, lots of things have happened. But I think, you know, the two scariest moments, I think, were moments where I had, where I thought I was going to be executed. Right? And both of them were in West Africa. One was in Sierra Leone. We were, uh,

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

and they had their rifles, their machine guns leveled and they were arguing with each other. We were in an open Jeep and they were arguing with each other, seemed to be arguing with each other about whether to kill us all or not. And we just sat, there was nothing we could do. And we just sat there. And at one point one of them like,

leveled his rifle at us to fire and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upward so it wouldn't... Oh my god man. So you know I had you know for about 10 or 15 minutes I was thinking this really could go down right and I it was the extraordinary feeling I became sort of I dissociated right I mean my body sort of went numb and I was so scared that I wasn't even scared anymore. I was like, I wasn't there.

And the psychological effect, and then they didn't shoot us and I don't know why, right? And the psychological trauma of that is way worse than someone shooting at you from 300 meters and you managed to get behind some sandbags. I mean, that's child's play, right? Compared to, wow, we are totally screwed and they could shoot us or not. And then a similar thing happened in Nigeria in 2006. I was seized by rebels, the EJaw warriors who were fighting in a group called the

Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a partly criminal, partly righteous like group. And, uh, they seized me in a small village in the creeks, the Niger river and, and in the Delta. And, uh, um, they accused me of being a spy. And one guy came up, sort of strutted up to me, you know, machine gun and these guys, these EJaw warriors are they, they got feathers and paint and all kinds of fetishes on them. And they're wild looking guys, right.

And really intense warriors. And he said, very matter of fact, very matter of factly, he said, when we, when we kill you later today, I'll be, I'm going to be the one to do it. They didn't say it meanly. He was just, I just want you to know, you know, just to, by way of introduction. That's like Princess Bride. Remember the, the pirate probably kill you in the morning. So I, you know, I was just remembering thinking, don't let your knees buckle. Like whatever you do, don't let your knees buckle. So those, you know, those two situations are, do you think he's just tormenting you?

I don't know what he was doing. There was a lot of, uh, I don't know. There was a lot of aggression. There was a lot of sort of performative aggression. They didn't know who I was. Their commander eventually, they called their commander and put me on the phone with him on a cell phone, like one bar of signal. Like I was standing on top of a log trying to maintain my cell connection with him.

And he was in South Africa, actually. He was an arms dealer and in South Africa, but indigenous Ija. And, um, I talked with him and he said, okay, give the phone back to the guy who gave you the phone. And I didn't know what he was gonna say. I was gonna say, kill him or don't. And I gave the phone back and the guy said,

okay, sir, yes, sir, all right, we'll do it. And I didn't know what, you know, and he shut the phone, you know, flipped the phone, it was a flip phone, he flipped it closed and he said, it's gonna be fine, we're gonna let you go. But I didn't know until that moment that it would be fine. So they might have been bluffing. I mean, he might, you know, I'm an American, right? I mean, you know, there are repercussions for whacking an American.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. Is there like any, is it like a myth that like being a member of like the American press affords you some degree of safety in those situations? Well, I mean, it protects you with people that don't want to get on the wrong side of America and the IJA as bad ass as they are probably don't want, you know, the American military as an adversary, they, you know, they have their hands full with the Nigerian military, right? military as an adversary, they, you know, they have their hands full with the Nigerian military. Right. So, but then there's groups, um, like ISIS who make, you know, they're the point of their existence is to fight America, to fight the Infidel, to fight the West. So, you know, it's like, depends who you're talking about.

Steve Rinella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the MeatEater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today.

I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history. massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. How different did it feel for you when it was, uh, when, when you got to a point and the global war on terror started and all of a sudden it was like you were with like Americans. Oh, it was so nice, right? Because I didn't have to worry that the people I was with were going to kill me, right? If I got wounded, I knew I'd be evacuated. Like, I knew that these guys would do whatever they could to help me and as I would them, as I got to know them, right? I mean, I really, this one, you know, so I spent, most embeds are a week or two, right?

And, but I spent a year off and on with one platoon, which was like 30, 40 guys at this remote outpost called Brestrepo. It was named after the platoon medic who was killed, you know, basically at the bottom of the hill. And, and so I really became part of that platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of a group. You know, I mean, a really ancient,

a really ancient, and pretty much, a way that's been pretty much lost to our society here at home, I felt like, wow, I belong to this thing. And they would risk their life for me, and I know I would for them, and here we are. Let's get it done. It was absolutely extraordinary. So that experience really changed me.

I feel like in our society, we don't get to enjoy that group affiliation in such a profound way. And it is what our evolutionary past consists of, right? That we're social primates. We survived, we survived not because we're rugged individuals, but because we affiliate very well. And in, when we're in groups like that, the individuals in them will risk their lives or give their lives to protect the group.

You know, it's like firemen or something, right? And that's our evolutionary past. And when you find yourself in a situation like that, it is almost intoxicating. It plays to so much evolutionary wiring. It plays to so many profound human emotions. And I just kept thinking, this is all I want. Like, I don't want to go home. Why would I want to do that?

Like, it was quite extraordinary. And that was a group of what size then? You know, 30 guys or so. I mean, so 30 to 50 people, as the anthropologists will tell you, is the typical group size in our evolutionary past. Right, so the groups of about that size that are affiliated by clan or by tribe

with other groups around that size, but the sort of survival community is about that size that are affiliated by clan or by tribe with other groups around that size but the sort of survival community is about that size and it you know it's sort of a perfect size it's the largest number that you can have quite close emotional relationships with and you can't be emotionally close to 500 dudes right it's not happening right even if you're in the same battalion that's a rather abstract knowledge right but 30 40 people you're like wow these are my, that's a rather abstract knowledge, right? But 30, 40 people, you're like, wow, these are my people. What wouldn't I do for them, right? And of course in our evolutionary past,

it wouldn't be all one sex, it wouldn't be all male, it would be a mix, right? It would be a mix of old and young, male and female, et cetera, and what wouldn't you do with your family? What wouldn't you do to protect them? Like nothing, you would do anything to protect them, right? Feeling that way about 30 or 40 people, that is the human experience in evolutionary terms, and it's the loss of that experience for most people in modern

society is a tragic one. The other day we had some anthropologists here, and they were excavating, They had been working on an excavation of an ice age encampment in Wyoming. Okay. So these are like mammoth hunters. Right. Right. And we were talking about well how big, like how big was the encampment? He's like 30, 40 people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. No, that's right.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, that's exactly, that's exactly right. Yeah. There's a thing I've been like, you should feel free as we're talking. I would, um, uh, I appreciate that you're not doing this, but, uh, uh, I appreciate the impulse, please tie into the books. Oh yeah. Like, yeah, sure. Like what you're talking about now is your book, Tribe.

Yes, right. Exactly. Yeah. I wrote a book, right. I wrote a book, Tribe, about- That's not what you're talking about, but these ideas are explored in- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. No, I was trying to figure out why does this modern society, which is so safe and so affluent, have such high rates of mental illness, you know, depression and anxiety, suicide, addiction. Why was it that along the American frontier at its various points in Pennsylvania and Ohio and further west all the way to Texas and Arizona, like why were, why were pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native

society and disappearing in native society and the natives didn't do the opposite and And what it really seemed to be and in Benjamin Franklin wrote about this because of course if you're like a good Christian the idea that like White Christians would rather live with what they called the savages Like is it flies in the face of the entire sense of Western superiority, right? And and Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about this. Like what is the appeal? Like, and the appeal is that, that those kinds of organic hunter gatherer societies, um, are

extremely egalitarian. Uh, the leadership is not imposed. It's granted by the people. I mean, all these sort of like democratic ideals that are, that we do not live up to actually are acted out in societies of that scale. And there's community, there's community, really close community.

And of course, if you're a young man, instead of having to plow fields all day, you can go hunting, like, you know what I mean? Like what's not to like, sort of. And so that was the genesis of my thought that maybe what people are really drawn to is close connection to each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo.

They got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars and everything, all the things young men like. It's like, wow, I mean, a number of them said to me, if we could take a helicopter back to Restrepo right now and do another year out there, we would do it. And that's how, so my book, Tribe, was about that phenomenon. We recently had a guy on, a guy named Pastor Shane Yates, who was sitting right in that chair and he was talking about coming home from Iraq. No, coming home from, I think it was in Afghanistan, coming home from Afghanistan. Was that where it was? The kids like eating, he's like, you're literally watching children looking in the garbage for food, competing with dogs in the streets.

