Sebastian Junger is an author, filmmaker, and award-winning war correspondent.

His book, The Perfect Storm, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Kentucky-native George Clooney, and his debut documentary film, Restrepo, was nominated for an Academy Award.

Junger's most recent book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, is a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die.

Sebastian Junger is joined in conversation with Rachel Martin, the co-creator and host of the podcast, Wild Card, an interview game show about life's biggest questions.

She was the founding host of NPR's award-winning morning news podcast, Up First, and spent six years as the host of Morning Edition.

Martin also served as national security correspondent and foreign correspondent for NPR.

Recorded at the University of Louisville Kentucky Author Forum, this is Great Conversations, Sebastian Junger and Rachel Martin.

[applause] Well, I'm thrilled to be here, and thank you to all of you for joining us at the Kentucky Author Forum.

Sebastian, thank you for doing this.

Thank you.

I'm thrilled as well.

I mean, those who are familiar with your work, myself included, there is a through line.

I think it is fair to say, if we just listen to the intro, you have been writing about situations where people are almost dying for a long time.

What is it about that particular experience?

And in this case, In My Time of Dying, now it's about you.

But if you look back at your career, you are in these scenarios, and you are putting yourself in these experiences where you're walking right on that line between life and death.

Well, for hundreds of thousands of years, human life has been very precarious, and it's only recently that a pretty affluent Western society has been able to make the threat of hardship and starvation, pain, suffering, or death, keep it from being a daily threat to most people.

But it's in those areas that life is at its most dramatic.

In this sort of terrible binary, you're either alive or you're dead.

In that binary, we find meaning to existence.

And as I say in my book, if we lived forever, life wouldn't mean that much.

And endless do-overs until nothing means anything.

So, as a young man, I tested myself in many ways.

I was a climber for tree companies.

I did the aerial work for tree companies around Boston, working 80, 90 feet in the air with a running chainsaw, hanging on a rope, taking trees down in pieces.

You make a mistake and you die.

It's this sort of liminal place.

And then I started covering wars.

Likewise, liminal places where the consequences are huge and therefore life is huge.

You know, and I grew up in a safe suburb.

You know, I was looking for a huge life, and I found it in these places that were risky.

You know, I've almost been killed a number of times in war zones, but I've never experienced dying until now.

I didn't know what it felt like to die.

And that finally came to me in the 58th year of my life.

And that's why this book is so personal.

It's the only book I've written that's really quite personal.

I think it's helpful for context to talk a little bit about your ideas of living, dying, or what doesn't come after that.

Before this happened, like when you were growing up, just tell me a little bit about your parents and what they talked to you about.

So, my mom was sort of a new-age spiritualist and imbued things like crystals and feathers with all kinds of magical powers.

I mean, they have magical powers.

Clearly.

Yes.

[laughs] Let's be clear.

My father, on the other hand, was a physicist and an atheist and a rationalist.

And you can imagine the conversations between them.

Good ones.

Yeah.

But I sort of fell for the rationalist team.

That was the baseball team I was always rooting for because they always seemed to win.

And so, that's where I've always been.

In this place, it's sort of like if things don't make sense rationally, then I don't believe them to be literally true.

And that the way I sort of reconcile this is that, you know, people need two things.

They need explanations, and they need stories.

And you don't want to confuse them.

So, there are stories starting with, you know, Santa Claus for your children that are lovely.

They're just not literally true.

But they serve an important emotional purpose.

The idea of God in an afterlife, in my opinion, is one of the loveliest stories.

It's our favorite bedtime story.

It reassures us in the dark of the night.

But you don't want to test them because they'll fall apart.

Explanations are super important.

We fly airplanes because there is a rational explanation for why they stay aloft.

It involves the airfoil and sufficient thrust.

And if those explanations don't make sense, we don't get on the airplane.

So, what you don't want to do is confuse explanations and stories.

And you definitely don't want to test the stories because it's embarrassing to them.

And we need those stories.

We all do, even the rationalists.

And so, for me, what I was trying to do with this book is not to tell a reassuring story, which we all need.

Other people have done that very, very well.

I wanted to try to explain in rational terms what I experienced while I was dying because it defied everything that I believed as a rationalist and as an atheist.

I mean, you just said it for those who haven't read the book as you were dying.

I mean, you were dying.

Let's get into it.

If you don't mind, let's get into the story.

Yeah.

So, I gave up war reporting after my friend and brother and colleague, Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya.

I made Restrepo with Tim.

And after he was killed, I stopped war reporting.

