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December 5, 2025 14 mins
Brian talks with author of "In My Time of Dying" Sebastian Junger about his Empower U Seminar on December 9th as well as his near death experience.

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Buck Sexton, even if she's a lib. You pay on
the first eight guys today after glad, I'm fifty five
KRC the talk station, A six fifty five KRC DE
talk station. A very happy Friday to everyone. Bryanton is
happy to bring to the welcome with the fifty five
carre mor Karse Morning Show. A man who you're going
to want to hear the next Tuesday, December ninth, It's

(00:22):
an empower You seminar virtual only, so you can stay
at home and log in from the comfort of your
own home. Just register it empower at you America dot
org of course to start time seven pm Tuesday. Mark
it down for my guest, Sebastian Younger and I hope
I pronounced in your last name right, Sebastian, you may
very well be aware of. I'm an author of a
whole bunch of very highly praised books. He's an award
winning journalist, contributing editor to Vanity Fair, special correspondent to

(00:46):
ABC News. He's been a war correspondent, covered major international
news stories around the world, received both a National Magazine
Award and a Peabody Award. And get a load of this.
He did a documentary res Strepo, nominated for an Academy Award,
and won a Grand Jury prize at sun Dance. Also
written for magazines. You've heard about The New York Times magazine,
National Geographic Adventure. You've read his stuff. Welcome to the program, Sebastian.

(01:09):
It's a real pleasure to have you. I'm to talk
about this rather fascinating. I guess I just sort of
life change that you went through in my time of dying,
how I came face to face with the idea of
an afterlife, which is the name of your book, hugely
successful book. Sebastian. Welcome to the fifty five krs Morning Show.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Hey, thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
You know your I got it. You died. I'm gonna
let you summarize what occurred to you and how life
transformational this death experience was. But I got to tell
you I had a friend of my father's or one
of my fathers, my late father's friends, went through almost
word for word, exactly what you experienced when you ended

(01:52):
up in the hospital. I mean he in his case,
he died and met his mom and ended up being
revived in your case as your father. So let's walk
through this and I think it's really important for my
listening audience to know that going into this experience, you
were an atheist, a confirmed atheist.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Yeah, and I still am. And my father was an
atheist and a physicist, which is like atheist square. So
that's where my family and I are coming from. So
I had a you know, I was a war reporter
for a long time, and I've come close to getting
killed a number of times, and I'd made my sort
of peace with that, and then I stopped war reporting.

(02:33):
I had a family. I felt like I sort of
slid into home base. And I'm in good shape. I'm
not a walking heart attack. I'm an athlete. I had
no reason to have any concern for my medical wellbeing.
And in mid sentence, I felt that pain in my
abdomen and it wasn't I had an undiagnosed aneurism in
my pacriatic artery, which is this little artery that no

(02:54):
one needs to think about. And an aneurism is a
sort of unnatural ballooting in the side of the artery
that will eventually burst, and when it ruptures, you start
bleeding out into your own abdomen. And the problem with
that is doctors don't know where it is. If you
get stabbed in the stomach, they know where to plug
the leak, as it were, but not if it's internal hemorrhage,

(03:15):
which is what I had. I lost half of my blood.
It took me an hour and a half to get
to the hospital. I lost at least half my blood,
if not more, and I was an end stage hemorrhagic
shock when I got there. And while they were trying
to get a pick line into my jugguler to transfuse me,
I needed ten units of blood, basically a full oil change.

(03:37):
Right while they were doing that, I felt myself getting
pulled into this black pit, this sort of infinitely black pit,
like the universe had cracked open. I had no idea
I was dying, but I was terrified of going into
this darkness. And then my father, my dead father, appeared
above me and communicated to me, it's okay. Basically, it's okay.

(03:59):
I'll take care of you. You don't have to fight it.
I'll take care of you. And I was horrified, but
I was like, I don't want to be with you.
I want I want to stay here like and I said,
on that point, on that point, I hate the interrupt
But on that point, were you I mean, I don't
want to be with you.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Was that a recognition that this was death? And I mean,
you knew your dad was dead and you were talking
or he was speaking with you from apparently beyond the
grave or some sort. So is that is that where
your fearstem from?