And he said, and like, you get home so fast and also you're just home. And he's standing there and there's a woman arguing with a Starbucks employee about the state of her latte. And he's like, I want to kill her. He's talking about just the heart, like the very difficult adjustment. But there's this thing I've been, and think about what you're talking about and the ideas that you explore and try. It was like, I'm kind of struggling with this thing I'm seeing happen later. I'm just becoming aware of it.

And it's very troubling to me about American culture where what, when you're where what, when you're on the internet, what you, if you solely relied on the internet, you would get a view of American culture that does not at all match the view of American culture that you have as you're alive being an American outside of the web. Right. of American culture that you have as you're alive, being an American outside of the web, meaning, um, any one of my neighbors, any one of my neighbors would, if my house was on fire, anyone of my neighbors would go into my house to get my kids, I would go into any one of my neighbors houses to get my kids. Right. I would go into any one of my neighbor's houses to get their kids. And when I say this, I'm not like, I have no idea of the political affiliation, right? Except for one of my neighbors. I have no idea of their political affiliation zero,

but like you get this. I used to think of people think of the, like the radical right and the radical left as being like diametrically opposed. I'm starting to view it more like, um, that these are just symptoms of a, that these are symptoms of an ailment. Yeah. It's like you could have a certain ailment and you might get like, like stunning headaches, or you might have a certain ailment and be other people would have the same ailment and be that they can't get a full breath or whatever, or all the weird shit that would happen to people with COVID. It's like too much time online is the thing.

And then the symptoms are you could be radicalized in one direction, you're radicalized in another direction. You're like, you want it being that you're just bound by what you hate. Like your culture is my people that I find are people that hate what I hate. And that's my team and dude, and like the part of your time I was like, Oh, that need like, like build a team that's not based on just that you all hate the same shit. Right.

Well, you know, in evolutionary terms, outrage, uh, is, is a powerful unifier because you're, you're unified with other people who are outraged by the same thing, and it creates a sort of pugilistic state of mind that's good at defending itself. So you think in evolutionary terms that anger and outrage response is a very effective defense against the threat. Right. And, um, the, the algorithms that are used in social media are very good at generating outrage. It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle and, but also very important feelings of love or

sadness or regret, you know, all the, there's a gentle emotions that also are really important for keeping society and people glued together. Shared value is shared warmth with each other. Those are hard. They don't have the algorithms for that. The algorithms for hatred are very, very simple. There's a threat over there.

We have to denounce the threat and unify against it, and then we'll survive. You go into very, very ancient human history when you gin up those emotions. And, you know, it used to be that at the town hall, someone might stand, you know, before the internet, right, before the apocalypse of the internet came along, you got, you know, the town hall and someone would stand up with a different view about, you know, paving the streets or whatever. And you'd be like, okay, I'm totally against that, but that's Joe. I know his cut, you know, I have a, I have a relationship with Joe,

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

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

I just refuse to participate in it. Yeah. Man, it's tough. Cause like, I use the internet to find out how the internet's destroying society because I'm into this thing right now. This it's like American veterans Institute or it's like interviews with world war two veterans. They just, they've been very good.

Like when these guys, they, they kind of were catching all these dudes in their eighties, nineties, I've seen some of those amazing thoughts. And it's like, they kind of were catching all these dudes in their 80s, 90s. I've seen some of those amazing thoughts. And it's like, I'll tell my wife the other day, I'm sitting there on a Saturday morning. Um, I'm sitting there doing some work and I got one of those plan. And I was like, uh, I said, this is gonna sound so nostalgic, but, um, holy shit. We've fallen far. Yeah. Like listening to interview after interview after interview with these guys about, um, they call it kind of start like, where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?

Right. Right. In the portraits they paint. Yeah. There's this dude, there's this Italian dude. And, um, he says, like, he goes down to, he goes down to a gas station or something to buy soda, you know, and everybody's in the gas stations listening. Cause pro-harvard has got attacked.

He goes home. His dad listens to the address from Franklin Roosevelt calls his four sons down into the room, informs them you will all fight because we moved to this country. We have a house and a car. This country cannot fail. And he says, when he goes to the train station, his dad makes a point that his dad wants to drive him alone to the train station. So he's expecting some kind of lecture.

His dad never says a word to him. All the drive, they get to the train station and notice dad says to him, he says to him in Italian, don't do anything that will cause me to hang my head in shame. Wow. That was it dude. Dorn I'm like, I don't know man, I just get nostalgic about it. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Like I just like, I feel like something's corroding. Like I just like, I have this terrible anxiety about culture right now with like the internet hatred. Yeah.

I mean, I still, you know, we're all here, we're still all human. And I think that same noble, those same noble sentiments and actions, individuals today are just as capable of them. Right. But what's gone, not gone, but what's in danger, what's under threat, is the idea of a nation that is unified, that thinks of itself as a nation despite its internal differences. I love that there's Republicans and Democrats. I happen to be a Democrat, but I don't care. Whatever. I mean, that's great. That the country is, my father's a refugee from two wars.

He's an immigrant, right? And the country's made up of people like my dad, right? And I was born in this country, whatever. It's all great. So the idea that we're all unified in this American project is an incredibly powerful one, right? And it transcends, it should transcend all these other divisions, including left and right.

And I think one of the problems right now is that the internet, and look, I have a laptop, I'm online, I research stuff, I get it. I just don't have a smartphone because I don't want that following me around all day and being where my brain disappears when I have 30 seconds to spare while I'm waiting for the bus. Like I just, that to me is horrible, right. For the brain. But, um, I, uh, I think that, I think, I think we've sort of lost sight of the idea that there is one, that there's the ultimate, that the ultimate category we're all in is American. Yeah, that's, that's what that's as a patriot, that's what I'm getting

worried about increasingly. Was it your quote or were you quoting somebody when you said that journalists, I can't remember if you said should or shouldn't, or it's not should or do or whatever, but like journalists don't tell you what to think. Right, journalists don't tell you what to think. I was paraphrasing someone else who was actually talking about theater. Oh, it's interesting, right? But I was praying I repurposed it for journal journalism is journalists don't tell you what to think They tell you what to think about and if a journalist is telling you what to think how to think they're not a journalist Yeah, don't listen turn it off. They're a commentator, right? They're an analyst or commentator. Yeah

Worse than an analyst like and we need it. That's their commentator. They're a comment or commentator. Yeah. Uh, uh, worse than an analyst, like, and we need analysts, they're commentators. They're a commentator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and you know, and I, so I feel like the internet has, um, and their political forces in

this country that are depending on the ability to fracture people in order to achieve their agenda and, and also make money. I mean, there's, you can sort of monetize this, right. And, and what they're sacrificing, maybe not deliberately and consciously, but ultimately what's happening is they are, they are sacrificing the cultural and political unity of this country, um, for smaller, for smaller gains, for smaller personal gains,

you know, including many politicians who do that. Let's talk about your health scare, man. Yeah. I've never heard of that. Yeah, me neither. I still, it happened to me. Isn't that funny? We're going through that with my boy right now.

My little boy has a thing that like, not any person in our social circle has ever heard of. Yeah, right. Like a, like a cartilage issue, you know? Yeah. Right. You got to be careful here, Steve, because you might get your, uh, your thing where you, you think you're developing a problem because he talks about it. Yeah.

I have this, like, if someone's telling me like whatever any problems someone tells you, especially internal. Oh yeah. Like, you're like, yeah, you know, I got a whatever in my kidney. I'm like, well, it's not like a bitch. No, I've got a weird feeling in my kidney. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, well that, that sort of paranoia is very human and it, and it, and, and, uh, it helps keep us alive, right? Once in a while, someone does have a weird thing in their kidney and they weren't aware of it until someone mentioned it and weird thing in their kidney and they weren't aware of it until someone mentioned it and they go to the doctor and say, you know, so there is a sort of use for that. But no, so basically what happened to me, I have a ligament in the wrong place.

My median arcuate ligament, which sort of goes across your abdomen about where your sternum is. I would know, I guess you do have a ligament in your abdomen. Yeah, yeah, it crosses right near the bottom of your rib cage, crosses your abdomen and mine is too tight. So it's called Median Arcuate Ligament Syndrome. It has crushed the celiac artery.