My marriage fell apart.

I got remarried.

I had a family.

I have two little girls.

I came to fatherhood late.

I have no interest in any dangerous anything anymore.

Zero.

And I'm not a walking heart attack.

I'm fit.

I'm healthy.

I'm an athlete.

So, I had the sort of arrogance of the former athlete.

I was like, nothing's going to happen to me suddenly.

I mean, eventually something will get me, but I'm not going to drop dead on my driveway like some people do.

Well, it turns out that's not the case.

And you can have something.

We can all have something that's basically undetectable and fatal and will drop you no matter how good your health is and no matter how hard you exercise.

I haven't had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, which is this little artery that no one needs to think about.

And the size of a pencil.

There are five of them.

One of them developed a sort of bulge in the side.

And aneurysms progress over years, decades, and lifetimes.

And they're extremely dangerous because if they rupture, you bleed out into your abdomen.

I mean, if someone does you the favor of stabbing you in the stomach, at least the doctors know where the leak is, where to put their finger to plug the leak.

They know what's wrong with it.

With internal hemorrhage, no one knows where it is, and so they can't find it to fix it.

And so, people bleed out.

And that's what happened to me in mid-sentence in June of 2020.

You were at home.

Your daughters were there.

Your wife was there.

You felt a pain.

You got weak.

Your wife was like, “We need to get an ambulance here."

And you resisted.

Well, yeah.

[laughs] There's a famous statistic, which I thought of at the moment, which is married men live longer than unmarried men.

And I remember in the moment my wife was telling me because the ambulance crew, there are two guys as well.

They're like, “He's fine.

He's going to be fine.” And I was like, “Yeah, I'm going to be fine.” And my wife is like, "No, you're going to the hospital.

Like, 10 minutes ago, you couldn't stand up.

You're going to the hospital.” And the problem is we lived in an old house and deep in the woods.

No cellphone service.

Like, the end of a dead-end dirt road is an hour drive to the hospital.

And I was losing a pint of blood into my abdomen every 10 or 15 minutes.

So, there's 10 pints of blood in your body.

You can lose about half before you die.

And it was an hour drive.

Like, you can do the math.

I was a human hourglass.

But still in the ambulance, you didn't know that it was that serious.

No, I didn't know until the next morning that I'd almost died.

But you go into something called compensatory shock.

So, your body clamps down on your vascular system, and your blood pressure goes back up, and you sort of reboot.

And so, I was feeling better.

So, I didn't think anything was wrong.

And we got to the ER an hour later, and I went off a cliff, and I went into end-stage hemorrhagic shock.

I was convulsing.

I was hypothermic.

The doctors knew immediately what was going on.

They were looking at me strangely, and I realized later they were looking at me strangely because they knew I was going to die.

I mean, I had something that is very, very hard to save people from.

And it came a point where a doctor was putting a large-gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me.

Something they thought had very low odds that this was even going to work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, if you lose too much blood, they can pump you full of blood, and you still die because there's acidosis, kicks in, and in your blood is a chemical reaction.

You just can't recover from that.

So, its blood transfusion is complicated.

And I had sort of passed that point.

I was right at that point where you're too far gone.

And even if you get blood, they're not going to save you.

I was right at that point.

So, I was like 10 minutes from dead.

I had no idea I was dying, but I was very confused.

And so, he was working on my neck.

And, you know, I'm in the trauma bay.

I'm lying on my back.

And suddenly, this black pit opens up underneath me.

It's like infinitely black.

And it's like the universe is cracked open and I'm getting pulled into it and it's infinite.

And I'm like a wounded coyote.

Like, I don't know I'm dying, but I know that if I go into the infinitely black pit, like I'm not coming back.

I just sense this is a one-way trip.

And I was terrified of this darkness.

And suddenly above me, I saw my dead father, my atheist physicist dead father.

Imagine my surprise.

[laughs] And I stared at him like, “What?” And he was just this sort of like presence.

And it was like his essence was there.

It wasn't quite vision that I was using.

It's very hard to explain.

But there he was, his presence, his essence right above me.

And he'd been dead eight years.

And he was not someone I was thinking about.

I mean, if I'd known I was dying,I would have been thinking about my children and my family.

And basically, he communicated to me, “It's okay.

You don't have to fight it.

I'll take care of you.

You can come with me.” You heard him say, though, or you thought you heard him say those words?

Well, it wasn't said.

I mean, again, this communication was not ordinary.

But that was his communication.

It was very, very clear.

“Don't fight it.

I'll take care of you.

