Facing Death (with Sebastian Junger)

- Today is March 24th, 2026, and my guest is author Sebastian Younger. This is his third appearance on ACON Talk. He was last here in June of 2021, talking about his book, freedom. Before that, in 2018, we talked about his book, tribe. I loved both those books. Our topic for today and his latest book is in My Time of Dying, how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife. And I wanna say before we start that I like this book even more than the other two, which is saying something, listeners, please go by it, read it. It's, it's beautifully written and it makes you think, I read it in two sittings. It's quite short. It's about 138 pages of text on my Kindle, but I wish it went on forever. It's that good. Sebastian, let's start with a little about yourself. I think if I was ever in physical danger, either from the natural world or bad people, you might be the one econ talk guest I want by my side. You are, you are a very capable, resourceful human being in the physical world, which is increasingly rare, as we discussed recently with Alled McLean Jones last week. And it, and you faced danger many times and some of those times you discussed in this book. So before we get to the events of the book that are at the center, talk about your life experiences that you brought to writing about death and dying.

- Yeah, thank you. Well, just very briefly, you know, my father Wa was a, a, a wartime refugee. He, he, he fled Germany, fled Spain when the fascists came and then fled France. And so he, he as a, as my father, he, you know, he brought a lot of awareness of war into my world when I was young. And that clearly implanted itself in my mind. He, my dad married an American woman. I grew up in Boston in a very safe, lovely and wildly boring suburb called Belmont. And, and I was a very anxious kid. And so what I went on to do, I now realize with the benefit of hindsight and good counsel by people who love me, I realized I was basically my whole life, sort of like wildly compensating for an upbringing that felt overly safe and, and not, you know, I'll, I'll put it very bluntly. I, I wanted to, when I was a teenager, I wanted to become a man, and I didn't know how to do that in the environment I grew up in. And so I wound up as a war reporter for many years and eventually stopped doing that and had a family, two young children. And that's when I nearly lost my life at home.

- But as a war reporter, where were you in, in at various times?

- Oh, yeah. So I, I, my first war, self-assigned, self-funded and really accountable to nobody was Bosnia. It was Sarajevo, the Seeds of Sarajevo in 19 93, 19 94. And I, I came home from that and, and wrote my first book called The Perfect Storm. And I literally turned the manuscript in. I was dying to go back overseas. I turned the manuscript in, did not have high hopes for it. It felt like an odd book and that people might not necessarily plug into. And I went overseas to Afghanistan. So this is 1996 when the Taliban were just taking over Afghanistan. I saw them on the outskirts of Kabul. I saw them in Jalalabad, and I had come under some suspicion from them. I left. And then I was in Kosovo and in 98 and Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Civil War in Liberia as well, Nigeria, the Niger Delta with mend Rebels, who were, who actually took me captive for a little while. That was very, very, very unpleasant. And, and then eventually I was with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I'd been in Afghanistan many times. I was there in 2000 with Ahha Maud who was just fighting in the Northern Alliance. Then 2001 when Maud's commanders took Kabul after nine 11, and then eventually with American soldiers. And I, you know, ironically, in some ways I'm probably best known for the work I did with American soldiers, even though I'd been to Afghanistan many times and really adore that country. And I really hope in my lifetime I can go back safely with my family. That would be kind of a dream for me.

- So you've seen a reasonable amount of death in those, those journalism experiences, correct?

- Yes, I have. Yep.

- And you write about it in the book, and you mentioned a couple of brushes with death that you had as a, as a young man surfing, I think was the, is the most dramatic one. Is that right?

- Yeah. When I was a kid and didn't know any better, I was surfing in midwinter off the coast of Massachusetts by myself, and I just, yeah, I almost drowned. I was in a very, very big seas and I almost drowned. And I, and I also was a climber for tree companies. So I did the aerial work. I worked 60, 70, 80, a hundred feet in the air, hanging on a line with a running chainsaw, taking trees down in pieces, and, which looks, I'm sure from the ground, it looks terrifying and dangerous and all that other stuff. And it's, and it's definitely terrifying. But what I realized up there in the treetops, and I made good money for a young, a young man, I, a young person, I made good money doing it. I loved the job. But what I realized is that if I was gonna get hurt or killed up there, it would only be because I made a mistake. Because I was simply dealing with the laws of physics. And if you top out a pine tree and you do it wrong and it comes back on you and crushes you, which can happen, it's because you did it wrong, right? You didn't make the cuts right. You didn't account for wind direction, et cetera, et cetera. So I realized it's the laws of physics, which are knowable. And so if I'm just super careful, I'm probably safer than I am driving down the road where there's ran a random element. Other people, other drivers that aren't, don't obey the laws of physics, right? They can't be predicted. And so I actually came to feel quite comfortable up there, even though I was also, you know, very scared of heights and learned to do the work simply by not looking, like, literally not looking down. I completely compartmentalized my fear so that I could be functional. And then there's an equivalent process in combat where you can be functional and scared by compartmentalizing what happens, what's what's happening.

- When you were in combat, which you write about in a few different episodes in the book, what are you doing? Are, are you as a journalist, are you, are you fighting? Are you just observing? What was your role in those situations?