Now the celiac artery is like a garden hose that irrigates all of your organs with blood, right? You imagine how big it is. And it comes right out. I don't want to, I have this thing I'm trying to do where when someone's telling me something I don't understand, you know, the impulse is going, uh-huh. I'm trying to picture it when I'm cutting a deer

open where it would be. I don't understand. So, so the, the celiac comes out of the aorta and the descending aorta and it, it branches down and it brings blood to the liver and the intestines and the stomach and all the, all the organs in your abdomen. Right? So it's a lot of blood goes through this. If you block it with a ligament. So also this ligament is like on the outside, pushing it down, binding in, right? And it's just crimping it off. Exactly.

It's just an irregularity. It isn't because I led a bad life and I'm filled with cholesterol. It's nothing like that, right? It's just a sort of bad design, right? It's very rare. But what the body does, cause the body is a walking miracle is it's like, okay, we still got to get the blood to where it needs to go.

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

but if there's a weak spot in one of the arteries, instead of dilating, it will bubble out, it will balloon outwards, and it's called an aneurysm. Okay. And the artery wall will balloon outwards and it will get bigger over the course of decades. So there's no symptoms, it's very hard to detect, and it very slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

And then when it ruptures, and it will, when it ruptures, you are suddenly bleeding, you're bleeding out from an artery. You know, an arterial bleed is deadly, right? You're bleeding out from an artery, a smaller artery into your own abdomen. So if someone stabbed you in the stomach and you made it alive to the hospital, the doctors don't have anything to figure out. They're like, Oh, we know what the problem is. There's blood coming out of a hole in it.

Exactly. They wouldn't, they know where to stick their finger almost literally to stop the bleed. Like it's, there's no mystery there with internal hemorrhage, it could be anywhere. Right. And so, um, this happened five years ago and it was during.

But you know when the blood's coming out. Well, I didn't know that's what was happening, but I, I felt of pain, right? But I'm an old Stoic... And it's like high pressure blood? Yeah, well, I mean, blood's an irritant when it's not in the vascular system. So that's what's causing the pain. Yeah, so I'm like, there's blood around my kidneys and around my liver and it just like feels awful. It's very, very painful. All of a sudden. Yeah, in mid-senates, it ruptured. So I mean, we're- What were you talking, what was the sentence? We have, right?

It's, I'm gonna live forever, I think this is the sentence. So it was during COVID and my, so I have two little girls that are now eight and five at the time, they were three years old and six months and my wife and we were, it was during COVID we were, we own a property in Massachusetts that's very remote. It's in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road.

There's no cell phone coverage there. The landlines are old and when it rains, they short out, so there's no landlines. We're surrounded by government land. It's just basically paradise, right? It's an old house from 1800 and we were there during COVID and I'd built a post and beam cabin deeper in the woods.

And one day we managed the, some teenage girls who lived up the road that we knew called when does this ever happen? They called and said, Hey, we're free this afternoon. Would you like some babysitting time? Right. And I was here like, yes, we pay a thousand dollars an hour. Like how long can you, how long can you stay? Right.

Yeah. So they came over a few hours and my wife and I went out to this beautiful little cabin. It was totally off the grid, like oil lamp, wood stove, you know, I felt it myself. You know, so we're in this place of peace and beauty and, uh, and this is sort of enjoying our, you know, a couple of hours of, of, of alone time. And all of a sudden, there's this pain in my abdomen, like, Oh, what was that? and all of a sudden, this pain in my abdomen, like, oh, what was that? And it wouldn't stop, and so I stood up

to sort of work it out. I thought it was some crazy indigestion, and I almost fell over. And what was happening was I was bleeding out in my abdomen, my blood pressure was tanking, and I was graying out, right? And I sat back down, I said to my wife, I never thought I'd have to ever say these words to anyone.

I said, I think I'm gonna need some help. And you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young. I was a really good competitive runner. I've always been very fit, very healthy. I just never thought that I would need physical help from anybody, you know? It just like never, never. And now my wife's dragging me out of the woods,

like literally dragging me down a trail to get me to help. And we finally got, there was no cell phone. Did she have one of those like mysterious bursts of power? Well, I got, you know, she didn't, I mean, I had my arm over her shoulder. I wasn't unconscious, but I was sort of half- Oh my God. I thought she was like pulling you up. Yeah, right, right. The car off the baby. No, not quite. So, so the, so the ambulance

game, you know, it took him 20 minutes to get there. I'm losing a pint of blood maybe every 10 or 15 minutes into my abdomen. But all in you. All in me. And, um, and you can lose about half your blood before you die. And we live an hour from the hospital. So you can do the math. Like it was, I was a human hourglass and, um, they, you know, they, their ambulance got there and I had sort of rebooted it. Then you go into compensatory shock.

So your body, it's extraordinary. Your body knows when there's a five alarm, alarm fire, even though, even if you don't, right? I didn't know I was dying. I had no idea. Right. And so it, it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body that you don't need to survive your, your, your, uh, surface areas, your skin, your

legs, your arms, and it pools it in your brain and in your abdomen and your heart, around your heart. So when it does that, your blood pressure goes back up and you, and I became sort of clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there and they were like, you know, it's a hot day.

You probably dehydrated sir. You know, they're looking at me. I'm 58. They're like, you're an old man. You know, they're 20s, right? The old dehydration thing, sir. They're looking at me, I'm 58. They're like, you're an old man. You know, they're in their 20s, right? Like they're your old man. The old dehydration thing, man. Yeah. And why don't you sit in the shade and drink some water and call us if you still don't feel well. And my wife, my wife said, you're taking him to the hospital. Like he couldn't

walk a few minutes ago. Like I've seen thirsty people. Yeah, exactly. And he was not actually thirsty. In my mind, at the time, I remember thinking, I've always heard that married men live longer. This is why. I'm seeing it right now. So.

Yeah, because your wife's always like, well, why don't you see somebody about it? Yeah. So they put me in and they started the long drive. And my compensatory shock held for most of the drive and right when We got to the hospital And they've got no idea what's going on. So they didn't like check your vitals and see that something was well They did so the thing is if you're if you have internal bleeding

Your heart tries to compensate for the drop in blood pressure by beating faster Which pressure pressurizes the system right you run the pump, you pressurize the pipes. Right. Except I'm very fit. So they looked at my heart rate and it was probably in the eighties. They're like, all right, he's almost 60 years old. His heart rate's in the eighties. That's pretty normal.

Right? My heart rate's 55. So they didn't know I was 30 beats up. Had they known that, they would, they were like, oh, this is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But I, my fitness level was masking it. Right. So they were totally cavalier about it.

Right. We almost stopped for coffee practically, you know, like, and we got to the hospital and I, I just went off a cliff. Your body decompensate and it has to decompensate at some point. And I just went, I went into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I'm convulsing with hypothermia and they rushed me into the trauma bay. The doctors know immediately what's going on and, uh,

immediately they diagnosed me immediately and sent me through a cat scan. They saw the, where the blood was pooling and they, and, um, so I'm in the trauma bay. And I got, uh, that's I just want to mention what you were just describing. Would you say hype? Like, what'd you say? Uh, uh, hemorrhagic shock. So is that no, these said something about hypothermia.

Oh yeah. You go into hypothermia when you have, when you're in hemorrhagic shock, your body gets hypothermic. Uh, I don't understand that. What, why is that? It's as if you're very, very cold. Your body can't keep up its internal temperature. Oh, which is, did you feel, did you, I guess when you're, one of your super

hypothermic, you don't know you're cold. I mean, did you, did you feel like a cold sensation? I was convulsing. I mean, I was having like these spastic shivering. Like, oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I didn't know what was going on, but I kind of sensed it wasn't good. I didn't know I was dying. I mean, there's a lot of-

But you knew it was a cold feeling. Well, yes. I was shaking. I've only shaken like that when I was very, very cold, and I've never even convulsively shaken. Huh. Right. God, man. Shaken. Shaked? Shaken. Whatever it is. So I knew there's a lot of, when you're dying, there's a lot of denial. I had no idea I was dying, but I was like, okay, I was going blind a while ago. I couldn't talk

and now I'm convulsively shaking, but I'm fine. Like, you know, like they're, just you're the gator. Yeah, exactly. So it never crossed my mind. Of course, everyone else knew and they, um, so they were, they like, they were able to look at what's going on. Cause you know, I mean, it would never occur to me like perhaps they're having internal bleeding. Like they're good enough where they're like, this dude is having a... Yeah, I had all the symptoms, right? And then they saw it on the CT scan. And so my blood pressure was 60 over 40, right? I'd lost half my blood at that point. I was probably 10 minutes from dead, right? I needed 10 units of blood to stay alive, which is basically a full oil change.