You can come with me.” And I was mortified.

I was like, “Go with you?

You're dead.

Like, the party's over here.

We'll talk later, like a lot later.” [laughs] "We'll talk.

Thanks, Dad.” Thanks for those things.

And I said to the doctor, “You got to hurry.

I'm going.

Whatever you're doing, hurry it up because I'm being taken.” And I said those words to him.

So, the short version of how they saved me was they brought me into the interventional radiology suite.

And in the old days, they would have had to cut my abdomen open and start rooting around in my organs, trying to find the ruptured blood vessel before I bled out.

I mean, real frontline surgery, basically.

But with interventional radiology, they put you on a fluoroscope, which is basically an X-ray machine that takes real-time video.

And so, they thread a catheter from a puncture in your groin, into your femoral, and up through your vasculature.

And they can get these tubes basically anywhere in your body.

And they were really struggling to get with me to get it to the spot.

I have a very complicated vasculature for some sort of freakish reasons.

And so, there was a point in the intervention radiology suite, like two in the morning, I was in agony, and they couldn't sedate me because, you know, my blood pressure was 60 over 40.

I mean, I was like flatlining, but I was conscious and in terrible pain.

And at one point, one of the doctors was like, “Well, we've done everything we can.

There's nothing more we can do.” And I sort of watched them give up.

And I didn't know this.

What it meant was I was going to have to go go into the OR, and they were going to, you know, cut my abdomen open.

And, you know, it was erased from the clock to see if they could save me that way.

And they probably couldn't have.

And then, one of the doctors said, “Why don't we try going through his left wrist?” And the other one said, “I like the way you think.” And that actually worked.

And it's because one of the interventional radiologists was this brilliant, genius doctor who - you know, very, very few people were going to save me.

And he was one of the few people in this country that actually had the skills and the imagination to figure out how to save me.

Who happened to be at this hospital in New England?

Yeah, a small regional hospital.

And then, you know, I woke up in the ICU the next morning, and the nurse.

You know, I was just in this sort of vast darkness.

I didn't know what had happened and where I was, and this is on Cape Cod, and I heard these ICU nurses talking.

And one of them had a really intense Boston accent.

And I was like, “Where am I?” [laughs] It's the afterlife, and everyone is from Boston.

It's the afterlife.

And it's all Boston accent from here on in.

And I opened my eyes.

And she said.

It's a middle-aged lady who looked like she'd buried three husbands, tough as nails, sweetheart, you know.

And she said, “Wow, congratulations.

You know, we almost lost you last night.

You almost died.

In fact, no one can believe you're alive.

It's kind of a miracle.” And I was just absolutely shocked.

I had no idea.

It's terrible news to get.

And I thought about my daughters and my wife, and I just couldn't believe it.

It's bad news before it's good news.

Like, “I almost died before you can be like in the - It's totally shocking.

I was just in for belly pain.

Are you kidding?

I almost died.

And then she came back an hour later and said, “How are you doing?” And I said, Well, I'm okay.

But what you said is really terrifying.

And I can't stop thinking about it.” And she said the wisest thing to me.

She said, "Try this.

Instead of thinking about it like something scary.

Try thinking about it like something sacred.” And then she walked out of the room.

And I've been thinking about that ever since.

What did your wife say when she came in?

You know, I doubted my memories.

So, I asked her later, I said, “What was the first thing I said to you when you came into the ICU?” And she said, “The first thing you said was that you saw your dead father.” Now, as a journalist, I started to doubt myself that I made the story up, that I, you know, like, am I imagining?

It was the first thing I said to her.

I described the pit and my dead father.

And that gave me confidence that something had happened there and in the trauma bay, something that I needed to try to understand.

So, where did that lead you?

When that nurse said, “Try thinking of it as something sacred,” that word has resonance for a lot of people.

Did it make sense to you intuitively?

Does that word have resonance for you?

It does.

It just doesn't have religious resonance, like the religion doesn't own the word sacred.

And for me, there's a very fine secular meaning that I use with that word.

For me, something sacred is anything that preserves or elevates human dignity.

That's it.

And often religion does.

You know, absolutely.

As do schoolteachers, you know.

As do many people, there are many sacred jobs in this society, and journalists occasionally.

On our best days, we travel to far-flung places in the world and come back with information that world governments need, that the citizenry needs in order to make wise decisions about how to protect human dignity, protect human life, and make this whole weird deal we're in better for everybody.

Like, that's a sacred task.

That's sacred information in the sense that I mean it.