- Oh, oh no, you're never fighting. I mean, that's, I mean, if you're fighting, you're not a journalist, you're a participant, right? And so I had, I had a video with American soldiers, I had a video camera in other situations earlier in my career, I just had a notebook and pen. I was writing down what I was seeing and hearing what people were saying and the sense I could make of everything with a video camera, you know, you're, you're recording events in the moment for later use, which is very different from distilling information into a notebook. They're both crucial to journalism. And so with American soldiers, when I used a video camera, most, I had it on me constantly. I mean, literally constantly, I slept with it. Just, you never knew when something was gonna happen or you would never knew when there was a conversation between two soldiers that was to somehow evocative or interesting, and that you wanted to record that. It wasn't all combat, it was everything about life at this small outpost called, I'm shooting video, I'm taking notes, I'm imitating everyone else very, very closely. Are they taking a knee and drinking some water on a long patrol? I'm doing that. Like, are we behind? Are we getting behind cover? I'm doing that. Are we getting low? I'm doing that. Like everything that they did, I did. And because that was safer and I just, I, I lived in terror of becoming a problem somehow causing a, even being wounded would be causing a problem, right? Like, I, I just like, they're out here on a combat mission, God forbid I I make that harder or, or, or god forbid, endanger someone or get someone hurt, right? So I was, I never asked for anything. Like, not even, Hey, can we just detour to that little hilltop so I can get a photograph? Like, what happens if someone gets hit, hit on that little hilltop? How do you, how do you, how do you not how do you live with yourself? Right? So I just never asked for anything. I wouldn't even ask someone to like bring me my coffee mug across, you know, from across the whatever. Like, I just, like, God forbid, God forbid. So, and I say, God forbid I'm an atheist. So I understand the secular context, but I think you get my meaning about it's unthinkable. And so I was very, very careful about what I asked for

- In those, what was the most frightening moment that you remember that you, you probably write about in the book, but are there moments that stand out that were particularly horrific?

- Well, one was in, in Sierra Leone. We, we were st I was coming back from a frontline fight with a, a couple of Sierra Leonian soldiers and a couple of journalists in the Open Jeep and re the rebels that we were fighting, a group of them stepped out from the jungle and stopped us with their guns leveled and seemed to be having a screaming argument about whether to kill us all. It was in Creole and I couldn't follow it, but at one point a guy racked his gun and leveled it, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards. And so we were very, that was, it was the, my first experience with going kind of hollow inside, which is a fear response. And another time I was told by rebels in Nigeria, after they detained me, they thought I was a spy. And one guy walked up to me and said, he had a machine, very muscular young man with a machine gun. He was a, he was a eja warrior, and he came up to me, he said, when we kill you later, I'll be the one to do it. Just sort of what, by way of introduction, very, very scary moments for me. And, and with American soldiers, there was, you know, we were in a lot of combat. The only time that I sort of like froze, which is another classic fear response is sort of freezing for a moment, was when I, I had nothing to do because my, my video camera, the firefight started very suddenly. I almost got hit by the first round. It hit a sandbag right next to my forehead and, and I couldn't get to my video camera. So I didn't have a job to do. I had nothing to do. And the only thing that insulates you from your fear is having a responsibility. Right? And I, and I couldn't get to my camera. It was 10 feet away. And the between me and the cameras, the sand was moving from bullet impacts. I just, and I, because I didn't have a task, a mission, a purpose, I, I froze. And, and then Tim, my colleague Tim, very brave, wonderful, beautiful Tim Heatherington, he, he jumped across that gap and threw me my camera and then started throwing ammo to the soldiers who were separated from their ammo as well. He was extremely brave in that moment. But of course, I've also seen him in moments when he was paralyzed and I was fine. So fear is a, fear is a weird thing. Right. And I should just add that Tim was killed in combat in Libya in 2011. We're coming up on, on 15 years now.

- Now the book revolves around a health crisis that you experience that's worsened by the fact that it takes place somewhat far in terms of time elapsed from a, a serious hospital. Give us the general outline of what happened to you.

- Sure. Yeah. So it was 20 June of 2020, and my, I've, my fam my wife and I have taken our little girls who were at that point, like three months old, six months old and, and three years old, taking them out of New York City. We own a property in Massachusetts. It's deep in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road. They're, there's no cell phone coverage there. When it rains the phone, the landlines go out because they're old is basically paradise, right? And in its remoteness and its beauty, and, which is great until you have a health crisis, right? So I, you know, I never, I mean, I'm a lifelong athlete. I'm not a walking heart attack. I, I was a really good long distance runner when I was young and carried that foundation of health my whole life. So I never occurred to me that I would ever go to the ER for anything except a car accident or a chainsaw accident. And just as sort of background, so in mid sentence, we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who lived up, up the up the road aways and, you know, which was rare during COVID. So the girls came over and my wife and I went out to this cabin that I built even deeper in the woods, like completely off the grid, like no electricity, this kerosene lamps in a wood stove. And we went out there just to sort of relax a bit, and in mid-sentence, while we're out there just en enjoying this beautiful p place of tranquility and peace and connection in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of jolt of pain in my abdomen. And I was like, oh, what was that? And I, I thought some, I thought it was so crazy indigestion. And I sort of stood up to breathe and walk it out, and I almost fell over. What I didn't know, obviously, is that I'd ha I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. It's a very rare condition. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. Again, this isn't heart attack territory, it's not arteries filled with cholesterol, you know, whatever, fat, whatever it is, whatever, clogs, arteries, I can't remember the word. Plaque. Plaque. That's it. Plaque, thank you. It was a, a structural problem. And aneurysms continue for can grow for years, decades undetectable, unnoticed. And then when they rupture, you are bleeding out into your own abdomen. You are bleeding out just as much as if someone stabbed you in the abdomen and severed an artery, except it's into your own artery. So you don't know what's happening. There's no blood on the kitchen floor. Right? And, you know, within a minute, I I I, I was too lightheaded to keep my feet, my blood pressure was plummeting. I was losing a pint of blood every, you know, 10 or 15 minutes into my own abdomen. And you can, you know, you can, there's 10 pints of blood in the human body. You can lose about half of them before you die. And I lived, we lived an hour from the nearest hospital, and which was a little regional hospital. So I was literally a human hourglass. And they, we vent my wife. I couldn't walk. My wife literally dragged me outta the woods and put me in the passenger seat of the car in the driveway. And, and I was going in and out of consciousness. And every time I lost consciousness, she thought, that's it. He's not coming back. And terrible experience for her. I had no idea I was dying. I didn't even know I was losing consciousness. I was synco. And someone who's synco in and out of consciousness, they don't know. It's seamless for them. They don't know they're losing consciousness. Right? And, and then I knew something was really bad because the sky, the sky turned blinding whites and everything turned whites. And this, this awful whiteness just eclipsed everything. And I was blind. Another symptom of blood loss. So at any rate, they got me to the hospital just in time. I was in end stage, hemorrhagic shock. I'd lost half of my blood, two thirds of my blood. I was in conditions that, for most people are not survivable, particularly at my age. I was in my late fifties, but I have an athlete's heart. It, my heart gets kept slugging away in my chest. I gave the doctor something to work with. And, and they, they, I got, they brought me into the ER and, and started trying to save my life.

