Facing Mortality and Beyond: Peak Performance in the Most Crucial Moments | Sebastian Junger

[00:00:06] Imagine you're about to die. Let's say you were hit by a car, you're bleeding out, you're on the way to the hospital but you just have this sense that you're not going to live and you see visions of let's say someone you knew in the past

[00:00:24] let's say a mother or a father and they're saying don't worry we're here for you come down this light at the end of a tunnel does that change your experience of life if you then survive well we're gonna hear from Sebastian

[00:00:42] Younger who wrote in my time of dying how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife and if you don't know who Sebastian is he's written tons of books about being a war reporter and his experience in war zones and other

[00:00:55] experiences like that and his books are always very intense but this is perhaps his most intense book that I've read where he's not talking about deaths in the battlefield or in a war zone but his own experience of of dying and what

[00:01:13] happened to him during that experience and it really it really makes you think I've been thinking about it a lot for personal reasons this past week and it it really was interesting to me so I hope everybody enjoys it if you do

[00:01:26] please retweet it please share it with your friends please subscribe to the podcast so all the good little algorithms work for me so thanks so much and here is Sebastian this isn't your average business podcast and he's not your

[00:01:46] average host this is the James Altucher show what what compelled you to write it I mean it's it's very different from I don't want to say it's very different from your other books I think stylistically it's it's similar but

[00:02:08] it's different in the terms of that you're you're veering into a lot of speculation instead of kind of well I'll let you describe yeah I mean what compelled me to write to the book is that I'm an author and I almost died and

[00:02:23] I saw very strange things on the threshold of death that were at odds with my understanding of physics and my commitment to atheism and and rationality and I wanted to understand them and I understand things by researching them

[00:02:40] and writing about them and then the magic of that process is that if I can understand something and you know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer right and if I can understand something my readers usually I can usually get my

[00:02:53] readers to understand it as well and then that's you know that's the magic of journalism so can you describe just jumping into the middle of the book describe specifically what you saw you're on the edge of death after this

[00:03:06] abominable abdominal abdominal eating starts yeah and the doctors are wheeling you in to surgery and treatment and hat with half your I guess vision or inner vision you saw this darkness and the other half is like you see life and what

[00:03:25] happens from there I don't know if I saw life but I saw something puzzling I so I had a abdominal hemorrhage I was losing a pint of blood into my own abdomen every you know 10 or 15 minutes there's 10 pints in the human body so

[00:03:40] you know you have an hour or so and I was an hour drive from the hospital so you can do the math and when I when I got there I was actively dying I had

[00:03:50] maybe 10 or 15 minutes of life left and they they they decided to put a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me with as much blood as possible my blood pressure was 60 over 40 so they they didn't have any

[00:04:06] time to spare and while they were working on my neck this black void appeared below me and you know again I'll reiterate I'm an atheist I'm a rationalist my father was a physicist and an atheist and a rationalist and so

[00:04:21] just for proper context for what happened I this black void appeared above me and I felt myself getting sort of pulled into it now I had no idea I was dying absolutely no idea I thank God or I would have been very scared and

[00:04:38] very very sorry can I ask I don't mean to interrupt but you were being wheeled into surgery you were in massive pain everybody was transfusing everything into you is it a trick of the mind that you didn't think you were dying like it

[00:04:51] does the mind kind of not want you to think you're dying so it plays tricks at that point or did you really I mean you must have had some guess that this was trouble well I guessed it was trouble but I didn't know I was dying in that

[00:05:03] moment you know I thought maybe I have cancer in my abdomen and a tumor that ruptured and I'm gonna wake up to very bad news tomorrow that they took out what they could but I got three months you know I mean I knew that I knew that

[00:05:14] something was happening that was probably gonna be very scary but I didn't know I was dying in the next ten minutes right I mean I'm not a doctor if I've been a doctor I would have read the signs like oh bro you got it you got an

[00:05:25] abdominal hemorrhage you know you got minutes left like I mean but I'm not a doctor I had no idea I had I had a completely bearable pain in my abdomen that's it right so when the doctor asked permission to put a needle in my in my

[00:05:38] jugular which is a somewhat risky procedure my answer to him was like why are you doing that in case there's an emergency and he said this is the emergency so I really I really didn't know and so this void opened up

[00:05:52] underneath me and I started to get pulled into it and I was very I was terrified and I didn't want to go into the void I because I sort of knew if I

[00:06:02] go in I'm not coming out like I just can I ask when you say the void opened up underneath you like you were lying on a gurney or something right so yeah what does it mean it opened up underneath you I just felt it underneath me into my

[00:06:13] left like this infinite blackness and I was suddenly aware of this place the dark place that I didn't want to go and you know of course none of the doctors knew it was there right I mean was entirely my own perception but boom there

[00:06:28] it was I was getting pulled into it and then my dead father appeared above me and I was completely shocked to see him I mean it's my dead father like what are

[00:06:40] you doing here like it made no sense to my rational mind and he was there in this sort of intense energy form right and and he communicated to me it's okay you don't have to fight it you can come with me I'll take care of you and the

[00:06:57] communication wasn't quite with words I mean it's very you know this is very hard to describe with language is such a limited limited medium and I'm taught where we know we're talking about things that are either totally hallucinatory or

[00:07:09] enormously profound and mysterious you know either way language isn't really up to the job but he communicated to me I'll take care of you you can come with me and I was absolutely horrified right I was like you're dead I'm alive I'm not

[00:07:24] going anywhere with you we got nothing to talk about in fact I was almost sort of offended by the suggestion that I would want to go with him I have two young daughters and wife a wonderful family like all right I'm 58 but I'm in

[00:07:36] great health and I'm like I'm not going anywhere with you right and and I said to the doctor you got to hurry you're losing me right now I'm going and then my memory is intermittent for the next six hours while they tried to save my

[00:07:50] life you know when you were when he was talking to you do you feel like it was more than it wasn't like a dream experience you felt like he was right there talking to you or in some way more real than a dream oh it wasn't a