So, in my mind, I thought I've been going to the front lines my whole life, coming back with this information that hopefully will serve some good purpose.

And that's my calling.

And now I've been taken to the ultimate front line, which is my own mortality.

And I was allowed to return.

Now, did I return with sacred information?

In other words, did I return with information that would help other people live and confront their deaths with more courage, more love, more dignity?

Like, did I come back with that kind of information or not?

And, you know, the thing about looking into the void is it either liberates you or destroys you psychologically.

And for me, you know, for a while, it kind of destroyed me.

And it took a long time to recover psychologically.

Well, that was my question.

Did your instincts kick in right away as the intrepid journalist?

And you're like, “I've got my duty.

I've got my new question set, and I know how to interrogate this, and I know how to get answers.” Or was there some time when you just needed to marinate in the I almost died, and I get to live?

And what is that about?

No.

At first, I went crazy and I got to work.

I mean, the thing about combat, I thought I understood danger.

And I think about combat is that if there's a lot of shooting, you could always get behind some sandbags.

You could always take cover.

And for this, there's no sandbag to get behind.

I mean, a process happened inside my body and will happen to all of us that will take us out.

There is nowhere to hide.

And the randomness of that was terrifying.

And I had another problem, which was that a day prior, just before dawn.

So, my family, my little girls, and my wife and I co-sleep.

Like, we all sleep together.

And at this point, my girls were age three and age like six months.

And just before dawn the day before, I had a dream that I was floating above my family, and they were crying, and they were very, very upset.

And I was shouting to them and waving my arms, and they couldn't see me.

They couldn't hear me.

And I was made to understand that they couldn't see me or hear me because I was dead.

I was a spirit.

And it's too late.

It's done.

You're leaving.

And I woke up in just anguish.

And suddenly there I was next to my family.

Oh, my God.

Thank God.

That was a dream because I really felt like I was dead.

And thirty-six hours later, I was dying.

And so, afterwards, I started researching NDEs, near-death experiences, which are very common.

And one of the most common experiences is that you're sort of hovering above your body and above your loved ones, and you can't communicate with them.

And basically, I had a dream.

It was essentially an NDE.

And I didn't know anything about this stuff.

And had someone tried to tell me about it.

I was like, “I'm fine.

Thank you for that, you know.” And I was seized with this terror that I had died, that I died in my sleep, and that what I thought was a dream was actually me having an NDE on the way out.

And I didn't know.

I didn't yet know that I actually was dead.

This is all a dying hallucination.

And psychologically, it's called derealization.

It's not believing in reality, not thinking you're actually here.

And it's a very common consequence of almost dying.

So, that kept lingering for you.

Yeah.

I mean, lingering.

I mean, it dominated my waking life.

And at one point I went up to my wife.

It's a serious epistemological question, like, how do you know you exist?

And it's one we learn to ignore so that we can exist.

If you start to question that, you know, it's like, “Why is money worth anything?” You know, don't start questioning money.

[laughs] It all falls apart.

It all falls apart.

Don't start questioning that you're here, and I did.

And at one point, I went up to my wife and I said, “Just tell me you see me.

I'm in front of you, that I survived, that I'm here.” And you can imagine this sort of eye roll.

You know, she said, “Yes, honey, you're here.

I love you, you know, et cetera, et cetera.” And I thanked her.

But in my mind, I'm like, that's just the kind of thing a hallucination would say.

[laughs] Like, I'm on to you, and I'm not going to fall for this.

[laughs] There was a part in that section of the book that resonated with me.

They appreciated everything when you almost die, or in your case, you do, and you come back.

Then you live in this heightened state of appreciating everything.

I'm sure many people have had this experience with a loved one.

But when my mom was dying of cancer, she also lived where everything is so beautiful, and I want to suck the meaning out of everything.

And it's exhausting.

And you long for the luxury and privilege of taking things for granted.

Totally.

Yeah.

I mean, this life is a sort of balancing act between appreciating it and not thinking about it too much.

And, you know, the Zen practice, which I know it's not a practice of mine, but my understanding of it is it sort of brings you into the present moment, which is a sort of exalted sort of religious experience.

It's just hard to live there.

And again, there's the question, you know, to see the ultimate truth that, you know, does it enlighten you, or does it destroy you?

Does it make you go mad?

There's a character in Moby Dick named Pip who falls overboard and swims, you know, in the lukewarm South Pacific, treads water for 12 hours in the middle of nowhere.

The ship sailed out of sight, and by absolute random chance, another ship crossed his path and fished him out of the open ocean twelve hours later.