- I, I like when the nurse says to you, can you open your eyes, Mr. Ger? And you did. And you were puzzled. And she said, we wanna make sure you're still with us. And you realized, oh,

- Yeah. Well, that was a little later in the evening actually. The, yeah, it was at night. It was a little later in the process, you know, when they brought me into the er, they put me into a trauma bay. The doctors immediately knew what was going on. The, the medics and the ambulance didn't immediately knew what was going on. They started to transfuse me to, to with a, a, a large, a, a a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to give me blood. Right? Blood keeps you alive, blood, the blood of other people. Right? So here's my brief pitch. Please donate blood, right? I'm alive because 10 people donated blood. You will keep alive. Someone's father, someone's daughter, someone's spouse. It's very important. At any rate, they were working on me. And I was in incredible pain. And the first extraordinary thing that happened was a nurse came, I, they couldn't gimme sedatives. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, right? I mean, I was, I was running on fumes. I was 10 minutes from dead, right? I was incredible pain. And from all the blood in my abdomen. And this nurse came up to me and said, help my hand. And said, look, he said, she said, look at me and breathe with me. I'm here. And, and I did. And magically the pain went away in my mind I'm like, that's not gonna work. That's some 1960s lama stuff. Like, I want some drugs. Right? It worked. And that human connection, literally, I believe helped save my life along with incredible doctors. But it was absolutely, doctors don't have time to hold your hand. Right? Like, it, it falls on someone else. And thank God, thank God for them. But so they trans they started working on my neck. And let me just say briefly, I'm an atheist. My father was an atheist and a physicist. He's dead. He's atheist and a physicist. And which is like atheist squared, right? Yeah. And so I'm lying there. I have no idea. I'm dying. Like absolutely none. I'm in for belly pain. I, I'm very confused and under me, the universe sort of cracks open. It's just like infinite darkness. And I'm getting pulled into it. And I'm terrified of this infinitely black pit, basically. I don't know, I'm dying, but I know I don't want to go in there. I'm terrified of it. And, and then suddenly my dead father appears above me to my left on the ceiling, I mean on the ceiling just above me. And he is there in his sort of essence, this sort of energy form. It's my father. He's right there. I'm shocked, right? And, and basically he communicates to me, look, you don't have to fight it. It's okay. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. You don't have to hang on. You're good. We're you come with me. Right? I was horrified. I was like, go with you. You're dead. I have the parties over here. Like, I get outta here. We'll talk a lot later. Right? And so I said to the doctor, 'cause I'm still conscious, I'm still conversant, right when I had this vision. So I said to the doctor, you gotta hurry. I'm going, I'm going away. And I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I wasn't coming back from there. Right? And, and then much, much later, they transfused me. They got me into the interventional radiology suite, which is basically, you lie on a, something called a fluoroscope. It's like an x-ray machine, but it takes video. So they can x-ray you in real time. They put fluorescent dye in your veins. They can see which tube is leaking inside your body. They can see where the catheter's going as they thread it through your vasculature to get the catheter to the, the rupture. And they embolize it, they plug it and save your life. You know, that's, it is like, that's what happens there. And while I'm, while I'm there, they work and work and work on me for hours. And they can't get the catheter to the rupture. And, and I'm in incredible pain and I'm confused and I, I am having hallucinations and I'm, and I see monsters everywhere. Very, very frightening monsters in the machinery. And the, and at one point, the doctor, I watched the doctor shrug his shoulders and say, oh, well we tried, like, there's nothing more we can do. And that was the first time, you know, usually you're sedated for moments like this. Yeah, right? I couldn't be sedated. Right. Very, very lightly. That was, so that was the moment that I realized, oh my god, I might die. Like I might not make it home. And that was a moment of devastating loneliness and isolation. And that's again where this nurse appeared and said, keep your eyes open so we know you're still here. I'm with you. I'll go, we're going through this together. Just extraordinary, extraordinary experience for me.

- And I wanna just say as an aside, that most people review this book very well, very favorably at Amazon. But a couple people, and I mean a couple give it low scores because there's so much medical detail, some of which we just, we just got. And it, it's really a tremendous actual narrative device because you alternate between it as the narrator of the book, looking back on this episode with a very cold clinical eye about what's happening. And it makes the emotional intensity of it that much more powerful. So I just wanna voice that disagreement with that reviewer. It, it, it really makes the book quite extraordinary. And you had to of course, recreate this. You weren't taking notes. And as the journalist, you recreated it through the notes that the doctors have to take in these, or the reconstruction the doctors have after these kind of events and through interviewing them. So all the detail that you're giving us, and it's quite spectacular in it. There, the writing is just amazing. Makes it, makes it that much more powerful. So before we go fur any further, talk a little bit about your father, because he, he, besides this unimaginable, literally moment of

- Yeah.

- Somehow confronting him. And we'll talk in a little bit about what you had to do to deal with that. I, I would just spoiler alert, Sebastian, you said you, you are an atheist. You did not say you were an atheist. So while this was a, a startling event, it, and it had an impact on you. It didn't have the impact that some people might imagine. But my point is, is that your father is along with the, along with the doctors and your wife, the, the other main character of this book. Talk about it for a little, talk about him a little bit.

