Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with Sebastian Junger

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Podcast, you can't predict anything.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
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 first light
dot com. F I R S T L I t
E dot com. Good Lord joined today by Sebastian Younger, journalist,

(00:43):
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 of The Perfect Storm. He's written an
outside magazine where I used to be a correspondent about

(01:06):
many things of whale hunters for one, went on to
do a ton of work about soldiers and the impacts
of war. His latest book, In My Time of Dying,
came out last year. It contemplates death and the afterlife
after a near death experience. The paperback version. Who knows.
If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might

(01:28):
have to wait indefinitely Spring of twenty six. I'd recommend
going getting the hardcover. Other works from Sebastian include Fire Tribe.
I mentioned Perfect Storm already. I remember seeing when that
came out, the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg
after I read the book about a commercial sword fishing

(01:48):
boat that never returned. So we're going to talk about
his new book and also about his years as a
war correspondent and a bunch of our stuff, man Bash
and when you're when when one the Perfect Storm came out?
Do that hit me hard? Like in a good way.

(02:09):
But you know, one of the biggest things is I
used to be a tree a climber for a tree service, really,
and I know that the story came out of that
that you were climbing, you were a tree service climber
had a chainsaw injury. Yep, what was the chain saw injury?

Speaker 2 (02:24):
So I was doing a ton of work and I
was exhausted by the area I lived and it had
been hit by a hurricane.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Assurance.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
I was just doing work for home homeowners that needed
cheap tree work, and I 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.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
I was doing a ton of work. I was a
good climber. I was exhausted, and I I was I had,
you know, I had a little climbing saw and I
was working in a big elm and uh. And there
was a little sucker that was like between my ankles,
like it's sort of getting in the way, like a
tiny little branch, right, and I just reached down. I

(03:05):
was I was in the flow, right, I mean I
was sort of moving right, and I would just reach
down to zip it this little sucker, to sort of
zipp it so it would we wouldn't like tangle up
my feet. And I was just slopping in a hurry.
And the tip of the bar hit the tree and
popped up in the back of my ankle, and uh,
it was I wasn't spiking so I was wearing I

(03:27):
wasn't wearing big leather boots, right because I wasn't spiking
the tree. It was a prune and and it just
went right into the back of my ankle and I
it didn't hurt, but I was like something hit my ankle.
The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw. I
got it, I should just at least take a look
to make sure I'm all right, And UH turned off
the saw and clipped it on my belt and U

(03:48):
and pulled my pant leg up and h sure enough
so I could see my achilles tendon. I mean, I
was looking at it right, and but it wasn't It
wasn't cut. It just had been laid open. And I
repelled down to the you know, the ground, and my
crew took me, took me to a sort of urgent
care place and they sewed me up. But it got me.

(04:09):
I was limping for quite a while, and it got
me thinking about dangerous work and that there's all this
work in this country that the nation needs, right. We
need people drilling for oil, we need loggers, we need
all kinds of people doing you know, commercial fishermen, and
no one's really thinking about them. And they're taking casualty
rates that you know, are sometimes comparable to units in
the US military. Right. I mean, it's like it, there's

(04:32):
the commercial fishing industry is deadly right, And so I thought,
I'm going to write about dangerous work and because it's
no one's thinking about it, and these people deserve some
some love.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
Basically, you were already fixing the writ You were already
fixing to be a writer.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Though. Yeah, I'd spent my I sort of muddled my
way through my twenties trying to figure out how to
be a freelance writer and you know which, you know,
I've waited tables for a while, and then I got
this great job as a climber, which I was really proud.
I was a terrible 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 eighty
feet in the air with a chainsaw or whatever, and

(05:08):
of course you can get killed up there. But I
realized there's no random element, Like if you're going to
get killed doing treework is because you screwed up. You know,
It's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you
rolled the dice wrong, right. You lose a chess because
you may bad decisions and the other guy didn't. And
treework was the same way. If you don't make a mistake,
you're gonna be all right. So really focus, be in

(05:30):
the moment right now and be perfect and there was
almost a sort of zen discipline to that mindset that
I really really liked.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
Did you have awareness of commercial fishing from growing up?
You grow up mass chooses, right, Yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
Mean at the 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 treework from
there locally and in Boston and writing, you know, working
on this writing project. In that writing proce. My girlfriend
was a violinist and uh, you know, pretty typical sort
of bohemian, you know, young person's life for a while,

(06:07):
very nice, and Gloucester was a really you know, rugged
fishing town.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
And I was there.

Speaker 2 (06:12):
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, Andrea Gail, with six men, have been
lost one thousand miles off shore along line here.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
What's that again?

Speaker 2 (06:29):
That storm nineteen ninety one, And then there were these
crazy rescues as well, and the seas offshore were measured
at one hundred feet, which was sort of record setting.
The offshore data booies were registering one hundred feet and
did you.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Can't you can't even like a you know what I mean, Yeah,
you can't picture it?

Speaker 3 (06:45):
Oh god, I mean you gotta picture five feet and
a skiff is like, oh my god, I'm gonna die.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
Yeah, when you're yeah, you gotta like I'm just trying
to think of how to you could probably explain it
to listeners, but I mean, like a five foot swell
of skiers everything. A five foot swell if you're in
a small boat, and a five foot swell your your
sub your sub wave. Yeah, I mean like when you look,

(07:09):
it's just water, hard foot waves.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah. And this was a sixty eight foot steel hauled
longlining long liner and but still sixty eight feet in
seas of seventy eighty feet ninety feet is it'll get overwhelmed, right,
It can be flipped end over end, pitch poled, rolls,
you know, all kinds of things can happen.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Has that Did that boat ever get recovered?

Speaker 2 (07:31):
No? No, they don't. They lost radio contact. They don't
know where it went down.

Speaker 4 (07:35):
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 the boat going up these
waves and down these waves, I think like always stands
out in my mind as something that's in You're watching
it and you're like, this can't.

Speaker 2 (07:53):
Happen on Earth.

Speaker 4 (07:54):
Yeah, did you ever talk to people who had been
in c's like that and what as far as like
what they're how accurately that captured the.

Speaker 2 (08:03):
Yeah, 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 I even talked to a guy named Ernie Hazzard

(08:27):
whose boat was pitch pulled off George's Bank and flipped
end over ends, and he wound up trapped in the
cabin in a flooded cabin upside down at night in
the North Atlantic, I mean, the ultimate nightmare, right, And
he managed to on a lungful of air, swim out
through a busted window and make his way to the

(08:49):
surface in this huge storm and the life raft popped
up right next to him and he got in it
and he managed to survive. So I interviewed him about
what's it like to be trapped in a flooded boat
upside down at night? What's going through your mind? Because
I was trying to recreate the state of mind of
those guys in their last day, the last hours, their
last minutes. And yeah, so these captains said that, you

(09:09):
know the waves, they're they're huge, and the problem isn't
that their individual waves are that big that they will
but they'll converge, like waves will they coming get from
different directions, They'll converge, and suddenly you have a wave
that's twice as high as all the other waves, and
they will just overwhelm you.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Hmm oh man. Yeah, uh, when you like when you
developed I don't want to call it stick seems real condescending,
That's not what I mean. But like when you decided
to focus on that the dangerous work thing? Was that
did that become like a I guess, like a strategic

(09:47):
professional decision or was it was it personal obsession or
was it just like that you wanted to make you
want to make a living as a writer and this
would be a wave that you could develop expertise and
establish a name for yourself.

Speaker 2 (10:01):
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 like sort of ruins your work. But
this was a case actually where a sort of personal

(10:24):
decision about what fascinated me actually coincided with something that
turned out to be a great commercial decision. And you know,
I didn't strategize it like that. I've never thought like
that in terms of my work, but it actually was
a kind of good fit for where the marketplace was
at the time, and no one had really studs. Turtle
wrote a great book called Working It was an oral

(10:44):
history of work, an amazing book, but it wasn't focused
on dangerous work, right, and you know, I just I
just thought this is you know, there was a sort
of class issue here, you know, I mean, the people
that do dangerous work are mostly not exclusively mostly working
class mails and they get hurt and they die without
much fanfare and we're all depending on their work, right,

(11:04):
And I mean we all we live in houses made
out of wood that someone cut down, and we're eating
fish and you know, gone and on, we're driving cars
that oil got drilled out of the ground by somebody,
you know. And and so I just all that was
really compelling to me. And uh and and it turned
out to be a sort of gap in the market.

(11:24):
You know, no one had really focused on this yet,
and so you.

Speaker 1 (11:28):
Know it works. Do you do you intentionally steer clear
of some of the broader geopolitical concerns when you're getting
like like if you get into if you're talking about
oil workers, you don't want to set it up like
it's a debate about dependence on oil, right, if you're
talking about timber, you're not setting it up that it's

(11:51):
a debate about how much old growth logging too much?
Like you try to really focus on these people that
are focus on the lives of people who ye 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,

(12:14):
they're probably aware of the broader geopolitical market factors. That
are pushing them to do what they do. But there
their desire to participate or they're moving into participate is
like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's
what that's what's available to them.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Yeah. So there are great journalists, better journalists than I
am in so many ways, that are writing about the
sort of macro issues. I'm not an economist, I'm not
a scient you know, whatever. There's there's people doing really
good work about the you know, the urgent issues of
our day, the economy, the climate, you know, whatever you
name it. Right, I'm not that guy, right, like what what?

Speaker 1 (12:55):
What? Really?

Speaker 2 (12:56):
And it it interests me because I'm a part of
the planet and part of the country, and I'm invested
in the out in good outcomes, right, 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 in my career, but you know,
many years later, when I was embedded with US forces

(13:18):
in Afghanistan, you know, I had plenty of personal opinions
about the war, you know, and some some positive, some critical,
but I wanted to write about the soldiers, right. I
was one semary third Airborne in a remote valley with
a lot of combat. I was interested in those in
those guys, and they were not They themselves were not
thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just

(13:39):
weren't thinking about it, right, Yeah, And and so when
I wrote my book War and made my film or
Strepo about those guys, there was no discussion about the
larger issues because those guys were not interested in it.
And I wanted to. I wanted to make work that
made people understand what it was like to be an
American soldier in bout Afghanistan. Like end of sentence, and

(14:03):
you know, they're twenty years old, they're twenty one years old.
They're I wasn't thinking about the economy when I was twenty,
Like why why would they, you know, like, why would
they think about the larger issues? They're they're they're they're
already have their hands full of just doing the job
that's right in front of them.