Like how did they get the old blood out? They pump it out? No, it's in your abdomen and then it takes a few months to be reabsorbed by your body if you survive. So they don't try to get it out. No, no, no, it's not doing it. They got like a complete sun pouch deal. No, no, no.

That, they don't, that doesn't matter. Like they wouldn't know that. Yeah. They don't need to worry about that. I was probably 10 minutes from dead, right. And, um, and they, they, they put me on in the trauma bay and a doctor, um, a doctor starts prepping my neck to insert a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me because I need a lot of blood fast.

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

I think they kinda go hand in hand a little bit. Well, yeah, well, sort of atheist squared, right? Like hyper rational, and I'm a lifelong atheist, so you need to know this for what I'm about to say, because it flew in the face of a lot of, of my understanding of reality, understanding of life and the world a little bit. So beneath me and to my left,

this sort of yawning blackness opened up, like the universe has sort of cracked open into this just infinite black void, and I was getting pulled into it. And I didn't want to go. I was like a wounded animal. Like I didn't, I wasn't thinking about my family. I didn't know I was dying.

I just didn't want to go into the vast darkness, right? Like when you take your dog to the vet and dog doesn't want to go to the, you know, I was like that, like, no, no, no, I'm not going in there. And I was getting pulled in and I couldn't stop it. And I was panicking. And then above me to my left, suddenly appeared my dead father.

He'd been dead eight years, and he was there in this just energy form. Like it wasn't even quite vision that I used to perceive him. Like it was a sense that I, that's, it was a sense that's not familiar to me, but it was absolutely like, oh, there's my dad. Like what is he doing? He was very benevolent, and he was absolutely like, oh, there's my dad. Like, what is he doing?

He was very benevolent and he was communicating with me. He was hovering right above me and he was communicating with me. Basically, you don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. He was very, very paternal and loving and caring. And you know, he was, so he was a physicist.

He was, I realized later on the spectrum, he was not a particularly emotional person, right? Like I loved him, but my connection to him was not visceral and loving in that way that he was at that moment. Like it was in some ways the most loving, sort of viscerally loving thing he'd ever done for me, right, in that moment.

It's like, I'll take care of you. And I was horrified. I was like, you're dead. Why would I go with you? I'm alive. The party's over here. Like, what are you doing here? I mean, I was shocked and horrified, offended, almost offended that he would think I would want to go with him and not want to stay alive with my family. I was really offended. I was like, what do you think? And I said to the doctor, you gotta hurry, I'm going. I was gonna ask you if you were aware

that you were conscious or not conscious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was talking to the doctor. And then there was my dad, and I said to the dad, he was right over here, I said, you gotta hurry, I'm going right now, I'm being taken. Oh, did the hole in your dad seem like diametric? They were connected to each other. He was like, don't be sort of, he didn't say this, but he was basically, don't be scared of what's happening right now. Oh, so it wasn't a different directions? No, no, no. Well, he was there, the

pit was above me. He was up there, but basically he was saying, you don't have to, I was fighting going into the hole. Yeah. And he was like, you don't have to fight it. I'll be like, I'll be with you. I'll take care of you. It's okay. I'll accompany you into the. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, they eventually, and you're, and

you're still talking to this doctor. Yeah. Yep. And you know, they couldn't sedate me because my vital signs were too low. So everything that they did, they had to do with me fully conscious. I had a little bit of fentanyl, but it didn't, it didn't do anything.

I was in a huge amount of pain. And they brought me into the interventional radiology suite. And, um, which is this, I, I, I, I, I, I R is this sort of like magic basically. Like you're on a fluoroscope, which is an X-ray machine that takes real time video. And they pop a hole in your groin and they thread a wire up your femoral artery and they can snake it around to any part of your body. So instead of, you know, if they need to put a stent in your aorta, they can put it in by wire instead of opening your heart up. Right?

It's amazing what they can do. And they were trying to get the wire to the ruptured artery to embolize it, to block it. So I would stop bleeding. And the alternative to doing that, this is what they would have had to do 20 years ago, is like cut me open and try to find the bleed before I bled out. Right? And the outcomes are terrible for that. And if they'd had to do that, they would have brought my wife in to say goodbye. They told me that later. Like we would have brought her in to say goodbye, because you probably wouldn't have made it. So they were trying and trying with this wire to

thread its way through my sort of weird vasculature, because the ligament can totally contorted all my vasculature when it compensated, right. And they couldn't get the wire to the place. And I was in the, on the fluoroscope for hours and I was two in the morning and I remember the doctors giving up.

Right. And I remember them sort of one of them shruggy is like, well, we tried, we did everything we could. And now I finally realized that I might die. Like I didn't know it until then. And during this, they're pumping blood to you and you're just bleeding it out. It's kind of like. Yeah, that's right. And, and also, you know, you can't just replace blood without consequences, right? I mean, you can die from blood loss with a full complement of blood in you, but blood from other people.

And there's a chemical process that gets going when you experience extreme blood loss that they can't, it's called acidosis, and they can't get ahead of it and it will kill you. So I was right at the edge of where that process would start. And so I was barely hanging on. The nurse was there holding my hand hand that human contact was so important I mean literally important for survival, right? You need the doctors that you know the mechanics But you also need some because it's very lonely dying is being a being a patient in a hospital extremely lonely, right?

Everyone's masked is very bright lights. You don't know what's going on. And so this nurse was she was holding my hand She was like breathe with me. It's okay. Keep your eyes open. I'm right here. You know, she was my lifeline. And one of the reasons I survived, and I shouldn't have survived, the doctors didn't think I would, and they're sort of amazed that I did. But one of the reasons I survived was that human connection, along with amazing medical care.

Did she have a glove on, or it was skin? I don't remember. I think it was skin. I think it was skin. I think it was skin. Yeah. It was just absolutely crucial. And so I watched the doctors give up. And I was like, oh my God, I'm not going to make it.

And I thought I was just in for belly pain. What's going on? Right? I had no idea. And then the doctor said, why don't we try going through his left wrist? And the other doctor was like, well, I like the way you think. And so because of my weird vasculature, that was a different angle of attack that the doc, the IR guy, thought might work.

And it did. And he saved my life. And he'd been called from dinner an hour away and had driven to the hospital to save my life. Like, I mean, what these doctors do is just amazing. Like he was on call and he, and um, uh, so they brought me up to the ICU, you know, then they sedated me and they put me under and you know, I was in this sort of wild darkness for like a

hundred years or something. Like I felt like I was gone for a very long time. And then the next thing I knew, I heard this really intense Boston accent, a woman speaking in a, so this is on Cape Cod at Massachusetts, right? You all know the Boston accent, not the loveliest accent on the planet, right? Pretty harsh. You said that, not the loveliest accent on the planet, right? Pretty harsh. You said that, not us. Yeah.

It's pretty harsh, pretty hush, pretty hush accent, right? And just this woman speaking a really intense Boston accent and I'm still in my, in darkness, right? My eyes are closed. I'm like, where am I? Like there probably don't have these accents anywhere you want to go later, right? Right? Wow.

Might not be a good sign. Guy's getting mean. So he, I opened my eyes and she said, congratulations, Mr. Younger, you made it. You almost died last night. No one thought you were going to make it. You're kind of a miracle. And I was like, well, that's some straight shooting...

Gow, man. ...info right there, right? And, um, I was shocked. I had no idea I'd almost died, right? I was absolutely shocked. It's quite traumatic to find that out, right? Particularly if you have young kids. I was absolutely shocked.