- Yeah. So he, he was a product of a mixed marriage. His, his, his mom was a Austrian Catholic. And she married a Sephardic Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew who grew up in, partly in Spain, spoke fluent Spanish and was a journalist. And he was posted to Dresden when they met, they met at a dinner party in Salzburg. And she, they fell in love with each other immediately. They're very, both very smart, good looking, charming people. And they fell in love and got married extremely quickly as people did back, you know, back in the day. Right? 1900 and so, and they moved to Dresden and 10 years later, the Reich dog fired 1933, things started to get ugly. He took his family out of, so my father grew up speaking Spanish and German. Took his family out, went to Germany and were there until the fascists came in 36. He, they, they left, they went to Paris. They were there until the fascists arrived. Arrived a few years later in the form of the Nazis. And they, they went to Portugal and then eventually United States, my, where he met my mother and fell in love and had a family. So, as he liked to say, because of the fascists, he got married and had a family and speaks five languages fluently. 'cause they just kept learning everything. Every country he passed through, he learned the language and he became a physicist. He was, he was very, very, very smart man. Extraordinary mind and extraordinarily limited in, in some important ways as well. And he, I now realize he was what we would now call on the spectrum, like very, very clearly on the spectrum. A very, very sweet man. And, and, and, and, and un and oblivious and, and hard to connect to emotionally and, and, and somewhat childlike in his emotions and his feelings. But a brilliant physicist. And so, you know, we had a complicated relationship, but I loved him. And he, he died, I holding my hand talking to his dead sister who was in the room. Right? I mean, that, that, I mean, clearly to him, she was in the room. It was my first experience with this sort of odd phenomenon that dying people see the dead, that the dead show up to receive the dying. And I didn't know anything about it. I was like, wow, it's so strange. Like, he's quite convinced she's here. You know, like, and I'm a total rationalist, right? Like I've no time for any of that nonsense. As was,

- As was he,

- As was he. Yes. No time for any of that nonsense. Right? And, but you know, we can get to this if you like, but, but there's a quite a lot of e you know, quite a lot of ev evidence. There's quite a lot of testimony. Thousands and thousands of people and hospice nurses and doctors, like who, you know, the dead showing up in the rooms of the dying is a well, well-known thing. And it's been going on forever. So make what you will of it. I try to make sense of it in my little book, but so he, I'll just, I end, I'll end with this. Him showing up for me as mortified as I was, right? I didn't know I was dying. I certainly didn't wanna die Will I wasn't gonna go willingly. Right? It was the pro in some ways the closest connection I've ever had with him. He was not an easy man to connect with. Emotionally. Intellectually, yes. Not emotionally. He was there for me completely when I needed him most. Just a beautiful, big hearted father who was gonna take care of his son, his 58-year-old son. And I, you know, I have to say it in some ways changed my relationship, my internal relationship with him.

- Yeah, sure. And you write about it really movingly in the book. It's amazing. Thank you. Now some people, when they see something they can't explain. And this issue of near death experiences and testimony, you know, I'm, I'm a mystical rationalist, which is oxymoron. I, I'm very open to the mystical side of things, but I'm also very much an analytical and rational person. So when people tell me about these testimonies, I, you know, there's a lot of explanations for those that are not, that don't, it doesn't, you don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe in an afterlife. You don't have to believe in that. This reality we live in is somehow not the real thing. But I'm open to those possibilities, is how I would describe it. Which is why i, I like and enjoy very much being a religious person. For me, it's my way of connecting to the ineffable, the, the mysterious things we don't completely understand. And I think I've probably referred to it before, but you know, the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when Richard Dreyfus has a vision, which yeah. Is implanted in his brain by aliens to come to a mountain that looks a certain way. And we see him, it's incredibly unbelievably poignant scene for me. He's, he's making, he's a dinner and he's, he's, he's making a mountain unconsciously. He's forming a mountain with his hands or with his knife and fork, a mountain of mashed potatoes that looks like what he's been told. He needs to find this vision. Wow. And his family, all of a sudden he stops in the middle of it. 'cause he looks around and he realizes, everyone's looking at him like he's crazy. And when we see things we can't explain, we call that crazy. That's, that's the word we literally use for it. It's crazy that your father would show up and so you're forced to confront it. And, and some people, you know, Richard Dreyfus in the movie is Bewitched, or whatever you wanna call it, possessed obsessed. And everyone around him sees him as a tragic lunatic and who needs help. You had to confront something similar. You saw something that is at odds with your worldview. You could easily, and it may be true, attribute it to stress. You wrote, well you called it a minute ago when talking about other people, hallucination, which is just a fancy word we use for your brain, doing things that don't seem plausible, but you decided you didn't dismiss it. You, you embarked on a, a journey of, of exploration, both of the near death experience, but also something which I found magnificent in the book, what we understand about reality, about the creation of the universe, the, the physics that your father of course was involved in and that your relatives or friends of your relatives had spent their lives on. And so the book becomes a beautiful investigative journalism. You could call it kind of understates what it is. It, it's, it's something magnificent. And what do you find?

- Yeah, so first of all, I say the book, the problem with being a rationalist and rationality is an enormously powerful tool, right?

- Phenomenal

- It, right? I mean, it, we, we, there planes stay aloft because of the rational process, right? Yeah. Medicine exists, you know, everything exists because of a rational thought process. And so don't dismiss it. But the problem with rationality, as I say in the book, is that things keep happening that don't make any sense, right? So the sort of line between a visionary seeing the truth and a crazy person is very, very thin, always has been the, the, the great prophets right. Of, of religion are very, very close to just being schizophrenics. Yeah. Right? And maybe there's some overlap once in a while. So if, if someone came to you and said, this is the deal, the universe is 93 billion light years across, it came from nothing to everything in an amount of time. That's too small to measure. And we now live in a situation where mineral dust can organize itself in such a way that it's self-aware, can think about itself, humans and probably other, other beings on other planets. And, and not only that, when you're smart enough, when the human race is smart enough to look at the quantum level, in other words, the subatomic level, what it finds is this weird apparent contradiction that particles at the subatomic level, if you observe them, if there's a conscious observer, they can only be in one place at one time. If you don't observe them, they're in all places at one time. The obser act of observation at the quantum level creates the reality that it is observing. Now, if a person on was, was saying all this on the street corner right into a megaphone, you'd be like, well, where's social services? He's clearly insane. Right? That is what exactly what phys physicists have found. And interestingly, the physicists supremely rational men and women have concluded that, you know, there is a poss there's a many odd possibilities. One of which is that consciousness is a universal quality like the force of gravity. And it actually, it's a universal quality that is part of the physical universe and gives it form that creates the universe that we ourselves see. Right? And these are rational people suggesting this because I, they seem to be at their wits end to explain these contradictions that we know we can prove exists as Sir Arthur Edington a great physicist of about a hundred years ago, as he said, something that we don't understand is doing, we know not what. And that was his ultimate pronouncement about the state of human knowledge. Yeah.