Speaker 1 (14:17):
When when, if if you go back to look at
your work with your work with Swordfish Longliners, where there's
a disaster, 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

(14:41):
you're in the mix, right, I mean that that like
it puts you on the long line boat. Yeah, in
the storm. Yeah? What was that? Like? How would that
with your family friends? Did they think you were not slight?

Speaker 2 (14:57):
Like?

Speaker 1 (14:57):
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 get this rolling?

Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah? I mean I'd done a little bit of that
in the early nineties. That was in Idaho on some
hot shot crews. They're fighting these big fires. I was
really interested in wildland fire and myself I would have
loved to have been on a hot shot crew. I
just didn't. From the East Coast where I lived, the
bureaucracy trying to figure out how to do that just
on a bureaucratic level was almost impossible, and so I

(15:30):
ended up reporting on them, spent quite a lot of
time out there. So I was I sort of participant
a journalist in some situations before that. But my first
war was in nineteen ninety three on backup for one second.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
When you were doing the fire stuff, though, did they
really let you get in there or was it too
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.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
For no, they just put They just put me on
a helicopter and dropped me in and yeah, yeah, yeah
it was amazing. And I mean with absolutely no I
absolutely no credentials or anything. I mean, I just showed up.

Speaker 1 (16:05):
It's refreshing to hear that that. Yeah, someone didn't be
like no, no, no, no, no, you stay here.

Speaker 2 (16:10):
It was the early nineties, right, I don't you know,
maybe different now, But I showed up. I was like, hey,
you know, I'm interested in writing about wildland fire and
could you get me on a crew? And the next
thing I knew, I was in a helicopter. They dropped
me off for the shot crew up in the you know,
mountains north of Idaho, north of Boise. It was a
huge fire.

Speaker 1 (16:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (16:26):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
Well, you know, most wars are don't involve you as 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 nineteen ninety six. I watched the
Taliban takeover. I was with the in Kobble.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
Yeah, because you interviewed you interviewed a mom.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
Masud. Yes, I'm Shamsud.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
He was killed, Yeah, he was killed by later interviewers.

Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah, I interviewed him. I spent two months with him
and his forces in Badakshan in two thousand and the
fall of two thousand and I was with his commanders
when they took when they liberated Kabo after nine to eleven.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
And that's incredible, man, Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
So the guy, you know, the US government has nothing
to do with that decision of yours to go seek
out Masud and spend a couple of months with him
fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. They have nothing to
do with it, right, And so I wasn't embedded with
US forces until two thousand and five, was the first time.
So most of my war reporting has not been with
US forces.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
It's just Spen. You try to get closer, closer, closer,
until you're in it.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, so I was, you know, my first war was
Sarajevo in nineteen ninety three, 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 and Ukraine, except on a
much scale. Right, It's not Russian Ukraine. It's the Bosnian
Serbs and in Bosnia, but the same sort of awful

(18:07):
shelling of civilians they besieged Sarajevo. It was an ethnic,
ethnically driven conflict, you know, sort of a nationalistic conflict
and grotesque, grotesquely violent, And I you know, I managed
to convince a magazine editor I knew at a magazine
called Men's Journal, which is back in the day a
pretty good magazine, and he wrote, he gave he gave

(18:28):
me a sort of letter of passage like Sebastian is
working on a piece for us for which wasn't even
true for the boar of civil war in Bosnia, and please,
you know, help them in any way you can I
just like showed that to some un guy and he
gave me a un press pass and the next thing
I knew, I was on a relief flight into Sarajevo
and then boom there. I was like it was no
credentials from anybody, right, But there were a lot of

(18:50):
freelancers in Sarajevo who made their made their bones. I
mean it sort of like learned the craft because they
just put themselves in that situation. They started lansing radio newspaper.
You know. I went there basically the girlfriend I was
living with in Gloucester dumped me and I was, you know.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
I'll show you, right. So I was sort of heart
heartbroken and.

Speaker 2 (19:14):
Like, oh I can you mean, I can do anything
I want right now? Are you kidding?

Speaker 1 (19:17):
Right?

Speaker 2 (19:17):
So it was that that heady mix of heartbreak and liberation,
you know what I mean. It's sort of an interesting
moment and people in your life and uh So I
went to SFO and there was a lot of other
freelancers like me, and I would say eighty percent of
them were young males like I was. And I would
say eighty percent of those guys had just been dumped
by their girlfriend, like.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
You know eight.

Speaker 4 (19:38):
So oh sorry, I was gonna say, there's a there's
a book My War Gone By miss it.

Speaker 2 (19:44):
So yeah, I met him. Yeah, I met him in
Bosnia in ninety three.

Speaker 4 (19:49):
I mean that I remember reading that. That probably read
that fifteen or so years ago. But yeah, it's a
very similar story. I mean it's like in hotel rooms.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
And yeah, he was probably dumped by his girlfriend. Also, yeah,
he seemed like it.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
You know, it was seventeen years ago this summer that
I first decided I didn't want to die, okay, And
I realized when I was I topped my last I
topped my last big tree. Yeah, and and you know
that thing when you relieve that top load, it really

(20:24):
bucks like Bucks huge. And I used to just I
liked it, was indifferent to it, didn't think about it.
And I was like, man, I don't want to I
climbed down on that tree. Never like I changed my behaviors.
And I was getting married that summer. But you have
to to go do what you did, Like tree climb

(20:46):
is one thing, but to go do you did, and
like go into Afghanistan during the Civil War when for
a lot of people, having an American captive is really cool.
And then being able to like kill an American captive
is enticing. Right, It's like you had to kind of
have been like I mean, I don't sound like you know,

(21:07):
like you had like like it's like a mental issue,
but you had to be like kind of indifferent to death. No.

Speaker 2 (21:12):
I wasn't indifferent to death, but I felt like I
was taking calculated risks that were manageable, like I wouldn't. Yeah,
I would never have gone into Syria. I mean Syria
there was an open market for Western Yeah, right.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
So when Afghanistan didn't feel that way when you were.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Wow, But he was also blown up, Yeah, of course,
I mean right, but I don't shooting people around him, right.

Speaker 2 (21:41):
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 the people. I mean I was
there to report on the frankly, the tragedy and the
outrage of what the Taliban back by Pakistan were doing
to the Afghan people, Right, I mean and they were
full the people, the Northern Alliance and MASUD were fully
on board with the fact that someone had from the
West and pressed had come in to shine a spotlight

(22:02):
on them. So I was very I.

Speaker 1 (22:03):
Mean, they felt protected.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
They would have died protecting me, right, I mean, 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.

Speaker 1 (22:28):
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, because 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.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
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 the two scariest moments I
think were moments were 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.
I was coming back from a frontline fight back towards

(23:06):
Freetown and with a couple of government soldiers and a
couple of journalists and a group of rebels stepped out
of the jungle and stopped us on this deserted road.
And two weeks later they wiped out two cars full
of journalists on the same road, like right near where
we were. These same guys stopped us and they had

(23:28):
their rifles the machine guns leveled, and they were arguing
with each other. We were in an open jeep and
they were arguing with each other, seemed to be arguing
with each other but whether to kill us all or not.
And we just said there was nothing we could do,
and we just sat there. And at one point one
of them like leveled his rifle at us to fire,
and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards
so it wouldn't come. So, you know, I had, you know,

(23:51):
for about ten or fifteen minutes, I was thinking this
really could go down, right, And it was the extraordinary feeling.
I became sort of I just associated, right, I mean,
my body sort of went numb, and I was so
scared that I wasn't even scared anymore. It's like I
wasn't there, and the psychological effect. And then they didn't

(24:12):
shoot us, and I don't know why, right, And the
psychological trauma of that is way worse than someone shooting
at you from three hundred meters and you managed to
get behind some sandbags. I mean, that's child's play, right,
compared to, Wow, we are totally screwed and they could
shoot us or not. And then a similar thing happened
in Nigeria in two thousand and six. I was seized

(24:32):
by rebels, the Ejah Warriors, who were fighting in a
group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta,
a partly criminal, partly righteous like group. And they seized
me in a small village in the creeks and the
Niger River and in the Delta, and the accused me
of being a spy. And one guy came up sort

(24:53):
of strutted up to me, you know, machine gun and
these guys, these Ejoh warriors are they they got feathers
and paint and all kinds of Fea dishes on them.
And they're wild looking guys, right, and really intense warriors.
And he said, very matter of fact, very matter of factly,
he said, when we when we kill you later today,
I'm going to be the one to do it. He

(25:14):
didn't say it meanly, he was just I just want
you to know, you know, just by way of introduction.

Speaker 1 (25:18):
That's like Princess Bride. Remember the pirate probably kill you
in the morning.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
Right, So I you know, I was just remember thinking,
don't let your knees buckle, like whatever you do, don't
let your knees buckle. And so those, you know, those
two situations are.

Speaker 1 (25:33):
Do you think he's just tormenting you?

Speaker 2 (25:36):
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 myself connection with him. And he was in

(25:56):
South Africa, actually he was an arms dealer and Africa
but indigenous Ejaw, and I talked with him and he said, okay,
give the phone back to the the guy who gave
you the phone. And I didn't know what he was
going to say, and he say kill him or don't
any I gave the phone back and the guy said, okay, sir, yes, sir,

(26:17):
all right, we'll do it. And I didn't know what,
you know, and he shut the phone, you know, flip
the phone with the flip phone. He flipped the clothes
and they said it's gonna be fine, We're gonna let
you go. But I didn't know until that moment that
it would be fine. So they might have been bluffing.
I mean he might You know, I'm an American, right,
I mean, you know there are repercussions for whacking America.