Then she left, because she was doing her rounds. And I'm a mess. I'm throwing up blood. I got wires coming out all over the place, I'm a total mess, and I couldn't stop thinking about what she told me. And she came back and she said, how you doing? I said, well, not that great actually. Like, what you said is terrifying,

I had no idea I'd almost died, and I can't stop thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing, I think, just about anyone has ever said to me, she said, try this, instead of thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing, I think, just about anyone has ever said to me, she said, try this, instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And she walked out. I later tried to find her, two weeks later,

to find her, to thank her, and ask her what did she mean? Because I made my own use of that advice, right? I'm an atheist. The word sacred is a very important word to me, and for me it means anything that helps preserve human dignity. Like that's a sacred task. It might be a school teacher, it might be a shrink, it might be a nurse, you know, it might be a minister. Sacred work happens in church as well, right? You know, so anything that preserves human dignity. And as a journalist, on our best days, we bring back information that our country, the world, can use responsibly to help alleviate human suffering.

That's a sacred job. On our best days, that's like sacred work, right? So I thought, I've been going to front lines my whole life. I stopped after my buddy Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate front line, my own mortality. I stopped after my buddy Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate frontline, my own mortality. I was allowed to come back. Did I come back with sacred information that would help myself and others face the terrifying prospect of our mortality?

We're all going to face it. Do I have sacred information from this? That's the meaning I took. Right. And, but I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, like, what did you mean by that? And I couldn't find her. And not only could I not find her, no one at the hospital, the ICU, no one knew who I was talking about. Like, oh, there's no one here by that description. Like, why did she totally disappear? And she might've been a visit, you know, I'm not getting all

woo woo here. Like she might've been a visiting nurse and just, I mean, I, who knows, but I couldn't find her. And it her and it contributed to what afterwards was a terrible sense of unreality. Like I worried when I finally got home, I started to worry that I had died and that I was imagining everything. It was my dying hallucination that I actually didn't survive.

And did that moment with your father and the darkness, did that stick with you through that process? Is that something that you came back to later? Oh, yeah. I mean, as soon as this nurse said that to me, I remembered my dad. I was like, oh my God, I saw my father and the pit. And that stayed with me in sort of troubling ways. It means when I started researching NDDE's near death experiences, right? They're very common. They happen all over the world. They're not infinitely varied, right?

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

I'm a rationalist. I'm like, all right, that sort of makes sense. I get it, the tunnel, the out-of-body experience. You can do that with drugs. You can do that in a human- of use, like fighter pilots undergo. The one thing that didn't quite make sense to me is the consistency of the vision. So, many, many people see the dead when they're dying. In hospice, in ERs, I mean, it's a really, really common thing.

And if you give a roomful of people LSD, they will all hallucinate. There's no mystery there. The chemistry of that is well known. But they won't all hallucinate the same thing. What's odd about dying is the consistency of the hallucinations that they involve the dead, even people that don't know they're dying, even people who don't like the dead person who showed up.

It's not a comforting vision necessarily. And that's the only part of this that really made me sort of wonder, do we really understand anything about reality? And, you know, I went into quantum physics to try to sort of understand like maybe the problem is that we think we live on a flat earth and it's actually a globe. You know, maybe the problem is this boundary between life and death that we assume is absolute. Maybe it actually isn't the boundary we think it is.

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

There's this guy I knew that wrote me an email one time and he had had, he was tipping over a tree here we are chainsaws and trees yeah he was tipping over a tree and the wind picked up and he lives and all of a sudden the tree was going away he didn't anticipate yeah and he tripped and fell and the tree landed on him but he was in just enough of a depression where the tree didn't kill him but it messed with him. So he had a thing like you just mentioned. He later went back a few days later He describes going back and looking into that hole Yeah He's in such a weird state mentally that he went back looking in that hole half thinking that he would see himself now

And he was so tripped up that he did what you said. Yeah. Where he's like, maybe I did die. Yeah. And now I'm in a weird spot. Right. And he went to look. Yeah. Like he was in, it got that weird form over those next few days. You know, it's, I didn't know this, but it's really common. I talked to a woman who was rear-ended by a truck at a red light and medically she was, you know, was hurt a little bit, she didn't have an NDE. But after that she was just plagued with the fear that she had died in the accident and

didn't know it. She was in limbo and eventually would find it. So I had the same problem. And part of my problem was that, and I'm not woo woo, I'm really not a mystic, I really am a rationalist, right? But our rationality doesn't understand everything and that's where I have questions. But so the dawn of the day before,

right before dawn, my family and I co-sleep, right? So my wife and I, my little girls, sleep in the same area, on the big pad on the floor. It's like we're camping, basically, except at home. It's very, very nice. And I had a dream that I didn't know was a dream at the time, but I had a dream that my family was below me, my wife and my two little girls, and they were crying.

They were crying about me. And I was waving. I was like, I'm right here. It's okay. And they didn't, couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me. I was floating above them and I was made, and I was in this sort of darkness looking down at them and I was made to understand that they couldn't see me or hear me because I was dead.

I was a spirit. I had died and then I was headed out and there was no going back and that's it. And I woke up in a panic. I mean, I woke up and then was shocked to realize that I wasn't dead. I mean, that's how real the dream was, right? And that God, that was just a dream.

You know, I was really shaken. And 36 hours later, I started dying, right? So when I started researching NDEs, another common NDE is that you're floating above the doctors, above your body, above your family. I was going to ask about that. The bright light and the floating. Yeah. So I started researching NDEs and again, you know, like the rationalist explanations for most of it, I kind of buy, right? And... What are they? Oh, that, you know, the brain is being traumatized by low blood oxygen and it releases endorphins and you can hallucinate,

you know, brains hallucinate during times of stress. I mean, you know, there's all these just sort of neurochemical explanations that do a pretty good job at explaining most of the phenomena of NDEs, not the visions of the dead, the specificity of that can't be explained by low blood oxygen. Right. And, um, only the dying seem to see the dead. And, um, but another common experience is sort of floating above your loved ones. Right. And so I was seized by this fear. Oh my God, maybe I died in my sleep.

Maybe the rest of it is a dying hallucination. The trip to the hospital, the return home, the tearful reunion with my children, my reading a story to my daughter who's on my lap right at this moment, maybe it's all a hallucination. I actually died in my sleep and my wife woke up next to her dead husband, right? How would I know that's not true, right?

So it's really, really, it's called derealization. It's really, really common with people who have almost died, either for medical reasons or from a near miss, like your friend. And so I got pretty crazy, right? I really started, I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma is anxiety and panic, and another is depression. And I actually went through those phases, a classic trauma reaction, but I didn't know it at the time.

At the time, I thought, oh my god, it's been revealed. The word apocalypse means the revealing of all things, right? I've experienced the apocalypse. I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing of what reality actually is. It's actually, we're not here. You know, like, I really got crazy. And at one point, I went up to. You know, like, I really got crazy.

And at one point, I went up to my poor wife, but her name's Barbara. I said, honey, can you just tell me that you see me? No spouse wants to hear this, right? Can you just tell me that you see me, that I'm right in front of you, that I survived? Like, just tell me that I'm here. And she was like, yes, sweetheart, you're here. I see you.

You survived for the last time. You're fine. Can you please take the garbage out? Yeah, yeah, can you please take it out? Exactly. How about them dishes, right? But in my mind, I was like, that's exactly what a hallucination would tell you,

to maintain the hallucination. I didn't believe it. And she eventually said to me, and another very profound, like this nurse, like incredibly profound thing, she said, okay, Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you? Right? Not that you survived, of course, you're lucky you survived, but if you could push a button and have none of it have happened, would you push that button? And I know what she was talking about because on the one hand, you're sort of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead or the reality doesn't exist or what all these existentially epistemological sort of terrors,

right? On the other hand, I was sort of allowed to look over the final precipice and return home. I had a special trip, right? Like when I was granted special access, I didn't have to pay with my life. I was allowed to come back and like, was I lucky or unlucky? And I couldn't answer. I didn't know. And it really tormented me that I couldn't answer that question.

And I finally answered it by putting it in more sort of mythological terms. I was like, all right, she's really saying, am I blessed or cursed, right? And often when I'm in a sort of mythological terms. I was like, all right, she's really saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right. And often when I'm in a sort of dead end in my work, I'll look up the etymology, the origins of the important words in the topic that I'm researching to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what significance they attach to

these words. So they're. Give me an example of what you mean. Uh, well, I will right now. I will right now with the word blessing. So the word curse, curse, no one knows what its origin is. It's a total blank. Like nobody knows,

there's no known origin for the word curse. But blessing, yeah. But blessing, there's some theories that is related to the word course, like a course that you're on that you can't deviate from. There's some theories, is related to the word course, uh, like a course that you're on that you can't deviate from. There's some theories, but no one knows. With blessing, they do know what the origin is. And from the Anglo-Saxon word, uh, blezion, which means blood.