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Well, you know, when you've lost half your blood, your
brain's not working very well. I never connected those dots, right.
I was very puzzled to see him hovering above me.
I mean, A, you're dead. B why are you floating right?
I mean, I just I was. I can't tell you
how puzzled I was. And he was basically offering to
take care of me. Come with me, I'll take care

(04:48):
of you. I was like, why would I go? You're dead?
Why would I want to go with you? The party's
over here. We'll talk later, like in a long time. Yeah, later.
And I said to the doctor, you have to hear
I'm going right, And as he was working to get
the line into my neck.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Wow, Well, now that is one element that differs from
the friend of my father's, because he was in my
view of it, I use the term piece of God
all the time. You know, it's like the piece of
God that passes all human understanding. I think he experienced
something like one would believe the piece of God. No anxiety,
full relief, joy, happiness, no worries, no concerns, And when

(05:27):
he saw his mother speaking with him, I mean, he
was just totally enlightened. But he looked down and saw
himself on the operating table. He heard the doctors talking
to each other. And some may argue, going back to
your point about a dream state, was he really experiencing
sort of a dream at the time his cognitive functions
were still working and this was a manufactured thing. Or
was he indeed experiencing an afterlife? And is that sort

(05:50):
of what led you on this post experience journey that
you went on that you write about in the book.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, So afterwards, I was very, very puzzled by what happened.
And they managed to save my life. They got enough
flood into me. They used a individual radiology a catheter
to get through my venous system, through my arterial system
to the rupture and plug it. Amazing, amazing medical care.
And I woke up in the ICU the next morning,
and I went through all this conscious because they couldn't

(06:20):
sedate me because my vital size was so low. So
the next after I got home from the hospital, I
started reading about NDS near death experiences and what I
found out was that what I experienced seeing a dead
loved one is very very common. And uh, and I
started to so I started to explore that, and the
the you know, the the ultimate question and maybe the

(06:42):
ultimate mystery is, as you say, are these just the
hallucinations of a dying brain? Or are is it a
glimpse into into the fact that we may not understand
reality completely? We may not understand it very well. I mean,
we may not understand consciousness and life and death in
any way. And is this are these visions death bad visions?

(07:07):
Are Are they showing us a glimpse of an ultimate
reality which would be a sort of unity of all consciousness?
That that sort of idea?

Speaker 1 (07:15):
Now, did this experience transform you in a sense? That
what quite often what I've read, and of course there
have been multiple accounts, as you point out, and of this,
other people experiencing very comparable things. Did you come back
with a more profound appreciation for life? Like you know what? Uh,
It's like I always do agree. You know, you could
die any day. You could go outside, a bustle hit

(07:35):
you weren't planning for it. You know, we don't all
go through like a long arduous battle with cancer. Sometimes
bad things happen and you just check out without a
moment's notice. So knowing that you literally can check out
with a moment's notice, as you almost did, did it
change you and how you see life on a day
to day basis?

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Excuse me? Yes, yes it did, but you know, with
a sort of caveat, with a sort of asterisk. So
if you realize you can die, not only any day,
at any moment, it shed a very very bright light
on what the experience of life is and it can
make you very very paranoid, right, I mean you literally
think I could die at any moment. It's very very

(08:18):
hard to relax, right, And that terror is the flip
side of reverence. So yeah, I could die at any moment.
That's terrifying. Or I could die at any moment. I
have a great reverence and thankfulness for the fact that
I exist right now, and they sort of go hand
in hand and by at one point, so I went

(08:39):
through a period of extreme anxiety. It took quite a
months a year to sort of get out of that,
and it eventually where I landed was a kind of
calm appreciation of how sort of blessed we are, and
I mean blessed in a secular sense, right, I'm not religious,
but how blessed we all are to exist at all.

(09:00):
And it's easy to forget that when you're stuck in
a traffic jam or you know, running to you doing
the groceries or whatever.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
All right, well, I have a good question for you particularly,
and I think it's most appropriate for you because of
your being at about atheist. Where did your terror come from?
I know people that are afraid of death because they
remember what they did during their life, and you can't
pat yourself on the back for all the things you
did in life. Quite often religion will bring about that.
It's like watching the Ebenezer screwge. You know, he looks like,

(09:28):
oh my God, look what's going to happen to me?
If I don't change my ways, I will be doomed
to eternal power or a peril. No, if I think
that's a possibility, that's going to scare the hell out
of me. So I would have terror thinking that I
might die if I haven't changed my life or otherwise
undone the bad that I've done. But how about in
your case? Because honestly, sir, regardless of my personal philosophy