Speaker 3 (26:37):
Was going to ask, is there is there, like any truth?
Is it like a myth that like being a member
of like the American press, affords you some degree of
safety in those situations.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Well, I mean it protects you with people that don't
want to get on the wrong side of America, and
the e Jaw, as badassed as they are, probably don't want,
you know, the American military as an adversary. They you know,
they have their hands full of the Nigerian military, right. So,
but then there's groups like ISIS who make you know,
there the point of their existence is to fight America,

(27:12):
to fight the infidelal to fight the West. So you know,
it's like depends what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:33):
Oh it was. It was so nice, right because I
didn't have to worry that the people I was with
were gonna 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 and
as I would them as I got to know them, right,
I mean, I really this one, you know. So I
spent most in beds are a week or two, right,

(27:54):
And but I spent a year off and on with
one platoon, which was like thirty forty guys at this
remote outpost called Bristreppo was named after the platoon medic
who was killed, you know, basically at the bottom of
the hill. And so I really became part of that
platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of

(28:15):
a group, you know, I mean a really ancient and
a really ancient and pretty much a way that's been
pretty much lost to our society here at home. I
felt like, Wow, I belonged to this thing, and they
would risk their lives for me, and I know I
would for them, and here we are, let's get it done,
you know. And it was. It was absolutely extraordinary, and

(28:38):
so that that experience really changed me, right, I mean,
I feel like in our society we don't get to
enjoy that group affiliation at such a profound in such
a profound way. And it is what our evolutionary past
consists of, right, that we're social primates. We survived. We
survived not because we're rugged individuals, but because we affiliate

(28:58):
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.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
You know.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
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 this is all I want,
Like I don't want to go home? Why would I
want to do that?

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Like?

Speaker 2 (29:28):
It was quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1 (29:29):
And that was with how that was a group of
what size? Then?

Speaker 2 (29:33):
You know, thirty guys or so? I mean, you know,
so thirty to fifty people was the anthropologists will tell
you it was 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,
and it you know, it's sort of a perfect size.

(29:55):
It's the largest number that you can have quite close
emotional relationships with. And you can't be emotionally close to
five hundred dudes, right, it's not happening. Right, even if
you're in the same battalion. That's a rather abstract knowledge, right,
But thirty forty people, You're like, wow, these are my people.
What wouldn't I do for them?

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Right?

Speaker 2 (30:12):
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 you know, 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
thirty or forty people. That is the human experience and

(30:33):
evolutionary terms, and it's the loss of that experience for
most people in modern society is a tragic one.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
The other day, we had some anthropologists here and they
were excavating. They had been working on an excavation of
an ice age encampment and wyoming. Okay, so these are
like mammoth hunters, right right, and we're about, well, how big,

(31:02):
like how big was the encampment? Then he's like thirty
forty people? Yeah, yeah, yah, yeah, exactly, yeah, age, you
know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, No, that's exactly, that's exactly right.

Speaker 1 (31:13):
Yeah. There's the thing I've been like, you should feel
free as we're talking. I would. I appreciate that you're
not doing this, but I I appreciate the impulse. Please
tie into the books. Oh yeah, like what you're talking
about now is your book tribe? Yes?

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Right, exactly, Yeah, I wrote a book, right, I wrote
a book tribe.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
That's not what you're talking about, but you're yeah, these
ideas are explored and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (31:42):
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 his
various points in Pennsylvania and the Ohio and further west
all the way to Texas and Arizon, Like why we're
pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native society and disappearing

(32:07):
in native society and the natives didn't do the opposite,
and and what it really seemed to be And in
Benjamin Franklin wrote about this because of course, if you're
like a good Christian, the idea that like white Christians
would rather live with what they called the savages, like
is it flies in the face of the entire sense
of Western superiority, right, And Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about

(32:28):
this like what is the appeal? And the appeal is
that that those kinds of organic hunter gatherer societies are
extremely egalitarian. The leadership is not imposed, it's granted by
the people. I mean, all these sort of like democratic
ideals that are that we do not live up to

(32:49):
actually are acted out in societies of that scale. And
and there's community, there's community, really close community. And and
of course if you're a young man, instead of having
to plow fields all day, you can go hunting, like
you know what I mean, like what like what's not
to like sort of yeah, and and so that so
that was my the genesis of my thought that maybe

(33:12):
what people are really drawn to is close connection to
each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with,
against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo. They
got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars
and everything, you know, all the things young men like.
He's like, whoa. I mean, A number of them said
to me, if we could take a helicopter back to

(33:33):
Restrepo right now and do another year out there, we
would do it.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:37):
And that's how that So my book Tribe was about
that phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
We recently had a guy on a guy named is
pastor Shane Yats, who's sitting right in that chair, and
he was talking about coming home from thanks Yeah, coming
home from Iraq. No, coming home from I think it
was in Afghanistan. Coming home from Afghanistan. Was that where
it was was the kids like eating. He's like, there's

(34:01):
you know, you're 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
as you're just home and he's standing there and here's
a woman arguing with a Starbucks employee about the state
of her latte, and he's like, I wanted to kill her.

(34:23):
He's talking about just the heart, like the very difficult adjustment.
But there's this thing I've been and think about what
you're you're talking about and the ideas that you explore
and tribe. It's like, I'm kind of struggling with this
thing I'm seeing happened later. I'm just becoming aware of it.
And it's very troubling to me about American culture, where

(34:45):
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

(35:07):
being an American outside of the web, right, meaning any
one of my neighbors. Any one of my neighbors would
if my house was on fire, any one of my
neighbors would go into my house to get my kids.
I would go into any one of my neighbors houses

(35:28):
to get their kids. And when I say this, I'm
not like I have no idea of the political affiliation
except for one of my neighbors, I have no idea
of their political affiliation zero. But like, you get this.
I used to think of people think of the like
the radical right and the radical left as being like

(35:48):
diametrically opposed. I'm starting to view it more like that
these are just symptoms of a that these are symptoms
of an ailment. Yeah, It's like you could have a
certain ailment and you might get like like stunning headaches,
or you might have a certain ailment and be other
people would have the same ailment and be that that

(36:09):
they can't get a full breath or whatever, or all
the weird shit that would happen to people with COVID.
It's like too much time online is the thing. Yeah,
and then the symptoms are you could be radicalized in
one direction, you radicalize in the other direction. Don't You're
like you want it being that you're just bound by
what you hate, Like your culture is my people that
I find are people that hate what I hate, right,

(36:32):
and that's my team. And dude, and like the part
of your time, I was like that need like like
build a team that's not based on just that you
all hate the same shit.

Speaker 2 (36:41):
Right. Well, you know, in evolutionary terms, outrage is a
powerful unifier because you're you're unified with other people who
are out 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 that that anger and outrage response is a very

(37:03):
effective defense against the threat. Right, And the algorithms that
are used in social media are very good at generating outrage.
It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle but
also very important feelings of love or sadness or regret.

(37:25):
You know, there's a gentler emotions that also are really
important for keeping society and people glued together. Right, shared
value is shared I shared warmth with each other. You know,
those are hard. They don't have the algorithms for that.
The algorithms for hatred are very very simple. There's a
threat over there. We have to unify, we have to
denounce the threat and unify against it, and then we'll survive. Right,

(37:47):
So you're going into very very ancient human history when
you gin up those emotions. And you know, it used
to be that at the town hall, someone might stand
you know, before the internet, right before the apocalypse of
the internet that came along, you got, you know, the
town hall and someone would stand up with a different
view about you know, paving the streets or whatever, and

(38:07):
you'd be like, Okay, I'm totally against that, but that's Joe.
I know his you know I have, I have a
relationship with Joe, like and I don't agree with them,
and I might even at them, shouting at him. But
we're all in this together. We all live in this
little you know. That's gone right, And so you can
hate on people online and there are no repercussions. You know,

(38:28):
the person is not going to come grab you by
the shirt front and say, do not speak to me
like that in front of my community or in front
of my family. You're not any danger, right, You're free
to be a sort of cowardly adversary and that's very
seductive to a lot of people. And so I, you know,
I don't the internet's a great tool for all kinds
of things. I don't, you know, I have a flip

(38:48):
phone because I think the smartphones are just like killing people,
like literally literally killing people. There. It's a it was
a deliberate addiction designed by the tech companies, right, It's
a very powerful addiction. It's particularly powerful with our children.
And I think it's you know, I think it's destroying
the society. I just refuse to participate in it.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
Yeah. Man, it's tough because, like I use the Internet
to find out how the Internet is destroying society because
I'm into this thing right now. It's like American Veterans Institute.
It's like interviews with World War Two veterans. They just
they've been very good. Like when these guys they kind
of were catching all these dudes in their eighties nineties.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
I've seen some of those amazing.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
It's like, I'll tell my wife, I'm sitting there on
a Saturday morning. I'm sitting there doing some work and
I got one bottle was playing and I was like, uh,
I said, this is going to sound so nostalgic. But
holy shit, we've fallen far. Like listening to interview after
interview after interview with these guys about they all kind

(39:56):
of start like, where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?
Right right in the portraits they paint, there's this dude,
there's this Italian dude. And he says, like he goes
down to he goes down to a gas station or
something to buy soda, you know, and everybody's in the
gas station's listening because Pearl harvard'st got attacked. He goes home,

(40:17):
his dad listens to the address from Franklin. Roosevelt calls
his four sons down into the room informs them, you
will all fight because we move to this country. We
have a house in a car. This country cannot fail.
And he says when he goes to the train station,
his dad makes a point that his dad wants to
drive him alone to the train station, so he's expecting

(40:41):
some kind of lecture. His dad never says a word
to him all the drive. They get to the train station,
and you know what his dad says to him. He
says to him, an Italian, don't do anything that will
cause me to hang my head in shame. Wow, that
was it, Dude out the door, and I'm like, I
don't know, Mad is getting stuf about it, you know, yeah, yeah,

(41:02):
Like it's just like I feel like something's crowding. Like
I'm just like, I have this terrible anxiety about culture
right now, with with like the internet hatred.

Speaker 2 (41:10):
Yeah, I mean, I still you know, we're we're all
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.