And he was insane for the rest of his life.

And, as Melville said, he had seen God's foot upon the treadle of the loom and spoke it.

And therefore, his shipmates called him mad.

What he spoke was reality.

But it's a form of insanity.

You did not go mad, or maybe you did temporarily.

A little while, just a little while.

You regained control of the steering wheel.

And you focused on your work, and you started asking questions.

Yeah.

When you were exploring people's experience with NDEs, near-death experiences, what were the patterns that you saw for people who haven't read a lot about what these can be?

interesting thing about NDE is that they're not infinitely varied in their details.

Like, you ask people about their dreams.

There's an infinite, almost infinite variety of dreams and hallucinations.

You know, if you give a roomful of people LSD, they'll all hallucinate, but they won't all hallucinate the same thing.

The strange thing about NDEs is they fall into like four or five basic sort of buckets, and they're fairly consistent.

I'm not identical, but fairly consistent around the world, the different societies, different ages.

And one of the most common experiences, and inexplicable for me, is that the dead show up to receive you.

And this has been documented all over the world.

If it's a hallucination, if it's a product of brain chemistry, it's pretty easy to assume that's where we got the idea of the afterlife.

But who knows what is really going on?

And so, basically, there are two camps about NDEs.

There's the what I think of as the sort of like wishful thinkers, who are some of them are serious scientists and doctors and et cetera, who have researched that is like, “Look, these experiences are so common.

They're so uniform.

They're so inexplicable.” They amount to evidence of an afterlife, not proof, but evidence of an afterlife.

And then there's the sort of rationalists like, you know, my favorite baseball team.

They're like, “No, no, no, no, no.” We can explain all this through brain chemistry.

You put, you know, fighter pilots in training in a human centrifuge.

They will see a tunnel.

They'll see a light.

They'll hover above their body.

You know, we can reproduce all of this in the lab, including with drugs.

And so, when I read through the literature, even me, as a rationalist atheist, I read the Optimists First, and I was like, “Oh, maybe there's hope.

Like maybe, you know, I could feel this little sort of like hopefulness creeping in.” Like, hopefulness that [crosstalk] were true.

Maybe we don't need to fear death.

And maybe there's something.

And then I read the Rationalists.

I was like, “Oh, well, like that was fun.” [laughs] Well, lasted.

But except for one thing.

And, you know, one of the things about skepticism is you have to be apply skepticism to skepticism.

I mean, skepticism itself does not get off scot-free in a skeptical inquiry.

And so, this sort of skepticism of this has enormous merit.

And I think you can explain a lot of NDEs through neurochemistry and all this other stuff.

No problem.

I got you.

Except for the dead and to the uniformity of the hallucination of the vision, of the dead showing up to receive the dying.

And that's what I don't quite understand.

Like, I get that the distressed brain will see all kinds of crazy stuff.

Like, I get it.

But the dead in their specificity.

And these are sometimes even people that had died recently, and the dying person didn't know they were dead.

It's really quite odd.

So, that's the only thing about all this that really makes me wonder.

Do we understand anything at all?

I mean, I'm still an atheist, but do we understand anything at all about reality, about life, about death?

Like, that's the one thing that really got my curiosity, my own skepticism about the skeptics go And, you know, there is a kind of, quote, rational explanation for this that evolution has endowed us with the ability to calm ourselves in these terrible moments and give us a kind of peacefulness in these terrible moments where we're transitioning to death.

And that all makes sort of sense, except it is bad science.

And as we all know, evolution, or Darwinism, is a product.

I mean, the traits that we have are adaptive and allow us to either survive or reproduce more effectively.

Like, that's what evolution is.

The traits that allow us to do one of those things or both of them get passed on in the gene pool more often than maladaptive traits that don't help us do those things.

So, the question would be, how would evolution create the neurology at a very, very, very deep level in the brain that would produce hallucinations of the dead just to comfort us?

There's no question of survival in evolutionary terms in a moment like that.

And there's certainly no question of reproduction.

So, how would this form in an evolutionary process in your brain?

Like, it makes absolutely no sense.

So, where I wind up with, “Okay, well, let's talk about quantum physics.

I mean, you want to go mysterious.

Let's go all the way.” You invited two of your dad's former scientist friends, physicists, to lunch because you were so vexed by these questions.

What did they tell you?

So, you have to understand physicists like that.

They're extremely literal.

And I don't know if they're sort of more human or less human than the rest.

[laughs] But anyway, they're different.

They're very, very different.