[00:08:03] dream at all I mean I was away I was talking to the doctors he was above me as much as the doctors were in the room he was in the room with me above me but

[00:08:12] again in a form that was a little bit different from the doctors who were there clearly physically there in front of me if I reached out I could touch them my father he was above me and it was his it was his energy I mean it's

[00:08:25] hard to describe he was like his essence in this sort of energy form and I wish English said better language for what I what I experienced you've done this exploration of all the different things that this might mean particularly after

[00:08:40] you know when you got out of the hospital but just put us at ease like you were okay obviously you know you you it was this bleeding in your pancreas what happened that you know that one of the doctors do yeah so it turned out I

[00:08:54] had an aneurysm in my pancreatic artery which is a little there's five arteries that go to the pain who knew right there's five arteries that go to the pancreas and one of them quite small is probably the size of a number two pencil

[00:09:06] or something like that like it's you know quite a small artery it developed it an aneurysm a ballooning and at a weak spot right and this is this isn't the product of bad health or a lifetime of sin or whatever right it just it really is like

[00:09:20] a random a random structural thing and and it's very rare in the spot that I had it and so it sort of ballooned and a ballooned and the walls of the artery got thinner and thinner over the course of probably decades right decades and

[00:09:35] then in one moment in mid-sentence while I'm talking to my wife it ruptured and I started bleeding out into my own abdomen and in that all it took in mid-sentence was boom suddenly I'm dying and it's not like I'm a walking heart

[00:09:49] attack I'm in very good health there was nothing nothing going on with me where I would think oh you know what you're at some risk of dropping dead like that's not me right and but but little did I know that I had this abnormality in my

[00:10:02] abdomen so what they did was they brought me into the interventional radiology suite that the last ditch the last ditch attempt to save a person's life who's has a hemorrhage like this is to cut their cut their abdomen open

[00:10:14] and start looking for the bleed before the person bleeds out it really is sort of battlefield surgery right but what they're able to do with in the end in interventional radiology is they put you on a fluoroscope where they can do sort

[00:10:29] of real-time x-ray video basically and of course you get a fair amount of radiation I had radiation burns after that but that's what was required to save my life and then they thread a catheter from your groin into your

[00:10:42] femoral artery a catheter is a flexible rubber or rubber tube or wire and they they thread it up your femoral from your groin and then up into your chest and through all the twists and turns turns of the abdominal arteries and they

[00:10:58] can get the the catheter really anywhere in your body right they can take sharp turns they can do way they can double back they could do whatever they need to do and so that way they're able to put in stents or what-have-you without

[00:11:11] cutting the person open so it's a huge huge breakthrough in medical technology and so they did that and they couldn't get to the spot that was bleeding they could not get there by catheter and at one point I watched the doctors sort of

[00:11:26] give up they were like well we tried everything you know it's probably off to surgery with them and what you know what I didn't know was that surgery was I might have survived but the chances were quite small that I would survive I

[00:11:38] didn't know that it's a really a last-ditch thing and then one of the doctors said let's try going through his left wrist I didn't understand that actually like how do you why do they need to go into it like why can't they

[00:11:48] just cut your stomach open or is that surgery that surgery if they cut your stomach open there's all this blood in your abdomen and it you and you bleed out very very quickly and you know it's deep deep abdominal surgery and you're

[00:12:04] in a very already a very compromised state so they got to move all the organs away they got to move they have to get the liver out of there they get to get the pancreas out of there they're excavating into your abdomen when you're

[00:12:14] already very compromised hoping to get to the bleed before all the blood runs out of you right because like left wrist like what do they they go all the way they put something in and they go all over your arm and then down yeah

[00:12:27] exactly exactly so what the left wrist allows is for them to come to that area in your abdomen from above right which avoids all the entanglements that you have to deal with if you come from below through the groin and it was those

[00:12:42] twists and turns of my vasculature that were impeding the progress of the little of the cat of the catheter tube that they were trying to get into me so from the left wrist it was it was easier and they just had to get past a blockage in

[00:12:57] my celiac artery that they forced open with a balloon and that allowed that finally allowed them but it was a very very high level interventional radiology like very few IR specialists would have even thought of it much less been able

[00:13:10] to pull it off so it's very creative of this doctor I mean you were lucky that that particular doctor was there and in the middle of Cape Cod on this day Oh incredibly lucky like another specialist the guy actually the guy who trained the

[00:13:26] guy who saved my life I happened to meet him a couple of weeks ago and he said that maybe maybe at most 5% of interventional radiologists would have even thought of doing that and been able to pull it off like he's like you were

[00:13:41] you're really really lucky so my odds of living were terrifyingly small but of course I didn't know that right like your odds include you know when you had pain calling the doctor not everybody does that you did it right on time

[00:13:57] because you got you know then then you got to the hospital before all your blood leaked out then they saw you right away which doesn't isn't always a guarantee in a hospital and then they figured out what was causing the

[00:14:08] bleeding and figured out this method of intervention yeah I mean when I arrived at the hospital as an acute in acute danger and they don't wait you know they don't make people wait around who are bleeding out they knew exactly what was

[00:14:24] happening to me they kicked a stroke off the fluoroscope to put me on it because they knew it was a matter of minutes before I died so so that you know that that wasn't sort of random and you know we called the ambulance because I after I

[00:14:39] started bleeding I stood up to sort of ease the pain and I almost fell over and you know like and then I was in and out of consciousness and eventually I started going blind and all of that are symptoms of extreme blood loss and so

[00:14:52] you know there was no question that I was that that we would call the ambulance the problem is we lived in a very remote area that had no cell phone service is the end of a dead-end dirt road deep in the woods and there's no

[00:15:04] cell phone service and the landlines don't work when it rains and it had been raining so we were really really very isolated and and if there was a miracle going on one of them was that we got one bar of cell phone service from the