Speaker 1 (41:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
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. Right.
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 you know that the country is My

(41:48):
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'm you know, I was born in this country. Whatever,
It's all great. So the idea that we're all unified
in this American project is an incredibly powerful one, right,
And and it transcends, it should transcend all these other divisions,
including left and right. And I think one of the

(42:10):
problems right now is that the internet. Look, I have
a laptop, I'm online, I research stuff, I get it.
I just don't have a smartphone because I don't want
that following me around all day and being where my
brain disappears when I have thirty seconds to spare while
I'm waiting for the bus, Like, I just that to
me is horrible, right for the brain. But I uh,

(42:31):
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.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
Yeah, that's that's what that's as a patriot. That's what
I'm getting worried about increasingly. Was that your quote were
you quoting somebody when you said the journalists I can't
mary if you said it should or shouldn't or is
it not should or do or whatever. But like, journalists
don't tell you what to think.

Speaker 2 (43:03):
Right, journalists don't tell you what I was. I was
paraphrasing someone else who was actually talking about theater. Oh
it's interesting, right, but I repurposed it for journalist journalism as.
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.
Don't listen.

Speaker 1 (43:22):
They're a commentator, right, an analyst or a commentatory.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
Worse than an analyst, like and we need analysts, they're commentator.
They're a commentator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know, and
so I feel like the internet as 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

(43:48):
of monetize this, right, and and what they are sacrificing,
maybe not deliberately and consciously, but ultimately what's happening is
they are they are sacrificing the cultural and political unity
of this country for smaller for smaller gains, for smaller
personal gains, you know, including many politicians who do that.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Let's talk about your health scare man.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Yeah, I've never heard of that. Yeah, me, neither happened
to me.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
And 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.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
You know, you gotta be careful here, Steve, because you
might get your your thing where you you think you're
developing a problem because he talks about it.

Speaker 1 (44:40):
Yeah, I have this like if someone's telling me, like whatever,
any problem someone tells especially internal. Oh yeah, Like you're like, yeah,
you know, I got a whatever in my kidney. I'm like,
well a bit now I got a weird feeling of
my kidney.

Speaker 2 (44:55):
Yeah. Yeah, Well that that sort of paranoid is very
human and it and it and and uh it helps
keeps us, 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
they go to the doctor and say, you know, so
there's a there is a sort of use for that.
But so basically what happened to me. I have a

(45:15):
I have a ligament in the wrong place, my median
arcuate ligament, which sort of goes across your abdomen about
where your sternam is.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
I would know you had I guess you do have
a ligament in your abdomen.

Speaker 2 (45:26):
Yeah, yeah, and it can cross it crosses right near
the bottom of your rib cage, crosses your abdomen, and
mine is too tight. So it has 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

(45:47):
big it is, and.

Speaker 1 (45:48):
It comes right on I don't want to know. I
have this thing I'm trying to do where when someone's
telling me someone I don't understand. Yep, you know, the
impulse is going huh.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
I'm trying to picture it when I'm cutting a deer
open would be.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
Like, I don't understand.

Speaker 2 (46:01):
So, so the celiac comes out out of the aorta
and the descending aorda, and it branches down and it
brings blood to the liver and the intestines and the
stomach and the all the organs in your abdomen. Right,
So a lot of blood goes through this if you
block it with a ligament.

Speaker 1 (46:19):
So also this ligament is like on the outside pushing it,
binding in right, and it's just crimping it off exactly.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
It's just an irregularity It isn't because I led a
bad life and them filled with cholesterol and nothing like that. Right,
It's just a sort of bad design, right, It's very rare.
But what the body does, because 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 uh, sort of redundancy in the vascular system,
so the blood flows to where it needs to go

(46:49):
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.

(47:09):
It will balloon outwards, and it's called an aneurysm. Okay,
and the artery wall will balloon outwards and it will
get bigger over the course of decades. So it's there's
no symptoms. Uh, it's very hard to detect, and it
very slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then
when it ruptures, and it will. When it ruptures, you

(47:30):
are suddenly bleeding. You're bleeding out from an artery. You
know what arterial bleed is, deadly right, You're bleeding out
from an artery, a smaller artery into your own abdomen.
So if someone stabbed you in the stomach and you
made it alive to the hospital, the doctors don't have
anything to figure out. They're like, oh, we know what
the problem is exactly. They know where to stick their

(47:53):
finger almost literally to stop the bleed. Like it's there's
no mystery there with internal hemorrhage, it could be anywhere, right,
And so this happened five years ago and it was during.

Speaker 1 (48:05):
But you know when the blood's coming out, Well.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
I didn't know that's what was happening, but I felt
a lot of pain, right, But I'm an old stoic, and.

Speaker 1 (48:12):
It's like high pressure blood.

Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah, well, I mean blood, blood's and irritant when it's
not in the vascular that's what's causing the pain.

Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
So I'm like, there's blood around my kidneys and around
my liver, and it just like feels odd. It's very
very full of a sudden in mid sentence, ruptured so I mean,
I mean we're taught.

Speaker 1 (48:30):
What was the sentence?

Speaker 2 (48:31):
Yeah, I'm gonna live forever. I think this is a sentence.
So so it was. It was during COVID and my
so I have two little girls and a eight and
five at the time, there were three three years old
in 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

(48:52):
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 atlant It's basically paradise, right. It's an old house
from eighteen hundred, and we were there during COVID, and
I built a post and bean cabin deeper in the woods,
and one day we managed some teenage girls who lived
up the road that we knew called When does this

(49:14):
ever happen? They called and said, Hey, we're free this afternoon.
Would you like some babysitting time? Right? And I was like, yes,
we pay one thousand dollars an hour, Like how long
can you how long can you stay? Right? Yeah? So
they came over a few hours and my wife and
I went out to this.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
Beautiful little cabin.

Speaker 2 (49:29):
It's totally off the grid, like oil lamp, woodstove. You know,
I felt it myself, you know. So we're in this
place of peace and beauty and and just to sort
of enjoying our you know, a couple of hours of
alone time, and all of a sudden, this is pain.
Am I at them, like, oh, what was that? And

(49:51):
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'd never
thought i'd have to ever say these words to anyone.
I said, I think I'm gonna need some help. And

(50:13):
you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young.
I was a really good competitive runner. I've always been
very fit, very healthy. I just never thought that I
would need physical help from anybody. You know. It's just
like never, never, And now my wife's dragging me out
of the woods, like literally dragging me down a trail
to get me to help, and we finally got there
was no cell phone.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
She had one of those like mysterious bursts of power.

Speaker 2 (50:37):
Well I got, you know, she didn't care. I mean
I had my arm over her shoulder. I wasn't unconscious,
but I was sort of half Oh I got. I
thought she was like pulling in yeah, right right, the
car off the baby nor so, so the ambulance game,
you know, it took him twenty minutes to get there.
I'm losing a pint of blood maybe every ten or
fifteen minutes in my aben but all in you, all
in me, and and you can lose about half your

(50:59):
blood before you die. And we live an hour from
the hospital, so you can do the math like it was.
I was a human hourglass and they, you know, they
their ambulance got there, and I had sort of rebooted
it that you go into compensatory shocks, so your body,
it's extraordinary. Your body knows when there's a five alarm fire,
even though even if you don't, right, I didn't know
I was dying, had no idea, right, and so it

(51:21):
it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body
that you don't need to survive your your your surface areas,
your skin, your legs, your arms, and it pools it
in your brain and in your abdomen, in your heart,
around your heart. So when it does that, your blood
pressure goes back up, and and I became sort of
clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there. They

(51:42):
were like, you know, it's a hot day. You probably dehydrated, sir.
You know they're looking at me. I'm fifty eighth. They're like,
you're an old man, you know, twenty right, dehydration thing man, Yeah,
and why don't you sit in the shade and drink
some water and call us if you still don't feel well?
And my wife, oh my god, my wife said, you
got you're taking him to the hospital, like he couldn't

(52:02):
walk a few minutes ago.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
Like I've seen thirsty people. Yeah, right exactly. And he
was not in my mind at the time.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
I remember thinking, I've always heard that married men live longer.
This is why I'm seeing it right now.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
So because your wife's I was like, why don't you
see somebody about it? So they put me in.

Speaker 2 (52:25):
They started the long drive, and my compensatory shock held
for most of the drive and right when we got
to the hospital.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
And they've got no idea what's going on.

Speaker 3 (52:34):
So they didn't like, check your bib alls. Well they
say that something was well.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
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 bike. Okay, right,
except I'm very fit. So they looked at my heart
rate and was probably in the eighties. They're like, all right,

(52:58):
he's almost sixty years old. His heart rates in the eighties,
that's pretty normal, got it right, My heart rates fifty five,
So they didn't know I was thirty beats up. Had
they known that, they would they were like, oh, this
is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But I my
fitness level was masking it, right, So they were totally
cavalier about it.

Speaker 1 (53:17):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:17):
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 decompensated. It has to decompensate
at some point. And when 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 immediately diagnosed me immediately and sent me through

(53:39):
a cat scan. They saw that where the blood was pooling,
and they and oh, so I'm in the trauma bay
and well, h yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:48):
That's want to mention what you were just described? And
would you say your hype Like, what'd you say?

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Uh, hemorrhagic chuck? So is that?

Speaker 1 (53:57):
No?

Speaker 4 (53:57):
They said something about hypothermia.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
Oh yeah, you go into hypothermia when you have when
you're in hemorrhagic shock, your body gets hypothermic.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
I understand that. Why Why is that?

Speaker 2 (54:07):
It's as if you're very, very cold. Your body can't
keep up its internal temperature.

Speaker 1 (54:12):
All right, Which is 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 well?

Speaker 2 (54:19):
I was convulsiate. I mean I was having like these
spastic shivering like oh really oh yeah yeah yeah yeah No.
I I don't know what was going on, but I
kind of sensed it wasn't good. I didn't know I
was dying.

Speaker 1 (54:30):
I mean, there's a lot of you knew it was
a cold feeling.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
Well, yes, I was shaking. I've only shaked. I've only
shaken like that when I was very very cold. And
I've never even convulsively shaked. Huh right, shaken, shaked, shaken,
whatever it is.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
So I knew.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
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 yeah, exactly. So so
it never crossed my mind. Of course everyone else knew,
and they.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
So they were they like they were able to look
at what's going on because 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, do
you have enough?