And so, these guys, I knew from when my father was alive.

They're younger than him.

Lovely gentlemen.

I was very fond of both of them.

And I invited them to lunch, and I explained what had happened to me.

And I was talking about my father.

I now realize I'm definitely on the spectrum.

And at one point, my mother saw him looking at a book, and she was cooking dinner, and they were just married.

My father was very handsome.

He had beautiful blue eyes, and he was like a real charmer.

Except he was on the spectrum.

And he was looking at this book, and he was going, “Oh, my God, it's so beautiful.

This is the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen.

My God.” And, you know, my mom, newly married, was like, “What has captivated my husband's attention?"

she tipped her over and looked over his shoulder, and it was a page full of equations.

[laughs] That's my dad.

That's physicists.

So, I explained to them what had happened.

And I asked, “Gentlemen, what's the odds that my dead father would appear above me, you know, hovering like as I was dying?” And, you know, of course, I meant it as a sort of rhetorical question.

But no, they're physicists.

[laughs] So, one of them looks up and frowns and starts running the numbers.

And I'm going from memory here.

I think he said, “I think it's probably around 10 to the minus 40.” I was like, “What?” He said something about Avogadro's number, which I don't even know what that is.

But it is roughly the chance that all the air molecules in this room ran through some random movement, randomly winding up, you know, in the corner of the room and asphyxiating us.

It's possible.

It's just very unlikely.

That's the odds of your atoms that used to make up your father, like winding up above you in the, you know, 10 to the minus 40.

And I was like, “All right, this is a tough nut to crack.” If I may, and this is another thing he said about my dad.

So, you really get that sort of physicist mentality.

He said, “Sebastian, your father was an incredible romantic.” [laughs] I was like, “That would be news to my mom.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, "Well, he was deeply in love with the Helmholtz resonator,” [laughs] which is a mathematical form, right?

Like, he was deeply in love with the Helmholtz resonator.

He was constantly talking about the Helmholtz.

I was like, “Well, sir, you might not understand what the rest of us mean by romantic, right?” [laughs] But that in and of itself did not satisfy you.

Or maybe that's what piqued your curiosity.

But there's a lot of physics in here.

I mean, there are a lot.

Heisenberg, Richard Feynman, you got Planck.

You go deep on cosmology and the physics of why we are here.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to have a serious conversation about life, death, reality, existence, time, and the universe, you're going to have to get technical.

I'm sorry.

I mean, you can tell yourself a story about it, which is lovely.

But if you want to really understand it, and ultimately what I was trying to do is like understand what happened to me.

We don't actually understand what happens when we die, and that at a quantum level, which means a subatomic level, there is some continuation of the individual.

Is that possible?

We don't even understand what consciousness is and how it works.

So, there are many things that can be possible.

Well, yeah.

And in the quantum world, what's possible is impossible.

I mean, that's what's so strange about it.

So, at the subatomic level, a photon is a subatomic particle that can be in two places at once.

Entangled particles can communicate with each other instantaneously.

And that means faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.

They can communicate with each other instantaneously across the entire universe.

I mean, things that are not possible are possible at the quantum level.

And so, it's not my idea, you know, in the conversations in quantum physics, this is, you know, one of the things that's talked about is there a post-death existence that is conceivable at the quantum level, which we already know violates all of the laws that we understand about the macroscopic world?

And yes, of course, it's possible.

And, you know, it's sort of proof is a way of thinking about it.

Because, you know, as I say in the book, “The odds that there are some post-death existences are very, very small.

But it's probably more likely than the odds of the universe existing in the first place.

[laughs] I mean, I'll take those odds.

No, no, that's right.

I mean, the odds of the universe existing in the first place are, and I'm going by memory here, but I believe it's 10 to the minus 230, which is one chance in a number that has 230 zeros after it.

That's the odds of the universe existing in a form that would permit human life.

And yet, here we are.

So, we're in the realm of the inconceivable already.

And so, is the inconceivable, like in the form of a post-death existence, possible?

Of course, it is.

I mean, what happens at the quantum level shouldn't be possible.

And yet we know that it exists.

So, there was an Amazon review of my book.

So, some of the reviews were wonderful.

Some weren't so wonderful with this one.

This one guy was very - Never read those, Sebastian.

He made short work of me.

He said, “Sebastian Younger fails to prove that there's an afterlife.

One star.” [laughs] So, wow, that must be a great life.

Everything's that simple.

Like, wow, that's awesome.

So, at any rate, you know, spoiler alert, you know, I don't prove there's anything.