[00:15:14] driveway which never happens and we managed to call the ambulance with that one bar if you had if your wife had driven you what would have happened well she you know it's a one-hour drive to the to the hospital and she would have

[00:15:28] been stuck in traffic and I would have died next to her in the passenger seat and so okay so they go in through the left wrist they go in through the left wrist and you know I'm conscious the whole time because my vitals are too low

[00:15:41] to be given any morphine or anything so you know I'm an incredible pain and I'm experienced the whole thing experiencing the whole thing and and hallucinating and all kinds of other unpleasant stuff and and eventually like 2 in the morning

[00:15:58] they managed to get the catheter to the bleed and they plugged the artery with a coil and blocked you know plug you know it's like plug the drain basically and saved my life and then and they sent me back then they I think they knocked me

[00:16:15] out and sent me up I was able to see my wife very briefly and hold her hand for a moment and they sent me up to the ICU knocked me out and I woke up the next

[00:16:23] morning the ICU and the nurse said to me congratulations you survived like no one thought you were gonna make it you almost died last night and I was completely shocked and the next thing that happened was after she told me that

[00:16:35] the next thing that happened was I remembered oh my god I saw my father and I saw the pit and it all came back to me and as soon as my wife got to the ICU

[00:16:45] that morning that was what I said to her I almost died and I saw my father he was right there I don't know what to I don't know what to make of this. And what did she make of it? What was her first reaction?

[00:16:57] Her first reaction was you know because I interviewed her later and I interviewed all the doctors who that agreed to talk to me I tried to do but you know I because it was a subjective first-person account which I was didn't entirely

[00:17:11] trust because I wasn't of right mind I tried to do as much reporting as possible including interviewing my wife and she confirmed that it was the pretty much the first thing that I said when she walked in was I saw my dad

[00:17:25] you know which gives me some a level of trust that I didn't sort of somehow retroactively make it up or something and and what she made of it was wow if you saw your father then you really did almost die like she didn't know she's

[00:17:40] not a doctor right the doctor and the doctors don't want to scare people so they're careful saying to the wife wow you're we all your husband almost bought the farm last night it's not the kind of thing that doctors say to spouses right

[00:17:53] and so in her mind they were like you know he had a problem we fixed the problem he's fine like that's the sort of level that the doctors are on but she was like wow you did if you saw your father that means you came really really

[00:18:07] close and that's when it sort of settled into her like wow I almost lost him. And what was her reaction to like when you said you saw your father what did she think that was did she think that was that you really saw your father or

[00:18:22] that maybe it was a hallucination like what was what was her interpretation at at first stab so to speak? You know she doesn't she doesn't believe or disbelieve anything like that so to her either whether it's a hallucination or something

[00:18:40] that's real by some of physical objective standard either way you only hallucinate something like your dead father when you are right on the precipice of dying right I mean the dying brain produces visions right we know that

[00:19:00] and and so like if that's what's happening you're really really close or you could say that on some level we don't understand possibly some quantum level some subatomic level there is some kind of post-death existence and

[00:19:14] that the dead engage with the living in a way like like when people read each other's minds in a way you know we know we sort of know what happens we have no idea how or why like that there's there's some level to this that we the

[00:19:25] physicists don't understand but that in fact like there's something real going on when the dying see the dead which is extremely common and really lacks a complete explanation. Take a quick break if you like this episode

[00:19:41] I'd really really appreciate it would mean so much to me please share with your friends and subscribe to the podcast email me at altatra.gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed thanks let's start with like the most

[00:20:04] scientific potential applications and you discuss all these in the book so for instance maybe at the moment of dying you mentioned endogenous DMT or endogenous ketamine so so basically chemicals inside the body that are very similar to the drugs ketamine and DMT could potentially activate to protect

[00:20:22] the cells in your brain so that's one theory of why these hallucinations or near-death experiences occur yeah exactly I mean so there's two camps right there's a lot of very smart well credentialed people who have taken the

[00:20:36] thousands of accounts of NDEs and you know that are across society they're quite similar across societies through the ages and and said this amounts to and you know these are MDs right these are doctors like these cases amount to

[00:20:52] not proof of but evidence of some sort of afterlife right that there's that opinion is out there amongst a very very serious rigorous people right and then equally serious well credentialed rigorous people doctors researchers your neurobiologists etc are like nonsense we can explain all of this

[00:21:15] through brain chemistry and we know that the dying brain produces a surfeit of these sort of like hallucinatory endogenous chemicals that will give you visions we know that epileptics when they have seizures will have visions see a

[00:21:29] tunnel of light when you put someone in a human centrifuge when you put a fighter pilot in a human centrifuge and spin them around and they experience low blood oxygen low perfusion in the brain that they will have all these crazy

[00:21:43] experiences in the white light and blah blah we can reproduce all of this in the lab so these these experiences that the NDE experiences they don't prove this in afterlife this is we are we understand how all this works and you know not

[00:21:56] surprisingly there isn't a these are all rational and plausible arguments and there isn't a sort of final proof the one thing I'll say and I you know as I was going through it I was so freaked out after I came back from the hospital

[00:22:11] so unnerved unsettled by what had happened to me and and this is pretty common like incredibly anxious right like really really fearful I was suddenly a very fearful person so when I was reading these accounts of NDE's I

[00:22:25] started with all the accounts by researchers who were sort of quote believers right that they were like this overtly or not over not overtly there were sort of suggesting this this amounts to evidence of an afterlife and

[00:22:39] as I was reading through this stuff now I'm an atheist I'm a rationalist etc etc right but I'm reading through it and I'm in such a delicate place I allowed myself this weird little hope that started to creep in like wow maybe

[00:22:52] that's pretty convincing maybe there is an afterlife like maybe there's nothing to worry about like I couldn't help myself right embarrassingly right and then I read the rationalists like men like men people scientists like my