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah? Yeah, I had all this. I had all the symptoms, right,
And and then they saw it on the CT scan
and so my blood pressure was sixty over forty, right,
I'd lost half my blood at that point. I was
probably ten minutes from dead right, I needed ten units
of blood to stay alive, which is basically a full
oil change.

Speaker 1 (55:29):
Like, how do they get the old blood out? They
pump it out.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
No, it's in your abdomen and then it takes a
few months to be reabsorbed by your body if you survived.

Speaker 1 (55:37):
So they don't try to get it out.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
No, no, no, it's not doing it. They got like they
got their sun pouch. No, no, no that they don't.
That doesn't matter, like that they would, Yeah, they don't
need to worry about that. I was probably ten minutes
from dead right, and they put me in the trauma
bay and a doctor, a doctor starts prepping my neck

(55:59):
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 he asked my permission to
do this, and I still didn't get I was like,
you mean, in case there's an emergency. He's like, this
is the emergency right now. If you say so, my life,
you know. My wife seemed worried also, But if I
you know, whatever, do what you gotta do. And I'm

(56:22):
lying there while he's working on my neck and all
of a sudden and I have to stop and just explain.
I'm an atheist, right, my dad was an atheist and
a physicist. She's like as well, yeah, well sort of
atheist squared right, like hyper rational. And I'm a lifelong atheist.
So you need to know this for what I'm about
to say, because it flew in the face of a

(56:45):
lot of of my understanding of reality, understanding of life
in the world. A little bit, uh so beneath me,
into my left, this sort of yawning blackness opened up,
like the universe had sort of cracked open. He said,
this just infinite black void, and I was getting pulled
into it, and I didn't want to go. I was

(57:06):
like a wounded animal, like I didn't I wasn't thinking
about my family. I didn't know I was dying. I
just didn't want to go into the vast darkness, right,
like when you take your dog to the vat and
dog doesn't want to go to the I was like that, like, no, no, no,
I'm not going in there. And I was getting pulled
in and I couldn't stop it, and I was panicking.
And then above me, to my left suddenly appeared my

(57:28):
dead father. He'd been dead eight years and he was
there in this just energy form, like it wasn't even
quite vision that I used to perceive him, like, it
was a sense that I it was a sense that's
not familiar to me. But it was absolutely like, Oh,
there's my dad, Like what is he doing? He was

(57:49):
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

(58:12):
like I loved him, but my connection to him was
not visceral and loving in that in that way that
he was at that moment, like he was in some
ways the most loving, sort of viscerally loving thing he'd
ever done for me. Right in that moment, It's like,
I'll take care of you. And I was horrified. I
was like, you're dead, why would I go with you?

(58:34):
I'm alive. The parties over here, like what are you
doing here? I mean, I was shocked and horrified, offended,
almost offended that he would think I would want to
go with him and not want to stay alive with
my family. I was really offended. I was like, what
do you what do you think? And I said to
the doctor, you got to hurry. I'm going.

Speaker 3 (58:52):
I was going to ask you if you were aware
that you were conscious or not.

Speaker 5 (58:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:56):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:56):
I was talking to the doctor. And then there was
my dad and I said said to he was over here,
I said, you got to hurry. I'm going right now.
I'm being taken. Oh.

Speaker 1 (59:05):
Did the hole in your dad seem like diametric? They were?

Speaker 2 (59:09):
They they were connected to each other. He was like,
don't be sort of he didn't say this, but he basically,
don't be scared of what's happening right now.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
So it wasn't a different directions, no, no, no, well, he
was there, the pit was above me.

Speaker 2 (59:20):
He was up there. But basically he was saying, you
don't have to I was fighting going into the hole. Yeah,
and he's 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.

Speaker 1 (59:30):
I'll accompany you into them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Yeah, And they eventual and.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
You're and you're still talking to this doctor.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
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 didn't
do anything. I was in a huge amount of pain,
and they brought me into the Indivendual Radiology Suite. And
which is this IR is this sort of like magic. Basically,

(59:59):
like you're on a fluoroscope, which is an X ray
machine that takes real time video, and they pop a
hole in your groin and they thread a wire up
your femoral artery and they can snake it around to
any part of your body. So instead of if they
need to put a stint in your orda, they can
put it in by wire instead of opening your heart
up right, It's amazing what they can do. And they
were trying to get the wire to the ruptured artery

(01:00:22):
to embolize it, to block it so I would stop bleeding.
And the alternative to doing that, this is what they
would have had to do twenty years ago, is like
cut me open and try to find the bleed before
I bled out. Right, and the outcomes are terrible for that.
And if they'd had to do that, they would have
brought my wife into Sagabye. They told me that later,
like we would have brought her into say goodbye, because

(01:00:42):
you probably wouldn't have made it. So they were trying
and trying with this wire to thread its way through
my sort of weird vasculature because the ligament can totally
contorted all my vasculature when it compensated, right, and they
couldn't get the wire to the place. And I was
in the on the fluoroscope for hours, and now it's
two in the morning, and I remember the doctors giving up, right,

(01:01:04):
and I remember them so when I'm shrugging, is like, well,
we tried, we did everything we could, and now I
finally realized that I might die, like I didn't know
it until then.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
And during this they're pumping blood to you and you're
just bleeding it out.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
It's kind of like, yeah, that's right. 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 acidosis and they can't

(01:01:38):
get ahead of it, and it will kill you. So
I I was right at the edge of where that
process would start, right, and so I was barely hanging on.
The nurse was there holding my hand, and that human
contact was so important, I mean literally important for survival. Right.
You need the doctors that you know the mechanics, but
you also need some because it's very lonely. Dying is
being being a patient in a hospital, extremely lonely. Right,

(01:02:00):
everyone's mask, there's very bright lights. You don't know what's
going on. And to this nurse she was holding my hand,
she was like, breathe with me, It's okay, keep your
eyes open. I'm right here. And you know, I was
choosing by like lifeline. And one of the reasons I survived.
I shouldn't have survived. The doctors didn't think I would
and they're sort of amazed that I did. But one
of the reasons I survived was that human connection along

(01:02:22):
with amazing medical.

Speaker 4 (01:02:24):
Did you have a glove on or it was skin?

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
I don't remember, it was skin and it was skin. Yeah,
it was just absolutely crucial. And so the 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?

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
I had no idea?

Speaker 2 (01:02:45):
And then the doctor said, why don't we try going
through his left wrist? And the other doctor was like, wow,
I like the way you think that. And so because
of the wed my weird vasculature, that was a different
angle of attack that the doc, the IR guy thought
my work and it did. And he saved my life.
And you know, he'd been called from dinner an hour

(01:03:06):
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 uh so
they brought me up to the ICU. You know, then
they sedated me, they put me under, and you know,
I was in this sort of wild darkness for like
one hundred years or something like. I felt like I

(01:03:29):
was gone for a very long time. And then the
next thing I knew, I heard this really intense Boston
accent a woman speaking in a So this isn't on
Cape cod at Massachusetts, right, You all know the Boston
accent not the loveliest accent on the planet.

Speaker 5 (01:03:46):
Right, pretty harsh you said that, yeah, us, Yeah, it's
pretty harsh, pretty harsh, pretty harsh accent, right, and just
this woman speaking a really intense Boston accent. And I'm
still in my darkness, right, my eyes are closed, Like.

Speaker 2 (01:04:04):
Where am I? Like there? Probably don't have these accents
anywhere you want to go later, right, might not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:12):
Be a good signs getting me. So I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:18):
Opened my eyes and she said, congratulations, mister 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 cout
right there, right, And I was shocked. I have no
idea I almost died, right. I was absolutely shocked. It's
quite traumatic to find that out right, particularly if you

(01:04:39):
have young kids. I was absolutely shocked. Then she left
because she was doing her rounds, and I'm a mess.
I'm throwing up blood, I got wires coming out all
over the place. I'm a total mess. But I couldn't
stop thinking about what she told me. And she came
back and she said, how you doing. I said, well,
not that great, actually, Like what you say is terrifying.

(01:05:00):
I had no idea. I'd almost died and I can't
stop thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing
I think just about anyone has ever said to me.
She said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like
something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.

Speaker 1 (01:05:17):
Then she walked up.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
I later tried to find her, you know, 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 anything that helps preserve human dignity, Like
that's a sacred task. It might be a school teacher,

(01:05:39):
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, you know, on our best days, that's like
sacred work. Right, So I thought, I've been going to

(01:06:03):
front lines my whole life. I stopped. After my buddy
Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate
front line my own mortality. I was allowed to come back.
Did I come back with sacred information that would help
myself and others face the terrifying prospect of our mortality?
We're all going to face it. Do I have sacred
information from this? That's the meaning I took, right But

(01:06:25):
I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, like
what did you mean by that? And I couldn't find her.
And not only could I not find her, no one
at the hospital in the ICU, no one knew who
I was talking about. All there is no one here
by that description, like why did she totally disappeared? And
she might have been, as you know, I'm not getting
all woo woo here, like she might have been a
visiting nurse and just I mean, who knows. But I

(01:06:45):
couldn't find her, and it contributed to what afterwards was
a terrible sense of unreality, Like I worried when I
finally got home, I started to worry that I had
died and that I was imagining everything. It was my
dying hallucination that I actually didn't survive and.