- Yeah. I I mean, there's so many beautiful, mystical, rational, irrational things. The, the singularity that the universe started in a space with no volume and expanded instantly into, into the world that we ob that we're part of now is implausible what I mean, it does, you, you have to You what you do with that is, we all have different ways of dealing with it, but there, there's something the universe should fill one with awe, I believe, and we'll, we'll talk about that a little more, more in a minute. But you also explore. And one last thing I would just say that, you know, I find it extraordinarily beautiful and and fascinating and that the one thing we have a very limited understanding of the physical world about is our consciousness, which is the thing we used to absorb and master the physical world. That's, that's too weird. But those things filled me with awe. And you also explore the near death experience literature. And we've had guests on the program talk about that before. People are, many, many people are extremely convinced by it as they would be because they're believers. Many people are very skeptical about it because they're not, I assume there are some people who've become believers from it, but not everybody, because it's imperfect, it's not open and shut.

- Yeah. So, so the three, there's sort of three groups of criticisms of the book, which was really well received. But there, the, the of the sort of reader reviewers, some people were upset that I'm still an atheist.

- Yeah. Come on. And

- My

- God gave you a miracle. Your father came to you and you still don't fill in the blank, but the, the fill in the blanks part of the problem, because he didn't tell you which religion you're supposed to follow now. Right. But okay.

- Yeah. And also, you know what I say in my, in my, you know, quote defense is, look, if I saw my dad, if I'd seen God, I might, you might have an argument to make, but I saw my father. Yeah, right? And another criticism, it's really a disappointment. Then I just didn't come out and say, great news, everybody, there's an afterlife. I'm here to tell you, don't worry about dying, because we're just gonna keep on going just as we were with our loved ones. And you know, that there's, there's no responsible way, scientifically or journalistically to make that assertion. Right. It just, you cannot do it. It's an act of faith, not an act of rationality. And I was looking for answers, right? And there are two sort of main group groupings in my mind of things that need to be talked about. There are, there are stories and there are explanations. And the stories are crucial to our psychological survival. Right? And they often involve God. And you know, I have children and I now understand why people believe in heaven. Because God forbid something happens to your child, you need to feel that they're going someplace good. I, as a father, I get it right. Those are stories, explanations, explain how the world works. Right? And, and you can tell the difference because explanations can be tested. You don't want to test the stories 'cause you embarrass them, you need them, right? The explanations have to be tested because if the explanation for why airplanes fly, if that explanation has holes in it, people are gonna die. Right? So, so what I was trying to do was explain, not come up with a story about my father's appearance above me in the hospital, but explain what it was I was seeing. And so, yes, there's a near death experiences is a sort of, nds is sort of a now common term. They're very, very, they're very common. There's thousands of testimonies about it all very, very similar. And if you look into the literature, there are two, of course, there's two camps, right? There's the believers and there's the rationalists. And the rationalists have always been my baseball team. I like watching them defeat the defeat the other team over and over and over again, right? It's one of my most pleasurable experiences watching that process. Right? But here's the thing. So the rationalist convincingly explained to me, and I read all the papers, that a lot of the, a lot of the visions that people have, a lot of experiences, the sort of hovering above the body, this is that, that those can be explained through neurological processes, neurochemicals, stressing the dying, the stress on the dying brain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Except for one thing, and I'm continuing to be a rationalist here, right? Because if you're a rationalist, a proper rationalist, you will apply rationality even to the rational process, right? I mean, you are skeptical of everything and you even inquire into your own skepticism skeptically, right? You really must. So the thing that doesn't quite work for me, yes, if you give a room full of people, LSD, they will all hallucinate. We know how that works. If you, when people die, they have low, low blood oxygen, et cetera, et cetera. It stresses the brain. They may see things, they may have a hovering feeling about the outof body experience. All these things can be explained. They put pilots in the centrifuge, human centrifuge, fighter pilots, to see when they'll, how many Gs will make them forces of gravity will make them pass out. They have out-of-body experiences. We can reproduce all of these things. Right? What does not make sense, what does not happen in the room full of people who have just taken LSD is that they all have the same vision, right? Not the same experience like hovering above your body. They see the dead, right? They don't see fire firetrucks and flamingos and swimming pools. They see the dead. Right? And sometimes there are cases, multiple cases of dying people seeing someone show up in their room who they didn't know had died. Like, what's David doing here? And they didn't know he had died. And there he is and no one else can see him. Right? So is that probative? No, but it certainly arou arouses some questions in me. So what the sort of, sort of where I came with this is that not that there's a God, you can have an afterlife and no God or a God and no afterlife. They're not necessarily paired right. They don't need each other. Right. People just assume they go together. But, but it is possible. And again, I did read a lot of physics that there is a post death continuation of individual consciousness at the quantum level that we're incapable of understanding, right? It's, it, it, we, we, we are our brains are for the macroscopic world. We're they're not designed to understand the subatomic world. And at the quantum level consciousness, which seems to affect everything in the universe, that that continues in some form. And that some of these mysteries like telepathy and people the dying, seeing the dead and ghosts and this and that, all, you know, sort of pre memories from former lives and all these sort of strange, and in my opinion, sort of often flaky testimonies and experiences, it's possible that they actually are united under a, a, a very simple idea that we do not ultimately understand the, the, the true nature of reality, of time, of life and of death. And that might explain some of these phenomena. And I'm totally open to it.