[00:23:05] father saying well hold on a second like let's be realistic here let's be real here we can explain all of this through neurochemistry and you know there's such like killjoys right there like party ruiners like oh they you know

[00:23:20] that looked like there was a chance for a while but oh well like the rationalists take you know like you know the rationalists take the debate as they always do and sort of crushed by the puny little hopes about like maybe

[00:23:33] there's something more and except for one thing right so I was enormously convinced by the rational explanations with what with one exception and I'm not saying that this proves there's any post that does existence or disproves I'm

[00:23:49] making no assessment in that regard I will just say it opened a legitimate question to my mind we know that if you give a roomful of people LSD they will all hallucinate it's no mystery right we know that all of them will we know why

[00:24:03] we know how it works in the brain there's no controversy there's no confusion it's it's it's settled science right but they will not all hallucinate the same things right and what is very odd about the experience of dying

[00:24:20] whether it's in a in an acute situation like I was with acute blood loss leading to a very rapid death or a heart attack or the long slow process of someone dying of old age in hospice in a home in their own home or in a memory care

[00:24:38] unit or what have you they're over and over and over again the one of the most common experiences for these people either the ones that come back from almost dying or the people who actually go on to die but they're conversant with

[00:24:53] those around them in those final hours or days is that they see the dead that the dead seem to show up to escort them across and or tell them no it's not your time and it's it's a legitimately weird thing and and that they don't there

[00:25:09] isn't a there's neurochemical explanations for hallucinations in general but no one's that has identified a protein or a compound in the human brain that necessitates a specific hallucination of dead relatives right like that has not been isolated in the lab well there's that and there's one

[00:25:31] other thing but but just addressing that for a second you do mention how and I separately look this up and it's definitely true that as someone's dying these like gamma waves or whatever go through the brain which trigger extreme

[00:25:46] memory retrieval so obviously you're remembering something of your dad and and other people are remembering people in their lives you know it's that whole sensation of all my life flash before my eyes so could it be related to that for

[00:25:59] instance well yeah the memory retrieval I mean that that you know connects more to this what's called a life review where the experience is that you're you're seeing in one moment simultaneously all of you the events of

[00:26:16] your life right and it's called a life review and it's a profound overwhelming experience I didn't have that I interviewed someone who did I didn't have that what's strange about I mean I you know I have obviously as we all do I

[00:26:32] have 60 years of memories right very few of them are of dead people right I mean I mean but you know my memories include my family you know people that are far more important to me than my dead father right my memory include my the only one

[00:26:48] or two people who died are actually important to me three people are actually personally important to me in that in that sense and so these aren't memories I didn't have a memory of my father right I wasn't like suddenly I was eight years

[00:27:03] old and we were camping right what I saw was my father floating above me in a form that I didn't understand communicating right now you can come with me that's not a memory I have right right and look you don't you understand

[00:27:17] what I'm saying this yeah so so they're slightly different and then the other the other aspect of it is that people in hospice I mean you ask hospice nurses about the process of dying I would say that very very often in the final hours

[00:27:30] or sometimes day or so the dying person will be actively conversing with a dead relative a dead loved one who seems to be in the room right and so that's not the gamma waves triggered by the final moments of brain death this is this is a

[00:27:47] the brain of a person who is still very much alive though on the way out and it's just it's a it's a rather odd thing and one of the very odd things about it

[00:27:56] and I know I'm sounding all woo-woo and mystical and I don't mean to but it it is a legitimate question that I have that might have a totally scientific answer but we don't know what it is but so one of the odd things that's been

[00:28:10] documented is that when the dying person sort of shows up in the hallucinations that when the dead person shows up in the room of a dying person and their hallucinations whatever you take that to be sometimes the dead person isn't known

[00:28:29] to have died by the dying person because it happened very recently and it's really quite a that's really quite mysterious and there's there many accounts of that and again it begs an explanation well and there's two other things that that

[00:28:43] actually were confounding one is when your father died or when he had you know was hit by an attack or whatever it was 315 in in the morning and you woke up experiencing your dad's pain essentially and he and he was experiencing this

[00:29:03] hundreds of miles away and you didn't know that at that point like that actually sort of defies explanation this other experience you had when he died yeah I mean well I'll explain a little bit more precisely because it really is

[00:29:16] why is a puzzle to me again a puzzle it puzzled my rational mind right it challenged what I thought might be true about the world so he was in Boston he was in hospice care and we knew they had some you know months left right it was

[00:29:32] not imminent his death was not imminent but it was inevitable and I was living in New York and you know 250 miles away or whatever it is and suddenly in the middle of the night I was woken up by him screaming my name from the next room

[00:29:47] like Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian and I sat bolt upright I mean I was like oh my god what what you know what's going on and I realized it was just a dream and I

[00:29:57] looked at the clock and it was 315 a few hours later I thought how weird a few hours later my mother called and said get to Boston as fast as you can the nurse says told me that last night your father woke up in a panic thrashing

[00:30:13] around and screaming and often that's a sign that the person is in their last hours or maybe day right it's a sign of the next thing before the next thing that happens is that they die and it's a very very common sign and I said wow ask

[00:30:30] her what time that was and of course the nurses that have to write everything down and it was 315 right so we know at the sort of quantum level that entangled particles can communicate instantaneously faster than the speed of

[00:30:43] light across the entire universe whether we know that quantum entanglement allows for that so it does make one wonder like in the human mind by some mechanism that we don't understand yet can the human mind communicate with other minds

[00:30:58] instantaneously across distance I have to say that it's possible not because there's a God or something but because the physicists have not figured everything out yet and what how did you explain at the time because this even

[00:31:10] seems like a more remarkable occurrence then then not to put down your you're seeing your dad as dying but you know there are people have attempted to make scientific explanations of that but there's I can't think of any real

[00:31:24] scientific explanation of what you just described so like how did you describe it at the time I couldn't right I mean I it had happened was a coincidence possibly you know but I don't have an explanation as I say in the book the