(09:51):
about life, death and doctrine and dogma, I've kind of
come to a realization that I'm not afraid of death.
I've reconciled myself with that. I'm prepared to meet my
make or I'm prepared for whatever comes. And you know,
if they pull a plug of meat right now I'm
on the morning show, I can handle that. I at
least I think I can. I don't live in terror
or fear of death at all.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, I mean I you know, it was a consequence
of trauma, right, I've been in a lot of combat
and was traumatized by that. A lot of people who
have made their peace with dying are still traumatized by
the events that they saw on the battlefield. And I
was very traumatized by this experience. You know, in mid
sentence talking to my wife, all of a sudden, I

(10:34):
was circling the drain, and that that could happen at
any moment can make you overly self aware, right, overly
conscious of your moment to moment experience I also had
very young children. I came to fatherhood late in my
mid fifties. I love them more than life itself, and
they are life itself for me. And so the idea
of being sort of plucked, plucked out of my family,

(10:56):
leaving my family with the records of my death, it
just I couldn't bear to think about it.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
That I get that makes perfect sense to me, because
you know, I have a wife, I have family, I
love them dearly, and yeah, the idea of missing them.
But see, then that goes back to is there something
afterward that will cause you to miss them? I don't
know what's coming. In my philosophy. I don't believe in ghosts.
For example, Sebastian, I don't want to believe in the afterlife.

(11:23):
I'm going to be looming around lurking, watching what people
are doing, or scaring the crap out of people. I
think God or we have a greater mystery out there
to contemplate than something like that. So I choose not
to believe in them because I don't want to believe
in that as a concept. So, but that longing and
that thinking about your current cognitive awareness of people and

(11:44):
interactions and people thinking about you were talking about you
that that has to continue to exist after you die,
to have some concern about what it's going to be.
Like I like to think that that's over with.

Speaker 2 (11:56):
Oh yeah, we may be over with that. But you know,
it was more an understanding now as a person who
is alive, that this could all end my right and
that's that's kind of that's kind of wrenching it and
it it and also it was more the concern was
more what you would do to my family more left
behind like that was that was a very very painful

(12:18):
idea very young kids. And you know, I just I
was too unbearable, unbearable to think about.

Speaker 1 (12:24):
I get it in my time of dying, how I
came face to face with the idea of an afterlife.
My guest today Sebastian Younger. Again, this is empower You
America dot org website. Register for the class next Tuesday,
beginning at seven pm. And I understand you're gonna be
doing question and answers as well. Oh yes, of course, yeah,
I know. I look forward to it. I love fielding
people's questions. Great part drama, part autobiography, part scientific inquiry

(12:49):
into the mystery of death. It's all there. Next Tuesdays
the day. I hope a lot of people tune into this,
and I hope a lot of people buy your book.
And here's what I'll do. I'll have Sean McMahon, my
producer for the day, and your book and a link
to people where people can get it, probably Amazon, on
my blog page, so they can maybe get a copy
of advance and start reading about what you experienced, maybe
even in advance of the seminar.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
Oh awesome, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
My pleasure to do with Sebastian Young are really a
pleasure talking with you. Fascinating concept you're dealing with here,
and again, best of luck on the Empower Youth Seminar, Tuesday,
seven pm. Happy holidays to you, Sebastian, you two, thank
you very much. Thanks my friend eight nineteen. Right now
fifty five KCD talk station, Sean will open up the
phone lines. We have time to talk. I got other
stories we can talk about. Maybe there's something I talked

(13:32):
about earlier. You want to chime in on it, feel
free to do so, but that'll be after I mentioned
my friends at Foreign Exchange. I really do view them
as friends. It's kind of like family. Every time I
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a lot of money. Plus, they get that family like environment.
They have a sc certified master technicians that know how

(13:53):
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run of the middle. Plus they serve as Tesla's as
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warranty on parts and service and the greatest thing about
it less money than the deal or deal. We all
know automobile repairs have gone through the roof, so you

(14:14):
can take some of the edge off of that by
going to Foreign Exchange, and you will be glad you
went there. The one I go to the location Westchester.
That's the Tylersville exit right off of I seventy five.
Just go east, take a ride on Kinglin. It's the
second street. Really easy to get to right there at
the Exchange. To find them online, it's foreign x dot
Com A plus with the BBB of course, foreign x
dot Com five one, three, six, four, four, twenty six,

(14:36):
twenty six, six four four twenty six, twenty six, fifty
five KRC at Postman Law.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
We're not

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