Speaker 3 (01:07:04):
Did did that moment with your father and the darkness,
did that like stick with you through that process or
is that something that you came back to later.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
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,
you know, and I and that stayed with me in
sort of troubling ways. I mean, so I started researching
NDEs near death experiences. Right, They're very common. They have
it all over the world. They're not infinitely varied right there.
They fall into three or four basic buckets, one of

(01:07:36):
them being that you know, the dead show up to
either tell you to go back or help escort you across.
And it's very very common as every society in the world.
It's quite a mystery. And I started researching NDEs and
there's some pretty good rational explanations rooted in medicine and
neurochemistry for many of the visions that people have when

(01:07:57):
they're on the threshold. I'm a rationalist, and I'm like,
all right, that that sort of makes sense. I get
at the tunnel, the out of body experience. You can
do that with drugs, you can do that in a
human center views like fighter pilots undergo. You know, there's
way The one thing that didn't quite make sense to
me is the consistency of the vision. Right, so the
many many people see the dead when they're dying in
hospice in ers, and like, I mean, it's a really

(01:08:19):
really common thing. And you know, if you give a
room full of people LSD, they will all hallucinate. There's
no mystery there. The chemistry of that is well known,
but they won't all hallucinate the same thing. What's odd
about dying is the consistency of the hallucinations that they
involve the dead, even people that don't know they're dying,
even people who don't like the dead person who showed up. Right,

(01:08:40):
it's not a comforting vision necessarily. And that's the only
part of this that really made me sort of wonder,
like do we really understand anything about reality? And you know,
I started I went into quantum physics to try to
sort of understand, like, maybe the problem is that we
think we live on a flat earth and it's actually
a globe. You know, Maybe the problem is this boundary

(01:09:01):
between life and death that we assume is absolute, maybe
it actually isn't the boundary we think it is. And
you know, I hate the word after life. I think
it's a misnomer and misleading. But there might be at
some sort of quantum level a reality that we don't understand,

(01:09:22):
involving consciousness and life and death and time and all
these sort of basic components of the universe. I don't know.
I'm an atheist with questions, which is a huge step
for an atheist or for a person of faith. Also,
you know, if you're a person of faith and have questions,
that's also a huge step in the right direction.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
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 okay, And all of a sudden, she
was going away. He didn't anticipate, and he tripped and

(01:10:02):
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 messled 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

(01:10:23):
that he would see himself in that hole. And he
was so tripped up that he did what you said
where he's like, maybe I did die, Yeah, and now
I'm in a weird spot. And he went to look
yeah and weird like he was in. It got that
weird for him over those next few days.

Speaker 2 (01:10:39):
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 was hurt
a little bit. It wasn't 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. And
so I had to say I had the same problem.

(01:11:00):
And part of my part of my problem was that.
And this is and I'm not woo woo, I'm really
not a mystic. I mean, I'm I really am a rationalist, right,
but our rationality doesn't understand everything. And this is that's
where I have questions. But so the dawn of the
day before, right right before dawn that we could my
family and I co sleep, right, So my wife and

(01:11:21):
I am are little girls sleep in the same you
know area on the pad on the big pad on
the floor. It's like we're camping basically, except at home. Right,
it's very very nice. And I had a dream that
I didn't know was a dream but at the time,
but I had a dream that my family was below me,
my wife, my little two little girls, and they were crying.

(01:11:43):
They're crying about me, and I was waving. I was like,
I'm right here, it's okay. I'm like and they didn't
couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me, and I was
I was floating above them, and I was made and
I was in this sort of darkness looking down at them,
and I was made to understand that they couldn't see
me or hear me because I was dead. I was
a spirit. I had died, and that I was headed

(01:12:04):
out and there was no going back and that's it.
And I woke up in a panic. I mean I
woke up and then it was shocked to realize that
I wasn't dead. I mean, that's how real the dream was, right,
And God, that was just a dream, and I was
really shaken, and thirty six hours later it started, I
started dying. Right. So, when I started researching NDEs, another

(01:12:26):
common ende is that you're floating above the doctors, above
your body, above your fans.

Speaker 1 (01:12:30):
I'm going to ask about that, the bright light and
the floating.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
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?

Speaker 1 (01:12:42):
Oh that?

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
You know, it's the brain is being traumatized by low
blood oxygen and it releases endoor fins and you can hallucin,
you know, brains hallucinate during times of stress. I mean,
you know, there's all these just sort of sort of
neurochemical explanations that do a pretty good job at explaining
most of the phenomena of NDEs. Not the visions of

(01:13:02):
the dead, the specificity of that can't be explained by
low blood oxygen. Right, and only the dying seemed to
see the dead. And but another common experience is sort
of floating above your loved ones. Right, And so I
was seized by this fear. Oh my god, maybe I
died in my sleep. Maybe the rest of it is

(01:13:24):
a dying hallucination, the trip to the hospital, the return home,
the tearful reunion with my children, my reading a you know,
a story to my to my daughter who's on my
lap right at this moment. Maybe it's all a hallucination.
I actually died in my sleep and my wife woke
up next to her dead husband, Right, How would I

(01:13:45):
know that's not true? Right? So it's really really this.
It's called derealization. It's really really common with people who
have almost died, either for medical reasons or from a
near you know, a near miss, like your like your friend.
And so I got pretty crazy, right, I really started.
I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma

(01:14:06):
is anxiety and panic, and another is depression. And I
actually went through those phases, a classic trauma reaction, but
I didn't know at the time. At the time, I thought,
oh my god, it's been revealed. The word apocalypse means
the revealing of all things. Right, as I've gone, I've
experienced the apocalypse. I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing
of what reality actually is. It's actually I'm we're not here,

(01:14:26):
you know, Like, I really got crazy, And at one
point I went up to my poor wife. Her name
is Barbara. I said, honey, just can you just tell
me that you see me? No spouse wants to hear this, right,
Can you just tell me that you see me, that
I'm right in front of you, that I survived, Like,
just tell me that that I'm here. And she's like, yes, sweetheart,

(01:14:49):
you're here, I see you. You survived for the last time.
You're fine.

Speaker 1 (01:14:53):
Can you please take the garbage? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:14:55):
Can you please say 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? You're unlucky

(01:15:17):
that this happened to you? Right? Not that you survived,
of course, you're lucky to survive, But if you could
push a button and have none of it have happened,
would you push that button? And I know what she
was talking about, because, on the one hand, yourself sort
of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead or
the reality doesn't exist, or would all these existential epistemological
sort of terrors. Right. On the other hand, I was

(01:15:40):
sort of allowed to look over the final precipice and
return home. I had a special trip, right, like when
I was granted special access, I didn't have to pay
with my life. I was allowed to come back and like,
was I lucky or unlucky? And I couldn't answer. I
didn't know, And it really torment me that I couldn't

(01:16:00):
answer that question. And I finally answered it by putting
it in more sort of mythological terms. I was like,
all right, she's really saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right?
And often when I'm at a sort of dead end
in my work, I will look up the etymology the
origins of the important words in the topic that I'm researching,
to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what

(01:16:24):
significance they attached to these words.

Speaker 1 (01:16:26):
So they're give me an example, what you mean.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
Uh, well, I will right now. I will right now
with the word blessing. So the word curse, curse, no
one knows what his origin is. It's a total blank, Like,
nobody knows there's no known origin for the word curse.
But blessed. Yeah, but blessing. There's some theories that is
really to the word course, like a course that you're
on that you can't deviate from. There's some theories, but

(01:16:50):
no one knows. With blessing, they do know what the
origin is and from the Anglo Saxon word bletson, which
means blood, and the idea was that there is no
blessing without a wounding, that the shedding of blood actually
confers the blessing. Right, So battlefields are sacred because blood

(01:17:13):
was shed on them, childbirth is sacred because blood blood
is lost. And they think it might date back to
the pre Christian rituals of animal sacrifice where you kill
the sheep or whatever, and the spilling of the sheep's
blood is what makes that moment and that place sacred.
And so it's suddenly I got it. I was like, oh,

(01:17:34):
it's not that, it's always they're twin. Blessed and cursed
are twin. They're part of the same thing, right, And see,
you actually it's a false question. You don't choose, You
don't even get to choose. If you're blessed, you're also cursed.
If you're cursed, you might also be blessed. And the
story of Jacob actually goes right back to that. He's
crippled by he wrestles with God and is crippled by God,

(01:17:57):
but also blessed like God bleod unjo his hip and
cripples him for life and blesses him at the same time.
And so it's a very ancient human human thought and
that just believed me for some reason and helped relieve
me of this sort of like unanswerable terror.

Speaker 1 (01:18:14):
If you might go so in the next twenty years,
this is gonna happen again sometime, maybe.

Speaker 2 (01:18:19):
More of the aneurysm.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
I no know that you're gonna die.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
Oh they're gonna die? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:18:23):
Yeah, yeah, are you h How did this shape your yeah?
How did this shape your awareness that you'll have that
you'll do this again? You know, you'll like you'll you'll
have another moment and maybe there will be the hole
in your dad.

Speaker 2 (01:18:41):
You know. You know, if if part of my unconsciously,
I think part of my horror at you know, if
I was 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

(01:19:03):
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. You know, I'm going to
miss them, but you know, but I'll be at peace

(01:19:26):
with it. You're not you know, you leave children behind.
You're not a piece. I mean you know what I mean,
like you you're a dad, I mean, imagine, right, Like so.

Speaker 1 (01:19:34):
It's the worst thought.

Speaker 2 (01:19:35):
It's the worst thought is and that 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 unthinkable, right, And so it's the point of my
I'm an older dad. My first daughter was born when
I was fifty five. Being a dad is what I'm doing, right,
I'm not doing you know, I write books as I
need to make a living. I could care less. Right,

(01:19:57):
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, you know, I'm good.

Speaker 1 (01:20:09):
In your research, what did you turn up about that
that feeling of your life? People that have that, they'd
say their life passed before their eyes. What's going on there?

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
Well, again, you know, we don't know the answers of
these things, but on a sort of neurochemical level, the
brain gets very active when you're dying. And and they've
they've had they've actually monitored people's brains while they were
dying because they had to for other medical reasons. They
need to know what was going on with the brain.
And they were actually able to watch the gamma rays

(01:20:42):
and the different 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 you know,

(01:21:05):
like when you're dreaming, like you can have a dream
that feels like it takes you know, ten minutes, right,
And they know that those you know, supposedly ten minute
dreams happen in seconds, right, So one of the things
that might be happening when and this is in the
neurochemical part side of the explanation for what for NDEs.
One of the things that might be happening is that
equivalent to a dream that you have an experience of

(01:21:27):
a long you know, vast amount of time and a
vast sort of perspective, right, you're seeing all of life
in one moment, the kind of overarching knowledge that you
can have with dreams, Like in dreams you you sort
of understand things that you can't understand, you know, there's
this sort of all encompassing knowledge sometimes. So that might
be what's going on with that. And let me just

(01:21:48):
say that there could be neuro perfectly good neurochemical explanations
for NDEs, and also a part of NDEs which neurochemistry
can't explain that do tie into some basic question about
quantum physics and what is reality? What is consciousness? I mean,
the quantum physicist of one hundred years ago realized that

(01:22:10):
conscious observation changes quantum reality, like if you observe quantum reality,
if a conscious observers observes quantum reality, it changes it.
And so the obvious question is does consciousness in the universe,
human and other otherwise, does consciousness in the universe create
the universe that that consciousness then exists in, right? I

(01:22:33):
mean it's a profound question. So when you're talking on
those terms, the idea that the consciousness that you enjoy
as when you're alive, that there's some other version of
it that continues on as part of the universe, a
kind of universal consciousness continues on after you die. You know,
it's not an insane question, right, It's a legitimate question.