[00:31:38] problem with rational thought which of course is a very powerful mode of thinking right like airplanes fly because of rational thought like medicine works computers work we're on a zoom because very rational people figured some stuff out right like but the problem with rationality is that things keep

[00:31:57] happening in life that we can't explain right like that's and we all know that experience so I don't you know I don't know I don't have an answer if I did you know I would have I would write I have another I would have another book to

[00:32:11] write but I don't have an answer for that question the other thing you talk about is people with near-death experiences that actually experience things happening let's say in the other room or they picture themselves above their bodies while they're being operated on which that I could almost

[00:32:28] see being there some scientific explanation but you you mentioned a couple of near-death experiences where the person experienced something they couldn't possibly have been aware of that was happening let's say behind closed doors in another room yeah and again you have to take these accounts as credible

[00:32:42] if people are waking up and deciding to have some fun with the doctors and you know whatever I mean if you want to be like infinitely skeptical you can say look these are unreliable port reports from people that might have gotten

[00:32:54] information later and then filled in and come up with a story either that they'd convince themselves of or they would they wanted to convince other people who knows right but the the other explanation if it is an explanation but

[00:33:07] the other way of thinking is that some of the some of the scientists who develop quantum theory like Schrodinger and Heisenberg Schrodinger for example his belief he wasn't religious his belief was that there was a universal

[00:33:26] consciousness that that was part of the Colossus of the universe right and it consciousness was part of the physical nature of the universe in the same way that gravity is right as gravity is this force we all understand it you jump out

[00:33:41] a window you're gonna fall to the ground no one can really explain it like okay I got it I'll fall but why like what is this force this invisible force that affects all things likewise Schrodinger was of the position that

[00:33:55] there was a universal consciousness and that when we die we return to it which which raises the possibility that if there's a universal consciousness maybe the individual consciousness between human beings can be violated at times in

[00:34:10] very indirect ways and you can quote read someone's mind right across a distance you can dream your father can wake you up in his sort of paroxysms of fear and anguish before he dies all the way in New York City and like with

[00:34:25] quantum entanglement we just don't understand the physical process but we're starting to get the sense that there's something real there that we need that we need to explain yeah like you know the idea of quantum mechanics

[00:34:38] is that these tiny tiny part and I'm no expert obviously none of us are but these tiny particles tinier than atoms are affected simply by observation when you observe something when you measure one of these quarks or whatever they

[00:34:54] change because you're measuring them not that's right you're not measuring them you're actually they actually become measurable because you're measuring them and so then the gets back to well how before there were before there was consciousness let's say before there were any living beings how did the

[00:35:09] universe even exist if they did they exist the universe only really start to exist when there was consciousness to observe it yeah and you know I would say I mean obviously I'm not an expert either and I would say there are many

[00:35:22] physicists who would say that they're not experts either because it's a profound mystery that they you know that nobody understands but the subatomic particles not only does observation change their behavior the subatomic particle is all

[00:35:38] things it's in all positions it has all values until it's observed and then it has to pick one right so it's not just this one thing or another it's all things and then it's one thing right and that's what's extraordinary about it

[00:35:53] and it's called it's the it's called a quantum waveform and the end the the the waveform is is the range of all mathematical possibilities for that subatomic particle and then once you observe it all of a sudden of course it

[00:36:10] can't be all that you know all things can pass through two slits like there's the famous double slit experiment there's two slits in a steel plate you fire a photon at them yeah like as you know if there's two doorways you can't

[00:36:22] walk through both at the same time right you have a one body you have to go through one or the other well at the subatomic in the subatomic world if you don't observe the photon it will go through both slits simultaneously and

[00:36:35] leave a strike signature on the on a strike plate on the other side that's consistent with going through both slits right if you observe it it's almost like it gets shy right it's like oh okay well I better abide I better have better abide

[00:36:50] by the sort of like norms that you humans are used to and I'll just go through one slit since you're actually watching right and that's the sort of central mystery of quantum physics that we know that it exists because of these

[00:37:03] these tests these experiments but they make no sense to us in our macroscopic human brains yeah but you know the one the one thing I'll say though is that quantum mechanics of course applies to these very small particles no one's

[00:37:16] really said whether it applies to large aggregations of particles like objects or human beings or whatever so like if a tree falls in the woods whether we observe it or not a tree probably is actually falling in the woods but you

[00:37:32] know but you brought up this one guy Robert Lanza who wrote about biocentrism this idea that consciousness actually created the universe can you describe his his philosophy a little because I've read his stuff before yeah

[00:37:46] he's a really fascinating guy and he's not the only person to talk about this there's another guy whose name I've just blanked on but at any rate Lanza is very readable and really brilliant and interesting even if you wind up

[00:37:58] disagreeing with him so it's called biocentrism and the idea is that just as at the quantum level if you observe a particle it's forced to go from all possibilities to one likewise the entire universe universe might be one massive

[00:38:18] range of possibilities of all possibilities right an infinite all virtually infinite range of possibilities until conscious life observes it and then it collapses into one form which is the universe that we know and that consciousness as Schrodinger said is universal and part of

[00:38:41] the very physical nature of atoms and subatomic particles the way gravity is and with the Higgs boson and that we don't understand how but that that sort of X factor in the universe of consciousness is what creates the

[00:39:01] universe in the form that we know it to exist because we're in it because we're creating it by observing it and you know it's kind of funny that we really have no scientific theory of consciousness itself like we know okay if we stimulate

[00:39:31] different parts of the brain that gives rise to these thoughts and if we shut down these parts of the brain then oh you can't remember anything or you remember something too well but we don't really know what it means actually when

[00:39:43] we say something's alive and conscious science has never been able to approach that topic but then you have guys like you mentioned in your book Yogananda but there's even more like recent guys like I don't know like Eckhart Tolle for

[00:39:57] instance who wrote the power of no like there's people who seem to induce in themselves this feeling of universal consciousness and what do you what did you think before of these guys what do you think now of these guys like what's