And the idea was that there is no blessing without a wounding. That the shedding of blood actually confers the blessing, right? So battlefields are sacred because blood was shed on them. Childbirth is sacred because blood is lost. And they think it might date back to the pre-Christian rituals of animal sacrifice, where you kill the sheep or whatever and the spilling of the sheep's blood is what makes that moment and that place sacred.

And so it suddenly, I got it. I was like, oh, it's not that you're, it's always, they're twin, blessed and cursed are twin. They're part of the same thing, right? And see, you actually, it's a false question. You don't choose, you don't even get to choose. If you're blessed, you're also cursed. If you're cursed, you might also be blessed.

And the story of Jacob actually goes right back to that. He wrestles with God and is crippled by God, but also blessed. God unjoins his hip and cripples him for life and blesses him at the same time. So it's a very ancient human thought. And that just relieved me, for some reason, helped relieve me of this sort of unanswerable terror. If you might go, so in the next 20 years, this is going to happen again sometime, maybe more.

Of the aneurysm? No, no, no, that you're going to die. Oh, they're going to die, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you a, how did this shape your, how did this shape your, how did this shape your awareness that you'll do this again? You'll have another moment and maybe there'll be the hole in your dad.

If part of my, unconsciously I think part of my horror, you know, if I was in a lot of pain and dying of cancer, I think my dad would have been a blessing and a relief to see and I would have thrown my arms around. I'm like, please take me away from my pain racked body. I'm done. Right. Thank you. And one of the problems was that I was in the midst of my life.

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

Like you're, you're a dad. I mean, imagine, right? Like, so, um, it's the worst thought. It's the worst thought is that, and that, uh, I'm going and I won't be around to protect them if they need it and to love them when they need it and it's un, unthinkable. Right.

And so it's the point of my older dad, my first daughter was born when I was 55 being a dad is what I'm doing. Right. I'm not, you know, I write books as I need to make a living. I don't, I could care less. Right.

Being a dad is what I'm doing. It's the center of my identity, my existence. And if I can get through to where they're okay, like, uh, you know, I'm good. In your research, what did you turn up about that feeling of your life? People that have that they'd say the life pass before their eyes. What's going on there? Well, again, you know, we don't know the answers to these things, but on a sort

of neurochemical level, the brain gets very active when you're dying. And, um, and they've, they've had, um, they've actually monitored people's brains while they were dying because they had to, for other medical reasons, they needed to know what was going on with the brain. And they were actually able to watch the gamma rays and the different, um, gamma waves and the different waves in the brain that like are part of consciousness they got to watch them change around the moment of death and one of the things that happens as you die is that the parts of the brain that are engaged in memory activate when you die right so you're you know like

when you're dreaming like you can have a dream that feels like it takes, you know, 10 minutes, right. And they know that those, you know, supposedly 10 minute dreams happen in seconds. Right. So one of the things that might be happening when, and this is in the neurochemical part side of the explanation for what, for NDEs, one of the things that might be happening is that equivalent to a dream that you have an experience of a long, you know, vast amount of time and a vast sort of perspective, right? You're seeing all of life in one moment, the kind of overarching knowledge that you can have with dreams. Like in dreams you sort of understand things that you can't understand, you know, there's this sort of all-encompassing knowledge sometimes. So that might be what's going on with that. And let me

just say that there could be neurochemical, perfectly good neurochemical explanations for NDEs and also a part of NDEs which neurochemistry can't explain that do tie into some basic question about quantum physics and what is reality, what is consciousness. I mean, the quantum physicists of a hundred years ago realized that conscious observation changes quantum reality. Like if you observe quantum reality, if a conscious observer observes quantum reality, it changes it. And so the obvious question is, does consciousness in the universe, human and otherwise, does consciousness in the universe create the universe that that consciousness then exists in? Right?

I mean, it's a profound question. So when you're talking on those terms, the idea that the consciousness that you enjoy when you're alive, that there's some other version of it that continues on as part of the universe, a kind of universal consciousness, continues on after you die. You know, it's not an insane question, right? It's a legitimate question. You get it, like this stuff, you know, I was saying earlier about if I don't understand something, I try to ask. No, I can't, because I know that I can't understand quantum mechanics quantum physics, but there's a thing that there's a trippy thing

Like if if everything If everything in the universe like if everything's electrochemical with life, it's all electrochemical you get into this problem where um There cannot be free will into this problem where there cannot be free will. Right? Like if everything is, happens according to physics and you go like, well, life is electrochemical. Right? Right? There's no room then like, then someone,

then a really good person who's really good at predictive modeling would be able to, you'd be able to like run all of it and predict the future because everything is electrochemical. Everything conforms to physics. Yeah. So when you get a lot of stuff, it's just like, it's kind of like when you're sitting there and you're looking outer space and you're like, even if there was like a big brick wall out there, there's shit on the other side of the brick wall. Well, the sort of, the sort of

like joker card in the deck there is consciousness. Is scientists don't understand, they can't even define what it is, right? The definition is something around the ability to think about itself, right? It's our self-reflective, but they don't have a good explanation or a good definition of it. And they have no explanation for it. Right. And, and the, you know, the fact that consciousness can have, can determine outcomes in the physical world simply because it is exists and is observing that, you know, that, so basically if that's possible, all bets are out, all bets are off sort of, right?

So you're right in a purely mechanistic universe, but how do you fit consciousness into a mechanistic universe? And it doesn't seem to be, consciousness resides in the brain, which is an electrical chemical like process, but it doesn't itself have, it's not itself manifested physically, consciousness itself, right? But it can affect the physical world in profound ways, at least at the quantum level. So, and let me just say, you don't understand quantum physics, neither do quantum physicists. Right? I mean, that's the great mystery. Like,

you know, what they've shown is that things happen in the quantum world that sort of don't make sense in the macroscopic world, right? But it doesn't mean they can't explain why, right? And for that matter, they can't explain why there's a universe. I mean, there really shouldn't be a universe. And, you know, the universe, basically, religion and physics are, they're closer than you might think. So in religion, physics are closer than you might think. So in religion, you have to believe that God is self-creating. Otherwise, you're stuck with, oh, well, someone created God, why aren't we worshiping that entity, right? God has to be self-creating. From that point onwards, it all works fine. If you just take that leap, like, work with me here, God's self-creating, and then from now on, we're just believing that God, we're work with me here, God's self-creating, and then from now on, we're just believing that God, we're all good, right?

Quantum physics is the same way in some ways. The universe is self-creating. After that, we can explain everything, right? So there's a similar act of faith, this leap, that both have to take. I'm not saying that they're intellectually equivalent. I think religion is a story and physics is an attempt at an explanation and stories and explanations are very, very different beasts, right? But on some level, they both required active faith that is probably beyond human comprehension. When you finished the book, did you end that process with

When you finished the book, did you end that process with like, did you now have your own understanding or your own ideas of stuff? Or were you just like, man, I don't know, I'd still… Well, of course I don't know, right? I mean, I'm like, yeah. Like, did you feel better? Yeah, so there's this idea about consciousness affecting the physical world at a macroscopic level. I mean, so one of the proposals is that consciousness like gravity is essential to the physical

reality of the universe. I mean, it suffuses the entire thing. It's not visible, but it makes the entire thing possible. Without gravity, there wouldn't be a universe. There wouldn't be planets. There wouldn't be anything, right? Magnet right magnetism likewise these sort of like invisible forces and you know we get used to the idea of gravity but if you didn't know anything and someone said to you you know what there's this invisible force and the closer two objects are to each other the stronger the

force is and if you throw a rock out a window like why, why wouldn't it float in midair, right? It doesn't because of this invisible force called gravity, and it exists throughout the universe, and we don't know why, right? That would sound like the rantings of a schizophrenic, right? I'm sorry. Likewise with consciousness, like, and so there's a sort of serious proposal that consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe like gravity is and that our individual consciousness returns to that greater entity when we die. And it's, you know, you can't prove it or disprove it. It's a sort of pleasing theory for me as an atheist. It gave me a sort of slightly more comfortable place rather than the just pure nihilism

of we're a bunch of cells and when we die, we're done. I also don't want to have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now for eternity. Like, thank you, no. Right? Like. Yeah. I had a moment of panic earlier in this conversation. Starting to contemplate that possibility. Yeah. I mean, it's like careful what you ask for, right? I mean, you know, 80 years is a long time and we sort of limped through it at the end thinking, thank God there's a finish line here in some ways, right? We'd imagine eternity and eternity of conscience. I mean, just remember what math class felt like in fifth grade, like imagine that for eternity, right? Like just, will this never end? Like that,

that's where I don't quite get about people of faith wanting an afterlife. I think they want to see their loved ones is what's going on. Yeah. Let me hit you with another one that used to, that troubled me for awhile. I had a scary thing happen one time and, um, and I had that feeling of, um, things, I had that feeling of, of my focus becoming singular and in reading about why that was like a feeling of like slowing down things slow down and then I was intensely focused on a thing and I was