But the conversation that I believe that I have, I think, goes to the heart of what is knowable.

And, you know, it lands where physicists have landed in this idea, does consciousness determine everything?

If you observe a subatomic particle, if you fire a subatomic particle, a photon, say, at two slits and you don't observe it, it will go through both slits at the same time.

It does the impossible.

And if you observe it, if a conscious mind observes it, it has to go.

It has to pick one slit.

It can't be in two places at once.

It can only go through one slit.

And so, the idea is that consciousness is determinative of physical reality rather than the other way around.

And it's possible that consciousness is part of the physical universe, which is now 93 billion light-years across.

It's part of the physical universe like gravity is and determines everything.

And that is entirely possible.

And that, you know, weird way would explain a lot of the things that sort of don't make sense to us in our earthbound existence.

I hear from people in my own life who are grappling with issues of living and dying and what comes next, if anything.

And, you know, when people grapple with notions of the soul and what even is that?

Well, it's energy, and energy doesn't disappear.

You can't disappear the energy.

Doesn't it reconstitute in some way, Sebastian?

Right.

But when people say the afterlife, what they mean is an existence where you continue on as a conscious being aware of yourself.

I mean, that's what they mean.

So, they don't just mean that the tiny electrical bonds within that keep physical material together, that keep our body together, like that sort of continues on in some form in the universe.

I mean, listen, our bodies don't disappear.

We rot or we're burnt, but those atoms don't disappear.

They're somewhere.

This is the same thing about energy.

Yeah, it's somewhere.

But if you're cremated, that energy is dispersed as flame and heat, which is not what I think they mean by that.

Sustaining consciousness of some kind.

Right.

So, are you okay with this level of uncertainty?

Like, personally?

I mean, whether there's an afterlife.

Yeah.

Well, yes, we don't have any choice, but yes, I am okay with it.

very unsettling for a lot of people.

Well, here's the thing.

Like, what are the choices?

Like, I mean, do you really want to be conscious for eternity?

Suppose the afterlife is unpleasant.

I mean, an agonizing life can be ended.

People commit suicide tragically, but they do.

And for many of those people, that's less painful than continuing to live.

Imagine an afterlife that is agonizing and there's no exit.

I don't think we want that.

But even an afterlife that's pleasant, and there's no exit.

I mean, I don't care how fun the dinner party is.

Eventually you want to go home.

[laughs] So, the alternatives aren't so great.

But here's the thing.

I feel like we're sort of in this good place.

So, if we knew there was an afterlife, existence was just this brief blip filled with pain and sorrow and joy and all this other stuff.

And then, boom, we're back.

We're in the afterlife.

We were where we were before, although we don't remember that.

And it goes on forever.

So, whatever happened in your life doesn't really matter because it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of eternity.

So, don't worry about it.

And so, the problem with that is it makes your actual life meaningless.

Whatever the meaning as you experience your life is, that meaning is sucked out of it because in a moment you're in the afterlife and nothing else matters.

The other problem is if there is absolutely nothing and we knew for sure that there was nothing.

If we knew for sure there's an afterlife, that's one problem.

You know for sure that there's nothing that's psychologically so annihilating that it threatens to make life psychologically unbearable and meaningless.

Like, what?

I live for a while, and then it's done forever.

Why bother?

So, there are two forms of meaninglessness waiting for us on opposite ends of this continuum of possibility.

If we could prove one or the other, we're kind of screwed with meaninglessness.

And the ambiguity that we live with, there might or might not be an afterlife.

There might or might not be a God.

There might be because it's ambiguous.

It allows us to live these lives with some hopefulness, but not with the certainty that it means nothing because then we're just going to be in a celestial hammock forever afterwards.

So, it actually is a kind of sweet spot that allows us to extract, whether you're religious or not, the maximum meaning, in my opinion, the maximum meaning from this brief, glorious, weird existence that we have.

I loved this line in your book.

If you raise children without religion, you will raise children who will ask questions you cannot answer.

Yes.

I have come upon this, too.

Yeah.

No, they're profound.

Children are profound.

They're profound in their questions and in their answers.

At one point, I asked my younger daughter.

Oh, maybe she was three, something like that.

I was playing with her.

I was just overwhelmed with feeling feelings.

And I said, “Sweetheart, you know how much Daddy loves you?” You know, one of those things parents say.

And she ignored me.

And I said it again.

She ignored me.

And I guess I did it again.

She ignored me.

So, I finally said, “Do you know what love means?” And she looked up at me sort of in impatience.