[00:40:12] what's your thoughts on this well yeah I mean they're all they're all taking taking shots at the great mystery and trying to understand it and you know there's two different things there's stories and there's explanations and

[00:40:25] religion you know stories help stories allow us to make sense of the world right so when my best my one of my very best friends Tim Hetherington and my colleague and my brother the guy I made Restrepo with I was in combat with him

[00:40:39] for a long time when he was killed in Libya in combat the day before I had a bike accident in New York right almost died I wasn't hurt at all but I come within inches like within inches of a car tire that would have crushed my skull

[00:40:56] right I mean it was extremely close right and but I didn't die and it felt like I was supposed to but I somehow narrowly avoided it and then the next day Tim was killed and I developed a story right I don't literally think the

[00:41:11] world works this way but I developed a story that I dodged death and death had to take someone so it took Tim and I was in I was crushed with guilt and shame

[00:41:21] that it was supposed to be me but it was Tim no I didn't literally think that right but it felt like the world worked that way and it was part of my processing some very painful things in my life including his loss and so you

[00:41:36] know what I one of the things that goes on with people who come up with these really profound visions of a grand unity I mean of course when people do certain kinds of drugs they feel a sort of universe many of them feel a universal

[00:41:49] connectedness that this sort of standard shamanic journey is the shaman goes into the afterworld right into the land of the dead into the universe into the expansion of all things and then back back across the border to his little

[00:42:05] tribe that needs the information that he or she got out there like they're all there are all these traditions in human society of exactly that like you leave the particulars of our our by our puny little biological lives ourselves and

[00:42:20] you step over the threshold into this sort of vast expansion where everyone is all things and and those stories are very powerful there may be at the quantum level an actual explanation like an actual intellectual theory

[00:42:39] framework for example for those stories right they may not just be stories they may be stories with a real explanation behind them and I will say just along along those lines I read after I finished the book I read a fascinating

[00:42:51] story about Dostoevsky who was a young man was a sort of political radical in the 1840s and he before he was a famous writer and he and his buddies were kind of radical they it would sit around and talk about outrageous things like like

[00:43:04] liberating the serfs for example right and then the czars Russia that kind of talk wasn't appreciated and they were the lot of them were rounded up by the police and thrown in jail for eight months it wasn't a particularly serious

[00:43:17] crime but eight months in prison right so eventually they were released they were piled into a wagon they just assumed they were going to be returned you know like delivered to the court and discharged returned to their families

[00:43:28] great eight months like instead the cart the wagon turned into a city square and the men were told to get out and they were tied to posts and there was a firing squad lined up in front of them so they these young men had to go from

[00:43:47] the joy of being released from prison to oh my god my life's gonna end in a few minutes they imagine the hallucinatory experience of suddenly standing facing these rifle barrels waiting for the command of fire and it was a setup so

[00:44:05] the truth was that it was a mock execution at the last moment as they braced themselves for the command right to have their chest torn open by rifle balls a rider galloped into the square and said the czar forgives them right

[00:44:19] but in those moments we get we because of Dostoevsky we get to know what those moments are like for a person right and they're exactly this he looked and he saw sunlight glinting off the church steeple and he thought well in moments

[00:44:38] I'm gonna become part of the sunlight I'm gonna become part of all things right and if I should survive this somehow I'm gonna turn every moment every remaining moment of my life into an infinity that is exactly the kind of

[00:44:53] hallucination that people have on ayahuasca the dying people have like it's just interesting my book is divided into into two parts what and if what is what happened to me if is a thought experiment what if there were something

[00:45:08] more how would it conceivably work right and where I land like Schrodinger so I feel like I'm a good company is some idea around that sort of the mysteries of the quantum world and what is consciousness and does it pervade

[00:45:23] everything and is that the explanation for all this just frankly weird shit that keeps happening in all of our lives it's funny you know I you know in the very beginning of this podcast you said you're a committed not just an atheist

[00:45:37] you're committed atheist like you really wanted to emphasize that this is almost your religion is atheism and and for your almost not quite explanation but the closest thing you're coming to it you're taking the most extreme

[00:45:53] scientific theory and applying it to this when like you also said there could just be many things we just simply don't understand and and you know religion is maybe the storytelling from thousands of years ago and quantum mechanics maybe

[00:46:07] this obscure scientific theory but maybe there's something in the middle that is able to explain universal consciousness somehow and it's probably not religion but maybe it's related to quantum mechanics and what does it mean

[00:46:20] committed atheism do you still feel as committed as an atheist as you were well there's two separate issues yes I'm an atheist I mean believe what does that mean like so you don't believe in okay the Bible or Vishnu or whatever but what

[00:46:37] does religion really mean do you believe in some things that we don't understand like some higher consciousness that's in the universe well you know you could be you could be believe in God and not be religious not have a practice of

[00:46:50] religion right or you could go to church every Sunday and practice religion and not actually think that there's a God like I went to church once and it was in a it was in a very poor part of Baltimore and it was a black revivalist

[00:47:04] church and the experience was totally transcendent right the singing the fraternity the community going on in that place the power of the pastor who was speaking I mean his sort of vision a totally transcendent affected me

[00:47:22] enormously and nothing none of it had anything to do with God I mean he threw the word God in there once in a while but it was completely completely unnecessary for a profound human experience in that building right and so

[00:47:33] for me a the I'm an atheist because I don't God is not part of my daily practice it's not part of how I understand existence and my life right it's not part of how I understand the universe to work and you know you could

[00:47:47] have a creator God I mean believers often say well listen the universe is vast it's complex nothing like that could happen with a without a creator a watchmaker as it were who designed it right which that argument actually has

[00:48:02] some flaws but just take it as a given like all right say there's a creator God that created the universe it's net a current tally 93 billion light-years wide right so across so 14 billion years old but it was okay that was created by