- And one of the strange things about losing a parent, I just lost my mom about two months ago, is of course you wanna talk to 'em. Yeah, yeah. And you go to column and you realize, oh, they're not, they're not home anymore.

- Yeah. - And for me, I, you know, I wrote a eulogy for my mom, and in the course of doing so, I got dramatically closer to her, which is interesting in and of itself. I'm, I'm performing the Jewish ritual of Kaddish, which is to three times a day go to a service and say a a, a prayer in Hebrew That, that we could spend a whole episode on that we won't. But the point is, is that I feel close to her in a way, in some ways closer than I did when she was alive. Yeah. And I think about her much more often, which is sad, but reality and somewhat comforting. I'm curious in studying the physics for this book, whether you got close to your father, especially given that experience that you had, given that he was a physicist, didn't have to be a physicist, it could have been a anything but you were doing. And I'm sure you wanted to talk to him.

- Oh, yes. I, you know,

- Maybe I did talk to him. I mean, I, I, a lot of my people I know after they lose a loved one, I, one of my favorite moments in my life is when a, a widow came to me and said, you know, my friend say I should stop talking to my husband. And I said, well, if you talk to him, she said, well, every day. And I said, you should keep talking to him. I think I don't agree with your friends. Yeah. So I'm curious how that, if that affected you.

- Well, I'll tell you what, when I was recovering from, you know, I had half my blood in my abdomen, and it takes a while to recover from that. Your body has to reabsorb it and you don't feel very well until it does. So I was spending my time with a, a little light reading about near death experiences and, and I eventually wound up reading about physics, right. And I realized this is the path. You know, either you take the story path and go for the story of religion and God, which I wasn't gonna do. Or you take the explanation path. And it ultimately, all explanations lie in, in, in physics. And so I'm reading these physics papers about quantum reality and all that stuff. And I remember thinking, God, dad, if only you could hover above me again and just help me here. 'cause I, I don't, this isn't making any sense. Like, it's hard. Yeah. So I called up his colleague, two of his colleagues who I knew when he was alive. He, he was very close to them. I invited them over for lunch. I told them I wanted to tell them what had happened. They were, they adored my father. Right. And I wanted to tell them what had happened and to get, and asked them, you know, what do you, what do you think my father would make of this? Right? And so we had a great conversation, but keep in mind they're physicists. They're extremely literal. Right? And so at one point, I, I said, okay, so what are the odds that my father could wind up after he died, years after he died, hovering above me in a corner of the room? Like, what are the odds? I mean, there's odds for everything are the odds, right? And it was sort of a rhetorical question, right? Forgive me, I'm just human, right? But, but he took it, he took it literally, and he sort of, Rudolph Ru Rudolph was his name, Rudolph Hall. He sort of looked up and up like that, and I could see him run there running the numbers, right? And even he said, I always say the odds are about 10 to the minus 63. I was like, what? There's a number for this. Are you kidding? He was like, there's a number for everything. It's

- A's a very small number,

- A very small number, but it's not infinitely small. It's not infinity. Right? That's zero absolute's zero. Right? And so he said, yeah, he, the, the, the molecules, the atoms that had once made up his body, they're still out there in the universe. And sort of random motion would have to place them all coherently together in the corner of the room for you to see him. It's not impossible. It's just unbelievably so unlikely that it will probably never happen. I'm like, oh my God, that's the physicist brain. Like that was the brain I was dealing with my whole childhood with my father. You ask a rhetorical question and he looks up at the ceiling and starts running numbers. Right? And so, yeah, it, it, it it that that that physics was a, a, a serious inquiry for me. And, and called me, recall me to, you know, my childhood when what he did for me was a sort of a kind of magic.

- I wanna talk about death for a minute. You say something quite shocking, which really pulls the reader up short. You say the following, finding yourself alive after almost dying is not as it turns out the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren't returned to life, you were just introduced to death. And in the book you write, I had a quote, you in the book, you write about some of the emotional challenges of, of coming back. And of course you write a little bit about your wife's challenges, who, who not only had to drive you, which is unimaginable as your passing in and outta consciousness, that that trip must have seemed time, must have been very relative in, in that, in that drive. And then she had to,

- She actually, she actually called an ambulance, so

- Oh,

- Right. But then she's gonna drive. Yeah, yeah. She called, she, she called an ambulance. Yep.

- But as she's driving, it must have been very hard. And she's in the hospital while you're, of course trying to say, fight for your life. And so she's had, I'm sure some challenges dealing with your challenges, but you write about how it wasn't what one might expect, which is, oh, you've got a newly of life and everything's more meaningful now because you realize life is finite. That was not your first reaction.

- No, I mean, I didn't, I kind of knew life was finite. What I didn't realize is that you could be dead dinner. Yeah. Without being in a war zone or without driving and being in good health. I had no idea that the world worked that way. Right. And, and that's terrifying. But as I say in the book, the flip side of terror is reverence. And if you do understand that life really is that temporary moment by moment, it makes the moment you're in inflates, like the universe inflated and the big bang, it inflates in meaning to encompass everything. Right? That's all you got is this moment. And it now encompasses everything. And it's simply a matter of keeping that foremost in mind while you go through the tri travails and tribulations of your life. Right. Which have to be dealt with.

- Piece of cake.

- Piece of cake. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

- No, that's obviously, it's many religions try to instill that, that sense of reverence. Here's it, here's the quote. I, it was the thing I was gonna ask you about next. You just quoted it without me asking, quote, the flip side of terror's reverence. If you're not sufficiently reverent, you're not sufficiently terrified. And vice versa. My appreciation for the current moment rose to such levels. It could almost be paralyzing. There was virtually no activity that couldn't come grinding to a halt, because I realized all over again how unlikely the whole thing was. Why wasn't everyone crying all the time over this? I thought, have you seen the trees really seen them? Or the clouds other, the way water droplets form digital patterns on the porch screen after it rains. Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don't need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder. Just stand on a street corner and look around for a while. Close quote. Really beautiful.