Speaker 1 (01:22:58):
You get it like this stuff. You know I was
saying earlier about if I don't understand something, I try
to ask. I know I can't because I know that
I can't understand quantum mechanics quantum physics. But uh, there's
a thing that there's a trippy thing like if if everything,
if everything in the universe, like if everything's electro chemical

(01:23:21):
with life, it's all electro chemical, you get into this
problem where there cannot be free will, right, like if
everything is happens according to physics, and you go like,
well life is electro chemical, right, right, there's no room

(01:23:42):
then like then someone then a really good person who's
really good at predictive modeling, would be able to you'd
be able to like run all of it and predict
the future because everything is electro chemical, everything conforms to physics,
you know, So when you get lots of it's just
like it's kind of when you say, sitting there and
you're looking outer space and you're like, even if there

(01:24:03):
was like a big brick wall out there, there's shit
on the other side of the brick wall.

Speaker 2 (01:24:08):
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, there's the
definition is something around the ability to think about itself
right or 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 the exp you know,

(01:24:30):
the fact that consciousness can can determine outcomes in the
physical world simply because it is exists and is observing that.
You know that. So basically, if that's possible, all bets
are out, all bets are off sort of right, So
you're right in a purely mechanistic universe, But how do
you fit consciousness into a mechanistic universe? And it doesn't

(01:24:52):
seem to be it. Consciousness resides in the brain, which
is a sort of electrical chemical like process, but it
doesn't itself have it's not itself manifested physically consciousness itself, right,
but it can affect the physical world in profound ways,

(01:25:12):
at least at the quantum level. So, and let me
just say, you don't understand quantum physics. Neither do quantum physicists. Yeah, right,
I mean that's the great mystery. Like, you know, what
they've shown is that things happen in the quantum world
that sort of don't make sense in the macroscopic world, right,
But it doesn't mean they can't explain why, right, And

(01:25:34):
and for that matter, they can't explain why there's a universe.
I mean, there really shouldn't be a universe, and you know,
the universe basically religion and physics are. They're closer than
you might think. So when religion, you have to believe
that God is self creating. Otherwise you're stuck with, oh, well,

(01:25:55):
someone created God, why aren't we worshiping that entity? Right?
Like it, God has to be self creating. From that
point onwards, it all works fine if you just take
that leap like work with me here Gods self creating,
and then from now on where we was believing that God,
we're all good. Right, Quantum physics is the same or
physics is the same way in some ways, like the

(01:26:15):
universe is self creating. After that we can explain everything. Right,
So there's a similar act of faith, this this leap
that both have to take. I'm not saying that they're
intellectually equivalent. I think religion is a story and physics
is an attempt at an explanation, and stories and explanations
are very very different beasts, right, but on some level

(01:26:37):
they both required active faith that is probably beyond human comprehension.

Speaker 3 (01:26:42):
When you when you finished the book, did you end
that process with like like, did you have your did
you now have your like your own understanding or your
own ideas of stuff or where you're just like, man,
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:26:56):
I'd still well, of course I don't know, right, I mean,
I'm like, yeah, I did you feel better? More like 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

(01:27:17):
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, 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

(01:27:40):
to each other, the stronger the force is. And if
you throw a rock out a window, like, why wouldn't
it float in mid era? Right? It doesn't because of
this invisible force called gravity, and it exists throughout the
universe and we don't know why. Right. That would sound
like the rantings of a schizophrenic, Right, I'm sorry. Likewise,
with conscious and there's a sort of serious proposal that

(01:28:04):
consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe
like gravity is, and that our individual consciousness returns to
that great, greater entity when we die, and it's you know,
you can't prove it or disprove it. It's a sort
of pleasing theory for me as an atheist. It gave
me a sort of slightly more comfortable place rather than

(01:28:26):
the just pure nihilism of where a bunch of salism
when we die, we're done. I also don't want to
have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now
for eternity, like thank you no, right, like they I
had a moment of.

Speaker 4 (01:28:37):
Panic earlier in this conversation starting to contemplate that possibility.

Speaker 2 (01:28:42):
Yeah, I mean it's like, careful what you ask for, right,
I mean, you know, eighty years is a long time,
and we can sort of limp 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
you remember what math class felt like in fifth grade? Like,
imagine that for eternity, right, Like just well never ends
like that. That's where I don't quite get about people

(01:29:03):
of faith wanting an afterlife. I think they want to
see their loved ones, is what's going on?

Speaker 1 (01:29:07):
Yeah, let me hate you. Another one that used to
that troubled me for a while. I had a scary
thing happened one time, and and I had that feeling
of things. I had that feeling of of my focus
becoming singular, and in reading about why that was like

(01:29:29):
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 that there's like two paths.

(01:29:53):
And the example that I read about one day was
that there's a there's an explosion, okay, and there's chaos.
Some people can be in that moment and they there's
an arm on the ground. The only thing they see

(01:30:15):
is the arm on the ground, and it's they just
get lost in like a sort of timeless consideration of
the arm on the ground. There's people that all they
see is everything right, it's utter chaos, nothing makes sense.
And then there's people that are like that guy needs help, right,

(01:30:37):
that's happening, that's gonna fall right, And in certain disciplines,
they're looking for the people that don't have those And
your and your experiences in war and your experience with
the with with death, like, have you have you ever
grappled with that or did you find any of that
in your research about these different these different sort of

(01:31:00):
responses people have.

Speaker 2 (01:31:01):
I mean I've had. 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, it partly partly depends on how
much preparation you have. And you know, one of the
things they do when they train environment and they train
soldiers what have you is they just get them to
rehearse and practice the actions they'll need to take in

(01:31:22):
a crisis moment over and over and over again, so
that you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out airplanes.
You know that, you know, they got that muscle memory
of whatever they do, you know, count to count to
five and whatever, you know, whatever it is like, they
get that muscle memory down, so that doesn't depend on deliberate,
deliberate thought. And so there's a lot of tactics in
combat that are somewhat formulaic, like football is, right, I mean,

(01:31:44):
there's this sort of team team coordination that doesn't have
to be thought about in detail in order to be enacted.
And if you have no training like that, your brain
hasn't been properly formatted for that kind of situation and
it's scrambling to get enough information to make a good decision,
and then of course people go into shock. And so

(01:32:05):
I've had all I have. I've had all of them.
I mean one time we got hit very when I
was with American soldiers. We got hit very unexpectedly, very hard,
and I, for I don't know, about twenty seconds, I
was frozen, like I just couldn't move right. I mean,
there's bullets hit in the ground around like, and then
I snapped out of it. And that was hyper functional.

(01:32:27):
Other times I've.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
I in that twenty seconds, where were you mentally? Were
you on an object or like, like what was your phone?

Speaker 2 (01:32:34):
It was 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 and we were
taking 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,

(01:32:56):
you're a parent with a child, who's indeed, you know,
whatever it is you had job to do, like that's
a refuge from your fear. The job you have to
do provides a shelter from your own feelings of fear
and self concern. If you have no job to do
because you're not holding your camera, you know, your fear
just moves in and sets up camp. Right, And so

(01:33:17):
Tim threw across you know, we we were this far away,
like between me and you, like five feet. We couldn't
there was too much gunfire to He threw me my
bulletproof vest and my camera. And as soon as I
was like geared up, boom, I was good. Huh right yeah,
And and so it gives you insight into how soldiers
perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they

(01:33:39):
got it, you know, they got the gear, the tools
they need. They have something they have to do. They're
not thinking about their own fear because they are charged
with such responsibility for their for each other. And and
and it looks from the outside it looks like bravery. Actually,
those roles that soldiers play in combat are a very
powerful protection from fear. To understand, you don't have to

(01:34:00):
overcome fear to do them. They are a protection from
the fear, as would be true if I mean, I
find grizzly bear is absolutely terrifying. Right, if my child
was in danger from a grizzly bear, I don't think
I would find the grizzly bear terrifying. I would try
to distract it, you know what I mean, like totally
changes that fear equation.

Speaker 1 (01:34:19):
I was with my fire one of my buddies who
was a firefighter yesterday and this kind of seems random,
but we're looking like we're looking at this thing in
my yard, and there's a big cobweb, okay, And I
wanted to clean this trough out. And I was saying
that I was gonna have my kids do it, but
my daughter that I've come to respect my daughter's hatred

(01:34:42):
of spiders, and I'm like, it's her. I was like, dude,
you could hand my daughter anything on the planet. She's
gonna grab it if I said to grab it, unless
it's got a cobweb on it. And he said, he says,
for me, as eyeballs, that's that seems avoidable. Not my
line of word.

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
Yeah, yeah, you know I can see, yeah, and one
one traumatic incident. Yeah, and then it's locked in eyeballs like, no,
thank you. I mean, I'm an I have a racknophobia
since I was a young child. I sympathized 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,

(01:35:23):
anything except except spiders. Like we're camping in the Southwest
and there's a transla it's yours, Like, I'm not doing it.
And you can tell it's a phobia because someone people
with phobia phobias have trouble even looking at a photograph
of the thing you're scared of, right, I.

Speaker 1 (01:35:40):
Know, I've tested it out. I was skeptical. I've tested
it out. It's legit.

Speaker 2 (01:35:44):
It's legit.

Speaker 1 (01:35:45):
I've come to accept it. Yeah, I used to be like,
give me a break.