[00:48:18] God all right if you want to call it that we'll go with that you could have that kind of God who decided look this universe is gonna have biological beings that would walk and talk and think can think about themselves we're gonna have

[00:48:30] turtles or you have kangaroos we're gonna have worms we're gonna have humans what aren't we gonna have like we're gonna have all and when those things die they're biological beings they decay they go back to the earth and they no

[00:48:41] longer exist in any form right that God could have decided that there was no afterlife right quote afterlife you could also have a universe that was started by a massive quantum fluctuation as some physicists proposed that requires no God

[00:48:55] right started by completely by physical means at the initially at the quantum level but in this universe in this completely materialistic rule-driven universe there is at the quantum level some kind of post-death existence that we do not understand then involves something called consciousness which

[00:49:14] like gravity is sort of everywhere and nowhere at the same time and and it is crucial to the physical existence of the universe without it wouldn't the universe wouldn't exist like you can imagine that you don't need a God for

[00:49:26] that to happen so you could have a God in no afterlife you could have an afterlife and no God you could have neither or you could have both so I'm an atheist because I've never seen any evidence of God it's an open question

[00:49:37] for me if there's a post-death existence because I did actually see my father you know I remember seeing my dead father above me in the in the trauma Bay had I seen God above me like trust me had I seen God above me at that moment I would

[00:49:52] have thought probably a hallucination but maybe not like maybe I've been wrong my whole life and there is a God but that's not what I saw right I saw my dad and now going forward like how has your like Dostoevsky's said his daily

[00:50:09] practice would change his his view of his relationship with himself in the universe has changed from that moment what what do you think you've changed from from that moment yeah I changed enormously I mean initially the change

[00:50:23] was incredibly negative right I mean I was incredibly neurotic and fearful and paranoid and anxious which is very what were you fearful about what were you anxious about I was afraid I could die at any moment and you know I knew that

[00:50:37] had I been on an airplane flight or in a traffic jam or camping with my family in the woods when the aneurysm ruptured it ruptured at a completely random moment right then I would have died absolutely right and you know that afternoon I was

[00:50:50] gonna go running and you know I run on these game trails in a kind of trackless like piece of woods that like nobody goes back there had I gone running and spent as instead of spending an hour a couple hours with my wife because we

[00:51:03] managed to get a little babysitting time I would have died crawling around in the woods so my paranoia took the form of I couldn't be alone I had to always be near a phone where I could call the ambulance you know like it was

[00:51:15] unbelievably neurotic like Woody Allen levels of like medical neurosis and and then eventually it settled into a more troubling phase where and again this is very common for people that almost died I started to worry that maybe I had died

[00:51:31] and that the return from the hospital and everything that followed was actually a dying hallucination and that I'm a spirit and that my children my family can't see me they don't know I'm here and the and and I know it sounds like a

[00:51:46] just weird you know sort of silly thought experiment but I can't tell you how real it felt and how palpable the fear was that I was misunderstanding everything you know after I saw my father I started to doubt everything

[00:52:00] like what how do I know you know I was blown up and I buy an IED in Afghanistan in 2008 like maybe I died then and the whole rest of it has been a dream like I

[00:52:11] you know I started to doubt everything and that was the beginning of a kind of descent into madness that like took quite a while to recover from how did you recover I eventually got a therapist and I did research about NDEs

[00:52:30] and some of the con so I was so I realized I'm in good company like a lot of people turn this really neurotic and have all the same fears that I have so like that reassured me that if it you know of course I could have been

[00:52:41] imagining all that of course I mean you can know at one point I went to my wife and I was like just tell me I'm really here like I survived I'm here just tell

[00:52:48] me right and she said yes you're really here and in my mind I'm like that's exactly what a hallucination would say like damn it right yeah there's no way to convince you there is no way but what basically what happened I had a panic

[00:53:02] disorder I would basically had an anxiety disorder they're very common and I did some pretty good work with this shrink and the passage of time helped and you know finally I was able to turn to the book as an intellectual endeavor

[00:53:18] and when I write I have to abstract things to write about them right like and in the process of abstracting this experience I basically was able to sort of like preserve it in amber right it'd been sort of embalmed and and it no

[00:53:34] longer had the emotional resonance that that it did immediately afterwards but I gotta say it was completely eclipsed the trauma of combat right I mean the trauma this like completely eclipsed anything I experienced in combat it was completely

[00:53:49] debilitating and I finally understood when people say that they're that they're bipolar or that they're that they have PTSD or that you know like that like I finally understood the how debilitating mental illness can be I did not get it

[00:54:06] until I experienced and how debilitating depression can be because I got it eventually got extremely depressed to the point where I was actually worried about myself and that was when I went to talk to a shrink and so now you know

[00:54:18] after that and after writing the book how do you feel this experience has changed your life going forward I mean I know it's a sort of trite bit of wisdom but I absolutely am more appreciative of life and not just life as experienced

[00:54:35] but the fact that anything exists at all and I do mean that like in the largest possible sense like that there's a universe that's 93 billion years across that I'm in it that I have children that I'm capable of love right that I'm

[00:54:50] like like all of that then when my my daughter is upset and and sort of losing control of her emotions that I can pick her up and comfort her and and she clutches me like a little animal right and I'm like that I can do that and it

[00:55:03] works and I've calmed her down this little creature that I love you know like that I can do you know all of it is suddenly like you know frankly not to sound sort of a little bit religious but it's kind of a miracle and and that

[00:55:16] you know that it's taken me you know into my 50s I was 58 when this happened to me it took having children very late in life and then almost losing everything to realize like wow just be thankful and yeah do you think losing

[00:55:34] every like so yes you had your daughter was three years old when this happened or two years old when this happened and you were and and so you're you're kind of in between you were in between this darkness this dark void with your father

[00:55:48] and and the and the surgeons that were about to work on you do you think if you didn't have anything I mean this is a big what-if there's really no answer but if you didn't if you think if you didn't have your daughter your wife these things