- Thank you.

- Are you still reverent mostly or terrified or both, or

- Been six years? I have easier, yeah, I have easier access to reverence. I mean, you can't entirely live in that place because there are tasks that need to be done where you have to focus on a lot of mundane details. And, and I have young children, you know, whatever, like, you can't, you can't stay in that place constantly. But if you can't access it, you're really, you're not, you're not living. And if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by frustration and anger and emotions like that, really overwhelmed by them, they are eclipsing the, the, the miracle of the fact that you're alive, right? That you exist, that you can hold your children, that you can see a tree. You know, it's a, it's all, it starts to sound very trite, but it's, you know, it's quite true. I'll say this makes me think of something that happened when I woke up in the ICU. So they eventually, after the doctors gave up, they tried another approach. It worked. They saved my life. And the next thing I knew, I was in the, it was morning, the ICU and I woke up to the sound of nurses talking about me, ICU nurse, two ICU nurses. And, and my eyes opened. And, and one of them said, congratulations, Mr. Younger, you made it like we almost lost you last night. In fact, it's kind of a MiiR miracle. No one can believe you're alive. And indeed I'd survive something that where the survi odds of survival are incredibly small. Right? And I was shocked. I had no idea. And then immediately I remember seeing my father, my dead father, and the black pit, right? And then the, the nurse walked away and she came back an hour later. I've just, I'm just lying there. I'm throwing up blood. I got tubes sticking out all over me. I'm in pain. I'm thinking about this terrible thing, right? And, and she comes back and says, Hey, how are you doing? And I said, well, not that great. What you told me is terrifying and I can't stop thinking about it. And, and she said, try this, instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred when she walked away. So in my mind, as a, as, as a non-religious person, as a secular person, the word sacred is a beautiful word. It's a necessary word. And I hold it to mean any process, any information, anything that protects, upholds human dignity. That's what sacred means. So sometimes school teachers are performing, doing sacred work. Sometimes shrinks are sometimes doctors, sometimes ministers, right? Like we are, we are all capable, capable of sacred work by my, by my definition of the word. So as a journalist, I've gone to front lines over and over again and came back with information about what's happening in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone or whatever it may be. Now, Liberia, Gaza, et cetera, Iran, like information that's sacred because it will help the world. It may help the world make wiser choices and protect human dignity. Without that, wherever you fall politically, it doesn't matter to me without that information, no choice, no good choices are possible. So journalists on their best day are, are potentially doing sacred work in the sense that, I mean it. So my question to myself was, I just went to the ultimate front line. I almost died. I looked over the edge and was allowed to return to life. Did I come back with sacred information? In other words, with information that might help others face their own mortality with more dignity, with more love, with less fear. Did I, yes or no? And that was the challenge I gave myself in writing my book, which took me two years to start because I was so avoidant. I'd been so traumatized by this, I was so avoidant of the topic, I just really couldn't bear for a while. And one of the odd things about almost dying, and it's very common, I didn't know this, is that often people who almost died, whether a medical emergency or a car accident or what have you, often they're seized with a terror that they actually did die. And they just realize it. And that they're in a kind of dying hallucination. And, and they are the only ones who don't know. And there's a amazing movie from, you know, 30 years ago called Jacob's Ladder about a Vietnam, a soldier in Vietnam who thinks he's returning home to his girlfriend, et cetera, is he's actually dying in the battlefield. And he doesn't know it. And his flashbacks to the battlefield are actually what's actually happening. And everything else is the fantasy, right? The hallucination devastating idea. So apparently that's really common. It's an effect of trauma. And so I got very crazy, right? I became the most neurotic person I'd ever met. I got very depressed, very anxious after I came home from the hospital. I couldn't be alone. I, I, I was agoraphobic. I mean, I was really a mess. Way more so than combat had ever, ever done to me. And at one point I went up to my wife and I said, listen, can you just tell me you see me, and then I'm here, and then I made it, and then like, just pro, can you just tell me? And she, I mean, no, no, no one wants to hear that from their spouse, right? Like that question, a bad sign, right? And, and she said, yes, of course you're here, we, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And in my mind I'm like, yeah, that's exactly the kind of thing a hallucination would say. Yes. Right? So it still didn't, it's a very, actually a profound philosophical question. How do you know Yeah. That you're here? And finally, and I'll, I'll I'll end with this, but I think it's a good, a good point to make her a a along these lines. She, my wife said to me this amazing thing. She said, Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you? I mean, not that you survived, but that it happened at all. Like, if you could push a button and have it not happen, would you, would you push the button? Boy, I didn't know what to say because on the one hand, I felt really like this was the most terrible thing that had I'd ever experienced. On the other hand, I was privileged, I was special. I got to look over the edge and then come back, right? And I was sort of chosen to see the truth. I, I phrased it even in grandiose terms to myself about what had happened to me, right? And I didn't know what to say. I didn't know I didn't have an answer. And then eventually I looked up the word I, I thought, okay, in sort of more mythic terms, she's saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right? So I looked up the word blessing, curious, right? What, what the origin was. And it's related, it's just, it's from the Anglo-Saxon word, ble, which means blood. And the idea is that there is no blessing without a wounding, right? There is no, no blessing without some kind of cost, some kind of consequence without some kind of diminishment and, and that they're, they're twins. And then you actually, you really can't have one without the other. And of course, life is both right. Life is painful and horrible, but, and a miracle and all at the same time. It's a blessing and a curse. And once I saw it like that, it kind of released me from this sort of moral paralysis about, you know, who was I and what was happening to me.