Speaker 2 (01:35:48):
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, a deep seated panic reaction. You can't.
You can't just turn it off.

Speaker 1 (01:35:59):
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, Yeah on it. Yeah,
absolutely looks a great skill. Oh totally, but just applied
to something I'm not interested in.

Speaker 4 (01:36:19):
Well, if she was in the tribe, that would be
her job, spider, you our own little Yeah, what are
you gonna work on next?

Speaker 2 (01:36:28):
I don't know?

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
Are you searching a little bit?

Speaker 2 (01:36:30):
I mean this? You know this this book felt felt
like I sort of capstone of my career. You know,
I'm sixty three, and it's about such an ultimate question,
uh that it was hard to think about something. You know,
then what's next after writing about what you know?

Speaker 1 (01:36:46):
Life?

Speaker 2 (01:36:46):
You know, like, what are you gonna do?

Speaker 1 (01:36:48):
Well, you can write a book about what you ought
to have done different? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:36:52):
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 my wife had stin pretty made
a surgery less fall. So we've been sort of in
a follow period because of that as well. She's coming
out of it, so you know, something going to work
on something I don't. I don't know quite what yet,
but you might wrap it up. No, I love writing.
I mean it's like you know, I'm I love running.

(01:37:14):
You know, 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 it's
one of my one of the most powerful experiences I've
ever had.

Speaker 1 (01:37:27):
And you like the act of it. Yeah, I love
it doing it, doing it, doing it. I only like
having done it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:35):
Right. We all other people to treat running like that, right.
I don't like doing it, but I love it afterwards, right,
And uh no, I love it. It's it's a a
higher state of mind for me doing it.

Speaker 1 (01:37:48):
Yeah, h good for you.

Speaker 2 (01:37:51):
Not always, not always, but when it's when it's good.
You know, musicians say the same thing, right, you know,
when they're really.

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):
Fun fun Man's well for me.

Speaker 2 (01:37:59):
For me, it's a kind of music, right, I mean,
the sentences have to have cadence, to have to rhythm,
and they got you know, like there's a lot of
musical components for me to the experience of writing.

Speaker 1 (01:38:10):
The writer Ian Fraser, 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 programs.
But uh, 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

(01:38:31):
to himself in that way.

Speaker 2 (01:38:37):
Yeah, right, right.

Speaker 1 (01:38:40):
You know who's got an interesting philosophy about Like you're
talking about whether you'll do another one. I don't know.
If you're a Quentin Tarantino fan, I am sure so
very much. So. I don't know if he'll stay true
to it. But he has said for a long time
I will make ten movies. I've made nine. Wow, yeah,

(01:39:00):
and that we'll see.

Speaker 3 (01:39:01):
Yeah yeah, turned into a washed up director.

Speaker 1 (01:39:04):
I'm like, I'm like skeptical. Yeah, he's he's gonna do
ten and then but right, yeah, I mean it's hard
to picture the end, man, but it all ties into
that mortality ship, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:39:19):
And 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.

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
Yeah, David Grant, you know, the writer David Grant. Yeah,
of course he when he was on. He came on
recently after finishing The Wager, and I just sounded interesting.
He was like actively searching, right, you know what I mean.
But he was hunting for a topic, right, right, which

(01:39:51):
is cool.

Speaker 2 (01:39:53):
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, like you won't see
the essential things that you need, the essential qualities that

(01:40:15):
you need in that thing, you won't you might not
see them, you know. And I feel like it's and
you know, I feel that way about God as well.
Like sometimes people are like, are you kidding, You're still
an atheist? You haven't found God. I'm like, look, God
has to find me, right, I mean, if I'm making
a decision to believe in God. It's a decision and
it doesn't have much content to it, right, Like.

Speaker 1 (01:40:38):
I'm not understand what you mean.

Speaker 2 (01:40:39):
Well, God, my understanding about faith is that it's an
overwhelming feeling of love and connection.

Speaker 1 (01:40:47):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:40:48):
So it's like, if you're just deciding to marry Susie,
you might not be in love with Susie. Right, It's
a 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 of decision to Oh, now I'm going
to believe in God. I was. I was mortally terrified.

(01:41:10):
I almost died. Now I'm going to believe in God
just to just to be on the safe side, because
you know, maybe maybe He gave me a break. That
isn't what religion really should be about. Religion should be
about an overwhelming feeling of connection and love, and that
like love for another person, I think it has to
find you if you're out seeking it.

Speaker 1 (01:41:30):
I understand you understand what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (01:41:32):
So, like, 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 yours like war do you got
to say? I'll listen.

Speaker 1 (01:41:54):
We just released this. It wasn't our project in this room,
but one of our guys on our at work had
this episode that he made. He does these kind of
mini documentaries, audio documentaries, you know, so what hell, what's
the word I'm looking for? What's an audio documentary podcast?

Speaker 2 (01:42:13):
I know?

Speaker 1 (01:42:13):
Yeah, but no, maybe you could have a podcast. Yeah,
that's just like a distribution platform, right whatever, You're right,
it's like a documentary. He I was tuning his bit
on this guy and the guy has what you're talking about.
The guy has an epiphany in a moment and was
an addict, you know, right, and he describes like where

(01:42:35):
he's standing on what day, what was happening, and all
of a sudden, like all was made clear, right and
dropped his addictions. Yeah, committed himself to his wife, you
know what I mean. And it was like he had
like an epiphany. Well that's like he got overwhelmed, right,
and that's that's very powerful. I mean For me, I
would need evidence to believe in God.

Speaker 2 (01:42:56):
I need evidence of God, right like I believe in gravity,
because there's evidence that gravity. You know, throw a rock
out of 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 gonna have
to say itself because the idea of applying gender to
God is silly itself in my life in an overwhelming

(01:43:18):
way where I cannot turn away, and I'm like, Okay,
that passes the test.

Speaker 1 (01:43:23):
Yeah right. A lot of dudes listening are like, it
happened when he almost died?

Speaker 2 (01:43:29):
Well, no, except I didn't see God right like I mean,
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'd be we might
be having a different podcast right now, right or But
I didn't. The things that I saw were very real

(01:43:49):
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 did that that that ultimate
reality is not accessible to us.

Speaker 1 (01:44:04):
Well, man, I'm glad you pulled through.

Speaker 2 (01:44:06):
Thank you, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (01:44:09):
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 all your books here on
our document.

Speaker 2 (01:44:19):
I'll rattle them off right now, off Man.

Speaker 1 (01:44:21):
Yeah, you had a book about you had a book
about a murder, like do the whole thing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:25):
So my first book was called The Perfect Storm. It
was about this huge storm in nineteen ninety one sword
fishing boat that was lost off shore one 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 wildland fire fighting, hotshot cruise. And then after
that was a death in Belmont when I was six

(01:44:47):
months old my parents. We lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. My
parents were building an addition to their house and one
of the three carpenters was a guy named al Al
de Salvo and he a couple of years after they
finished building the additions to the house, Al confessed to
being the Boston Strangler and he actually he was killing

(01:45:10):
people while he was working at our house. And there
was a murder down the street that was a classic
Boston strangling. But a black handy man from Mississippi happened
to have cleaned this lady's house that day left his
phone number on the counter. The police got the phone number,
chased him down. He was convicted, convicted, and sent to prison.

(01:45:32):
He died in prison for a murder. He says he
didn't commit. And no one knew that al DeSalvo was
down the street at our house that day all day
by himself, then he might have committed the murder. So
a death in Belmont is about that possibility. It's a
it's a cold case who done it? Basically. After that,
I wrote a book called War about this platoon in

(01:45:53):
the one seventy third Airborne that I was with off
and on for a year in the Corngall Valley. I
also shot a lot of deal with my buddy Tim
and we made a documentary called Verstreppo. I was nominated
for an Academy award a couple of months after we
were at the Oscars. We didn't win, but a couple
months later we were supposed to go on assignment to
Libya together to cover the Arab Spring, and at last

(01:46:15):
moment I couldn't go and Tim was killed he died
of blood loss from a shrapnel wound and scroin in
the city of Masrada. And after that I decided to
give up war reporting, and I wrote a book called
Tribe about community and how it works and how soldiers

(01:46:35):
experienced that Native Americans and how the loss of community
has affected people in this country and the nation as
a whole. And after that I wrote a book called Freedom.
It was an examination of successful underdog groups and how
they defeat greater powers, Like if smaller individuals couldn't defeat

(01:46:58):
larger individuals in combat, or if smaller groups couldn't defeat
larger groups, the empire would always win, right, I mean,
the world we've been made up of like fascist coalitions,
And but that's actually not true, Like under smaller underdog
groups are very actually very good at winning as long

(01:47:19):
as they have certain attributes. And so the book, my
book Freedom goes into what those characteristics are that allow
smaller groups or smaller individuals to win over a larger,
more powerful adversary, like.

Speaker 1 (01:47:30):
Why did the Americans win the Revolution? Why did the
viet Cong win Vietnam?

Speaker 2 (01:47:35):
Exactly exactly? And the problem, you know, just the brief,
very brief version is 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 US military or any military. And the
smaller you are, the faster you are, and that and

(01:47:55):
that that more than can more than compensate for your
lack of size and strength. So with out, without that
unique trait, it's unique to humans and every other species,
size winds, size dominates, right, Only in humans can the
smaller entity win, and that allows for human freedom, for
human autonomy, self definition, you know. And then finally, my

(01:48:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:48:31):
Great, And then people, you have a website, like if
people want to track you down, Yeah, not not you
down personally, but go find collection of all your stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:48:39):
Yeah so yeah, I mean obviously on Amazon or your
local bookstore.

Speaker 1 (01:48:43):
It's easy to get. You probably have one of those
author profiles on there where people can see everything packaged
on Amazon and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:48:49):
Yeah, yeah, but you can also go on Sebastianyonger dot
com is my website and it's j U N G
E R Sebastian Youonger dot com and all my stuff
is there as well.

Speaker 1 (01:49:00):
Thanks for doing the show Man. Appreciate it.

Speaker 2 (01:49:01):
I loved it. That was a wonderful conversation. Thank you
very much.

Speaker 1 (01:49:04):
Thanks

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with Sebastian Junger