[00:56:02] that kind of compelled you back what would it have been tempting to follow your father into the darkness you know I don't know and it's a good question so what I would say you know I didn't know I was dying but on some level my body I

[00:56:16] think kind of knew right whatever new in quotes right like I was in a lot of pain and had I not met my wife and had a family some other version of my life I think it would have been filled with sadness and regret that those things

[00:56:32] didn't happen and I think I would have been a very unhappy 58 year old in a huge amount of pain and I think that person and with no one to sort of live for right and I think that person would have shed this or this sort of earthly existence

[00:56:48] more easily as it was I'm living for these people from my two daughters and my wife I'm living for them like that's why I'm alive and so in a very very conscious and deliberate sense every day right that's my daily practice it's

[00:57:03] not God it's like I'm here for them that's what that's what I am right now and and it's a profound way to live right that I don't think I was nearly mature enough to do 30 years ago thank God I didn't have kids then but you know

[00:57:16] finally like finally I crossed the finish line like men mature late but eventually they eventually they get there right and and so I think I think it's very possible without that the sad unfulfilled life I would have been

[00:57:31] possibly living would have been much easier to leave and I and I might have done well I mean your book is such a really engaging exploration of this whole event and what it means and and and what you've learned and studied and

[00:57:46] again like you said it's divided into two books there's the story of what happened then there's kind of where you go from here where you go from you had this experience what does it mean to you what does it mean to life what does

[00:57:58] it mean to everybody and and you know you particularly in the beginning you intersperse the stories of what happened yourself with these experiences of death that you'd encountered up close in war zones as your career as a journalist

[00:58:13] which you've written many excellent books on I actually have unrelated to the topic really I do have I have a writing question for you on how you wrote this and I in you're always a great writer I always learn

[00:58:25] from your writing there's very few books where I feel like oh this is not just an interesting story like my own ability as a writer is changing because I'm reading this person and you're one of those writers so I want to use this opportunity

[00:58:40] to ask this question so you basically the the prologue begins it's titled we've been expecting you and it starts off I had an Almeric tri-fin a brand new five-millimeter winter suit and I squatted on the beach waxing my board and

[00:58:57] watching heavy January surf pound the outer bar so you're about to tell an experience of kind of coming close to death in surfing this begins a kind of set of experiences you know whether it's you know other other kind of

[00:59:11] experiences that maybe were too close to death for your taste and then the next chapter is called what and you start off the pain in my abdomen arrived without fanfare one September morning when my eldest girl was two and a half

[00:59:26] and the household was been an online and you start to tell about your actual direct experience I'm curious why that wasn't and I'm not questioning it one way or the other I'm curious about your thought process why was that the second

[00:59:38] chapter and I know it's technically the first the other ones are prologue but why did you write that as put that as the second chapter that seems like a great first chapter well I don't know yeah understand that there's chapters they're

[00:59:49] really actually sections so the book has two chapters in it and the prologue so just so people are clear that's not a lot of chapters just to it's like what and if so the prologue I did that because first of all movies do this all

[01:00:02] the time they'll have like a little sideshow drama that sets the tone sets the mood right like the couple's having dinner and they get into an argument you know hard cut to you know whatever he's in his job and he's whatever I mean it's

[01:00:21] like it's just a little it's a little so it's just the tone like just so that you know this is the kind of territory we're gonna be exploring so is the first time that I'd almost died and it allowed me to do all the biographical backstory

[01:00:35] that I felt like the reader would need to know about me since they're gonna be like inside my abdomen for the next hundred pages like you might want to know whose abdomen it is right so I'm like all right I'm gonna get I'm gonna the

[01:00:46] surfing story where I almost drowned in January off the coast of Cape Cod that will be a way a vehicle for slipping in just sort of minimal biographical details that you'll need to know so that when I say the pain announced itself suddenly

[01:01:03] one Saturday morning blah blah blah whatever it is that you'll know the very very the thumbnail sketch of the life history of the person that that's happening to and otherwise you're having I'm having to do that work during

[01:01:15] the headlong rush of the medical drama like I wanted the medical drama to be as propulsive as possible and if I have to sort of stop and fill in some backstory about how I went to Bosnia at night whatever like that just slows it down so

[01:01:30] it was a way to keep the actual story going full tilt once it started I see and I guess also it's a way to foreshadow that death is going to be a topic so that when you say the pain of my abdomen arrived without fanfare we

[01:01:46] could start to guess oh this pain is gonna lead to potential death exactly I mean the last sentence of the prologue is you know this dream I had of the crew of the Andrea Gale which is a boat that sank that I wrote about and I researched

[01:01:59] these men although I didn't know them and I had a dream where I worried that the dead men were angry at me for invading their privacy and I counted them on the beach and instead of getting mad at me they waved me over and it was

[01:02:13] as if they were saying it's okay you can come we've been expecting you and that's the last thing you read before the pain announced itself like of course the dead are expecting us right they're dead they know how this works you know like you'll

[01:02:27] get here eventually we've been expecting you and so that that was just a sort of ominous little beginning you know I was teeing up the story with this sort of ominous passage yeah because you have the what and the if in that

[01:02:40] prologue you have the what which is the surf potential surfing disaster but then you have the if what if there is a potential afterlife where yeah there's sort of a rules to it or a story to it or whatever and and and that's what

[01:02:55] we're gonna explore for the next hundred pages all right well thank you I did have that question when I was reading this thank you so much so in my time of dying how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife Sebastian you say

[01:03:07] younger younger younger j-u-n-g-r but it's younger well thanks so much I really wanted you on my podcast years ago when tribe came out such a wonderful book and now I'm so glad you came on the podcast now I really appreciate it and a

[01:03:23] great book I was riveted I read it in one setting and sitting and then went over it again you know in preparation for this but beautiful book and and such intriguing and interesting topics we all have to face so thank you again for

[01:03:37] coming on thank you it was a pleasure I really enjoyed the conversation