- Yeah. I, I went, I have in my notes, it's funny you came to this point. I have in my notes line from the comedian Jimmy Carr, who a philosopher, a friend of mine thinks is a great philosopher. And Jimmy Carr says, you can't have an easy life and a great character. Yeah. You have a choice. You can have character, you can, you can grow into something deep and meaningful, or you can have an easy life. But if you have an easy life, you're probably not gonna build the inner connections that it takes to have what we call character or meaning or all kinds of other things we might tie to suffering. And sacredness is one of those things. It's funny 'cause I was gonna ask you, I was gonna ask you this question earlier in the interview. All the dangerous places you put yourself in your career as journalist, you could ask, you know, the same question. You chose to live a life, most of your life to build who you become, who you've become, a very serious person who experienced things that most of us don't experience. So you've lived your life in many ways. This goes back to your father and your understanding that came years later. But in many ways, you have their life because of your childhood and your father's life, ex and your parents and grandparents' life experiences you wanted a taste of, they had a lot of character, they saw a lot of life, and they suffered a great deal. Yeah.

- They had a

- Lot of terror and fear and, and, you know, hard hardship. But they were human beings of great character, I suspect. And you forged a similar experience for your own life. And this is just another chapter.

- Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. And I, I, I am sort of conscious of having been extraordinarily lucky in the circumstances that I was born into and grew up in having been in many wars, the idea that, you know, you, I had a childhood where I didn't have any reasonable fear for my, my safety for my life. No, no, no reasonable concern that there'd be food for dinner, right. That I might not be able to grow, you know, grow, grow up in the house we were living in. That we have to move as refugees. Like, I, I, I so lucky that, that those thoughts that weren't even in my mind right, as possibilities. And as I got older, I wouldn't say I felt guilty about those good circumstances, but it did make me think that something was left undeveloped in me and something human, something essentially human, was left undeveloped in me because I I, because I never had to worry about like what was gonna happen to me. Yeah. I mean, when, when, when, have humans ever had that luxury? Yeah. Right. I mean, that's just, it just started. Look, they only invented antibiotics a few decades ago, right? Like when my father was born, you know, an infection could have easily killed them 'cause they didn't have antibiotics. Like now. Like, so even in, in, within my lifetime, there are things that protect people from, as doctors say, bad outcomes, unimaginable to even, you know, our grandparents. And so that precipitated in me a desire, I'm gonna say test myself, it's not quite the right word, but to not, not prioritize safety and convenience and comfort in the decisions that I make in my life. I wanted to prioritize experiences and challenges and human connection. I wanted to be in places where humans connect very immediate, visceral way, often because they're in difficult circumstances and they have to connect in order to survive. And those si situations as stressful as they can be for me, have also been the, the sort of food my soul has, has subsisted on, right? And made up for the sort of vacuum, the moral vacuum of a safe American suburb in the 1970s

- On a close with your experience of writing the book itself. Obviously a book can be an escape, but it could also be the deepest dive into the things that you need to discover. I suspect it was a little bit of both for you, it was, I'm sure it was incredibly cathartic. It was powerful to go back and talk to those doctors and your connection to them. Which what's amazing is that you weren't really communicating with them, but you had a human experience of dignity with, with their hands. That is unparalleled in, in human experience. It's only a few people have that curse and blessing of, of that level of, of gratitude and, and being taken care of. It's an amazing thing. But I'm curious, just putting it all down on paper and then putting it in a book you can hold in your hand and now it's done. And, and of course I'm proud just knowing you, Sebastian, I said I didn't write the book, so I can't imagine, you know, what it's like to write a book this good, I like my own books, but they're not like this. Thank you. What's that? Try to put into words what it's like to have that experience of writing it and then just finishing it and saying, okay, I've chronicled this incredible chapter.

- Well, I, you know, it's like one's children, like you sort of love them equally, but in different ways. All my books I love equally, but in different ways. And, and, and this, this book was particularly meaningful because I, I, you know, it was about me and it was about mortality. I mean, you know, I'd never really written about myself before. And, and as a journalist, that always seemed like unseemly, right? You might an occasional mention here and there, right? And a few references in my book war. But yeah, this, this one felt different. And, and it felt like it easily could be the book I end my career on. Like, how do you go beyond this one? Like, what are you gonna, the great railroad disaster of 1883? You like, you know what I mean? Like, it's like, where do you go from here? I didn't know. I don't, and I still don't have an answer to that question. So the experience of writing it, I, I just, I love my words, right? I love the process of arranging words in just the right way so that they communicate essential information, sacred information in a way that readers can't help themselves. They just wanna keep reading. Like, that's my, that's my vision, that's my goal, right? And I love that process of doing that with words. I absolutely adore it. And, and that, and this book was that process in some ways times a thousand because it was the most about the most abstract ideas, the most elusive concepts, right? And could I keep it grounded in, you know, a, a reality that was compelling even though we're talking about quantum physics, God help me, right? Like, and I feel like I did it. I flatter myself and I did it. Some people think it was too much science, but I think I would've lost them. Anyway, they said that about the perfect storm as well. Like what's with all the physics of wave motion? Well, look, a hundred foot wave sank the boat. You may wanna know, you might wanna know how that works, right? So you're not going to, you're not gonna please everybody. But, so I, I finished it and it was an extremely emotional process. And a lot of, you know, trauma comes with sorrow, trauma comes with grief and a loss of innocence and pain. And you know, I, I'm not embarrassed to admit I, you know, I cried my way through any number of sections as I was writing it. And, and then, and then it stopped and then, and that was sort of okay. And, you know, I was actually, I under my, my wife, my poor wife, under her her request, she said, can you go talk to someone? You need some help. Like, and so I did. I found a c counselor to talk to. And between writing the book and talking to a really good therapist, like I, I actually got to a good place. But I gotta, I gotta tell you, it took a couple years. It was way worse than combat. Way worse, right? Life is terrifying when you really understand what life is, it's terrifying. And an equal measure, it's magical. That's the deal. It's the only deal you're ever gonna get.

- My guest today has been Sebastian Younger. His book is in my time of dying. Sebastian, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

- My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.