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

There's people that all they see is everything. It's utter chaos. Nothing makes sense. And then there's people that all they see is everything, it's utter chaos. Nothing makes sense. And then there's people that are like, that guy needs help, that's happening, that's gonna fall. Right? And in certain disciplines, they're looking for the people that don't have those. And your experiences in war and your experience with death, like have you ever grappled with that or did you find any of that in your research about these different sort of responses people have? I mean I've had all, I think we're all capable of all of

them. I don't think there are, you know, like rigid categories where some people do this, some people do that. You know, partly, partly depends on how much preparation you have. And, you know, one of the things they do when they train firemen or they train soldiers, what have you, is they just get them to rehearse and practice the, um, the actions they'll need to take in a crisis moment over and over and over again.

So that, you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out of airplanes, you know, that, you know, they got that muscle memory of whatever they do, you know, count to, count to five and whatever, you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out of airplanes, you know, that, you know, they got that muscle memory of whatever they do, you know, count to, count to five and whatever, you know, whatever it is, like they get that muscle memory down so that it doesn't depend on deliberate, deliberate thought. And so, uh, there's a lot of tactics in combat that are somewhat formulaic like football is, right?

I mean, there's this sort of team, team coordination that that doesn't have to be thought about in detail in order to be enacted. And if you have no training like that, your brain hasn't been properly formatted for that kind of situation and it's scrambling to get enough information to make a good decision. And then of course people go into shock. And so I've had all of them. I mean, one time we got hit very, when I was with American soldiers, we got hit very unexpectedly, very hard.

And I, for, I don't know, about 20 seconds, I was frozen. Like I just couldn't move. Right. I mean, there was bullets hitting the ground around like, and then I snapped out of it and then I was hyper functional. Other times I've, I, I. in that 20 seconds. Where were you mentally? Were you on an object or like like what was your focus? It was a blur, right? and I couldn't keep up with the blur so I couldn't make good decisions because it was like this jumbled blur and

my buddy Tim was behind a Hesco barrier we've taken a huge amount of fire and One of the problems was I didn't have my camera and my bulletproof vest. If you're in a situation and you have a job to do, you're a medic, you're a journalist, you're a soldier, you're a parent with a child who's in danger, whatever it is, you have a job to do, like that's a refuge from your fear.

The job you have to do provides a shelter from your own feelings of fear and self-concern. If you have no job to do because you're not holding your camera, you know, your fear just moves in and sets up camp, right? And so Tim threw across, you know, we were this far away, like between me and you, like five feet. We couldn't, there was too much gunfire and he threw me my bulletproof vest and my camera. And as soon as I was like geared up, boom, I was good. Right?

And so that gives you insight into how soldiers perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they got the gear, the tools they need, they have something they have to do. They're not thinking about their own fear because they are charged with such responsibility for each other. And it looks from the outside, it looks like bravery. Actually those roles that soldiers play in combat are very powerful protection from fear. You understand? You don't have to overcome fear to do them. They are a protection from the fear as would be true if, I mean, I find grizzly bears

absolutely terrifying, right? If my child was in danger from a grizzly bear, I mean, I find grizzly bears absolutely terrifying, right? If my child was in danger from a grizzly bear, I don't think I would find the grizzly bear terrifying. I would try to distract it. You know what I mean? Like totally changes that fear equation. I was with my fire, one of my buddies who's a firefighter yesterday and it's kind of seems random, but we're looking, like we're looking at this thing in my yard

and there's a big cobweb guy and I wanted to clean this trough out. And I was saying that I was going to have my kids do it, but my daughter that I've come to respect my daughter's hatred of spiders. And I'm like, it's her. I was like, dude, you could hand my daughter anything on the planet. She's going to grab it. If I said to grab it, unless it's got a cobweb on it. Yeah.

And he says, for me, it's eyeballs. That's the way that seems avoidable. You're not in my line of work. Yeah. Yeah. I can see, yeah. One traumatic incident. Yeah.

And then it's locked in eyeballs. Thank you. I mean, I have arachnophobia since I was a young child. I sympathize with your daughter. I mean, I remember at one point I was sort of joking around. I said to my wife, listen, I'll protect you and the family from anything. Grizzly bears, home intruders, whatever, anything. Except black widows.

Except spiders. Like we're camping in the Southwest and there's a tarantula, it's yours. Like I'm not doing it. And you can tell it's a phobia because people with phobias have trouble even looking at a photograph of the thing you're scared of. I know tarantulas will hurt you. No, I've tested this out. I was skeptical.

I've tested it out. It's legit. It's legit. Oh, totally. And I've come to accept it. I used to be like, give me a break. Yeah. No, it has nothing to do with the danger It's legit. It's legit. I've come to accept it. I used to be like, give me a break. Yeah, no, it's, and it has nothing to do with the danger that's posed. Right. And that's where the photo comes in. You can't even look at a photo. It's a really deep suited, deep seated panic

reaction. You can't, you can't just turn it off. What's interesting about it is she has incredible detection skills. Like I wish she was afraid of deer. She'll come in the room. Like if she walked in this room and there's a spider, like, you know, somewhere on it. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great skill. Oh, totally. But just applied to something I'm not interested in.

Well, if she was in the tribe, that would be her job. Yeah, spider detector. I feel like we each sort of have our own little. Yeah. What are you gonna work on next? I don't know. Are you searching? A little bit. I mean, this are you gonna work on next? I don't know. Are you searching? A little bit. I mean, this book felt like a sort of capstone of my career. I'm 63 and

it's about such an ultimate question that it was hard to think about something, then what's next after writing about what, you know, life after. Well, you could write a book about what, you know, life after, you know, like what, what are you going to. Well, you can write a book about what you ought to have done different. That's right. So, so I don't know. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm, I've spent a lot of time as a, as a dad, as a parent.

And, um, my wife had surgery, you know, pretty major surgery last fall. So we've been sort of in a fallow period because of that as well. She's coming out of it. So I, you know, some are going to work on something, but I don't, I don't know quite what yet. Yeah. But you might wrap it up. No, I love writing. I mean, it's like,

you know, I'm, I love running, you know, I'm, I'm, I don't run races anymore, but I love the act of running. So I still run and I love the act of writing. Like it's just, it's, um, it's one of my, one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had. You like the act of it. Yeah, I love it. Doing it. Doing it. I hate doing it. I only like having done it.

Right. We all have people that treat running like that. I don't like doing it, but I love it afterwards. And no, I love it. It's a higher state of mind for me. Doing it. Yeah. Good for you. Not always, not always, but when it's, when it's, you know, musicians say the same thing,

right? You know, when they're really on. Yeah, that's all fun, man. That's like, I don't need to hack on it. For me, it's a kind of music, right? I mean, the sentences have to have cadence, they have to have rhythm, and they got, you know, like, there's a lot of musical components to, for me, to the experience of writing. Are you familiar with the writer Ian Frazier? Yeah.

Yeah. He once told me that, you know, he wrote a lot of humor. He was a humorist. I mean, some of his stuff is very, I mean, he wrote about Stalin and, you know, the pogroms, but he also wrote a lot of humor. And he said when he wanted to be a writer, when he was young and he wanted to be a writer, he always imagined a writer sitting at his typewriter, chuckling to himself. And then while I'm not being that way,

you know, who's got an interesting philosophy about like you're talking about whether you'll do another one. Um, I don't know if you're a Quentin Tarantino fan. I am sure. Yeah. So very much so. Uh, I don't know if you'll stay true to it, but he has said for a long time, I will make 10 movies. I've made nine. Wow. Yeah. And that we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't want to turn into a washed up director. I'm like, I'm like skeptical. Yeah. He's, he's going to do 10 and then,

right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to picture the end, man, but it all ties into that mortality shit. You know, you know, I'm not going to write a book just because I should write a book. Like it has to be a topic that I find so compelling that I can't not. Right. Like that's, that's what, that's what it has to feel like. that I find so compelling that I can't not. That's what it has to feel like. Yeah. David Grand, you know the writer David Grand? Yeah, yeah, of course.

When he was on, he came on recently after finishing The Wager. I just found it interesting. He was like actively searching. Right. Do you know what I mean? He was hunting for a topic. Right. Right.

Which is cool. Yeah, it's a different way to do it. I mean, it's, you know, it's, I feel like it kind of has to come to you like falling in love. If you're actively looking for your, your wife out there, like you may not, you may not find her, you know, you may not recognize like, and I feel like it's a little bit like that. Like if you're, if you're trying, trying too hard at it, you won't see the essential things that you need, the essential qualities that you need in that thing, you might not see them. Mm-hmm.

And I feel like it's a, and I feel that way about God as well. Sometimes people are like, are you kidding? You're still an atheist? You haven't found God. I'm like, look, God has to find me, right? I mean, if I'm making a decision to believe in God, it's a decision and it doesn't have much content to it, right? I don't know. I don't understand what you mean. Well, God, my understanding about faith is that it's an overwhelming feeling of love and connection, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Right? So it's like, if you're just deciding to marry Susie, you might not be in love with Susie, right? It's a higher level decision about something you want to have in your life. Fine, no problem, right? But that's not, I'm not sure that that's love, right? And likewise, a higher level decision to, oh, now I'm going to believe in God. I was mortally terrified, I almost died.

Now I'm gonna believe in God just to be on the safe side because maybe he gave me a break. That isn't what religion really should be about. Religion should be about an overwhelming feeling of connection and love. And that, like love for another person, I think it has to find you. If you're out seeking it, you don't understand what I'm saying.

So if somehow God came to me in some form and overwhelmed me in a moment with a profound feeling of connection, I'd be like, okay, you convinced me. I got it, right? I wasn't looking for you. You found me, I'm all ears. Like what do you got to say? I'll listen. We just released this, it wasn't our project in this room, but one of our guys on our network

had this episode that he made. He does these kind of mini documentaries, audio documentaries, you know. So what the hell, what's the word I'm looking for? What's an audio documentary? Bear Grylls. Podcast. I know, yeah, but no, maybe you could have a podcast, but shoot Hummin. Yeah, that's just like a distribution platform, right? Whatever. You're right, it's like a documentary. Yeah, and you know, you're doing this bit on this guy, and the guy has what you're

talking about. The guy has an epiphany in a moment, right? And um was the addict, you know, right and he describes Like where he's standing on what day what was happening and all sudden like all was made clear right, right and Dropped his addictions. Yeah committed himself to his wife. Do you know what I mean? And it was like, he had like an epiphany. Like he got overwhelmed. Right, and that's very powerful. I mean, for me, I would need evidence to believe in God.

I need evidence of God, right? Like I believe in gravity because there's evidence that gravity, you know, throw a rock out a window, it will fall. I believe in gravity. I need evidence of God. And for me, evidence of God would be that God suddenly presents,

I'm going to have to say itself, because the idea of applying gender to God is silly, itself in my life in an overwhelming way where I cannot turn away and I'm like, okay, that passes the test. Yeah. Right. A lot of dudes listening are like, it happened when you almost died. Well, no, except I didn't see God, right? I mean, I saw my dad, right? And I saw the nurse and the, you know, I actually did not see God. And if I had, we might be having a different podcast right

now, right? But I didn't, the things that I saw were very real-world and mundane, and one of them I can't explain, which is my dead father hovering above me. But it may just be I can't explain him because our minds, our human minds, are sufficiently limited that that ultimate reality is not accessible to us. Yeah. Well, man, I'm glad you pulled through. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming on the show. Do you mind, what's the best way for people to go? Do we have a good list of all your books here on our documents?

I'll rattle them off right now. Yeah, do it. Rattle them off, man. Yeah, you had a book about a murder, like do the whole thing. Yeah. So my first book was called The Perfect Storm. It was about this huge storm in 1991, sword fishing boat that was lost offshore, um,

hundred foot waves, et cetera. My next book was called Fire. It was a collection of my long form journalism, including quite a lot about, uh, wildland firefighting, hotshot crews. Um, and, uh, then after that was a death in Belmont. When I was six months old, my parents, we lived in Belmont, Massachusetts,

my parents were building an addition to their house. And one of the three carpenters was a guy named Al, Al the Salvo. And he, a couple of years after they finished building the addition to the house, Al confessed to being the Boston Strangler. And he actually, he was killing people while he was working at our house. And there was a murder down the street that was a classic Boston strangling,

but a black handyman from Mississippi happened to have cleaned this lady's house that day, left his phone number on the counter. The police got the phone number, chased him down. He was convicted and sent to prison. He died in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit. And no one knew that Al DeSalvo was down the street at our house that day, all day by himself, that he might have committed the murder.

So a death in Belmont is about that possibility. It's a cold case, whod basically. After that I wrote a book called War about this platoon in the 173rd Airborne that I was with off and on for a year in the Korangal Valley. I also shot a lot of video with my buddy Tim and we made a documentary called Verstripo. I was nominated for an Academy Award. A couple months after we were at the Oscars we didn't win but a couple months after we were at the Oscars, we didn't win, but a couple months later, we were supposed to go on assignment to Libya together to cover the Arab Spring,

and at last moment, I couldn't go. And Tim was killed, he died of blood loss from a shrapnel wound in his groin in the city of Misrata. And after that, I decided to give up war reporting, and I wrote a book called Tribe about community and how it works and how soldiers experience it, Native Americans and what the, how the loss of community has affected people in this country and the nation as a whole. And after that I wrote a book called Freedom. It was an examination of

successful underdog groups and how they defeat greater powers. Like if smaller individuals couldn't defeat larger individuals in combat, or smaller groups couldn't defeat larger groups, the empire would always win. Right? I mean, the world would be made up of like fascist coalitions and, um, but that's actually not true. Like under smaller underdog groups are very, actually very good at winning as long as they have certain attributes. And so the book, my book freedom goes into what

those characteristics are that allow smaller groups or smaller individuals to win over larger, more powerful adversaries. Why did the Americans win the revolution? Why did the Viet Cong win Vietnam? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And the problem, you know, just the brief, the very brief version is, uh, with strength and size comes a loss of mobility, a loss of agility.

That's true for an individual in a boxing ring. It's also true for, you know, the U of agility. That's true for an individual in a boxing ring. It's also true for the US military or any military. And the smaller you are, the faster you are. And that can more than compensate for your lack of size and strength. So without that unique trait, it's unique to humans and every other species, size wins, size dominates, right? Only in humans can the smaller entity win. And that allows for human freedom, for human autonomy, self-definition. You know, and then finally, my recent book is called In My Time of Dying.

It's about my near-death experience and what that might mean for all of us facing our mortality and what it might mean for how we understand the universe to function. Great. And then you have a website, like if people want to track you down, not you down personally, but go find a collection of all your stuff. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, obviously on Amazon or your local bookstore, it's easy to get books.

Well, you probably have one of those author profiles on there where people can see everything packaged on Amazon and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But you can also go on sebastianyounger.com is my website and it's J-U-N-G-E-R, sebastianyounger.com. And all my stuff is there as well. All right. Thanks for doing the show, man.

I appreciate it. Ah, I loved it. That was a wonderful conversation. Thank you very much. Yeah, thanks. Thank you very much. Thanks. Steve Rinella here. The American West with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's

former professor. By focusing on deep time, wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American West and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history. And, uh, I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have.

Catch the premiere of the American West with Dan Flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the MeatEater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American West with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out and I mean that in a very good way. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.