And she said, “Yes, Daddy, love means stay here.” I'm like, “Wow.” Like, I've never heard a better definition of love.

Like, that's it.

And so, yeah, we learn from them.

You know, maybe if we're open to it, we learn more than they learn from us.

Children are totally extraordinary.

Did writing this book cause you to look back at other choices that you had made in your life, especially in war reporting and watching people in that liminal space?

Did you observe those experiences differently or with more reference?

I didn't understand the fear that I saw in the eyes of parents, civilian parents in war zones.

I covered civil wars in West Africa.

I was in Afghanistan starting in the mid-90s.

A lot of Bosnia.

Until I had children, I didn't understand the fear that I saw in the eyes of parents in war zones.

And I'm ashamed of it.

I did not know what I was seeing.

I did not understand the depth of their fear because they were parents, and they loved their kids, and they weren't at all concerned about themselves dying.

They were worried about their kids.

But I didn't understand it until I had children.

And I don't think I really understood what I was gambling with when I was risking my own life.

And I'm glad I lived the life I did.

I'm very proud of it.

But I don't think I quite understood the gamble that I was taking, the kind of casino that I was in.

When I was taking risks in war zones, until this happened to me, I gave up war reporting.

I'm good now.

I slid into home base.

I got a family.

Nothing's going to happen to me now.

And I think something will happen to you.

And I didn't understand.

It felt almost embarrassing to me that at any one point in my life, sort of like careless and cavalier about my own safety, about my own life.

And, you know, Tim getting killed brought that crashing down.

And then this happening to me really ended it.

You don't understand until you really understand that you're going to die.

You don't really understand that you're alive.

You can't have that understanding until you really know, not in some abstract sense, like you're 25 and you are going to die someday.

But it really immediately said, “I am going to die.” And that's when you start understanding.

I am alive.

And you don't get it till then, or at least I didn't.

It was so interesting.

You write that in the book that, of course, you experienced death and near death so many times in Korengal.

If anyone hasn't seen Restrepo, they should go see it immediately.

But if you've seen that, if you've lived in those places, how do you then reconcile for yourself how it is that you encountered death and were brought back?

I mean, what meaning did the bringing back have to you?

Was it just that I've been brought back to tell the story of it?

No, it really is a casino, right?

I mean, what's the meaning of winning the slots?

I mean, in my opinion, I had a bullet hit so close to my forehead in a sandbag that it kicked sand in the side of my face.

The guy who tried to kill me was 500 meters away.

I mean, imagine the angle.

You could figure it out.

I mean, imagine the angle, the deviation that saved my life.

Tell me that's not random.

And at one point, someone stood up at the end of our talk that I gave, and he was pretty upset with me.

And he was religious.

He was Christian.

And he said, “Sir, you've been given a second chance by God.

And I can't believe you're still an atheist.

And God saved you.

Like, why aren't you appreciative?” And I said, “Well, here's the problem with it.

Like, why me?

Why me and not Tim?” You're saying I'm a better person than Tim was.

And even if you want to try to argue that, which I don't advise, but if you want to try to argue that, why me and not a child with cancer?

Why did he save me?

And if you're saying that his grace is a kind of random lottery and I just picked a good ticket.

And if the child with cancer didn't, then that's cruel.

I don't want anything to do with a God like that.

I'm sorry.

I'd rather take my chances in hell, you know.

And so, I don't like believing in the meaning of things because we have to find some divine plan, some meaning in the horrors that happen.

Do you divide your life into before June of 2020 and after when this happened?

Yeah, I mean, I almost would say it started.

You know, I mean, in the sense that I now fully understand that I'm alive.

I didn't quite get it until I almost died.

I mean, I just had this idea, no, I mean, we can be pretty confident we're going to live till dinner.

Like, even till the end of the month and probably to the end of the decade.

Like, I'm healthy.

Come on.

Just don't bother me with it.

You come back when I'm 85 and talk to me about dying.

Right now, I'm living my life.

And I was like, “It's not true.” It's just not true.

Like, any one of us in this room could be dead by midnight.

Like, I'm sorry.

Like, I'm sorry to put it that way.

But if you understand that, like, boy, are you going to pay attention this evening?

But then doesn't that put you back in the headspace of the exhausting appreciation of every moment?

Well, that's the balancing act of living a meaningful life.

I mean, there's no way out.

Like, you have to balance a reverence for life with the ability to not be preoccupied with death.

And it's very hard to do.

So, what does that look like as you walk through the world now?

When you say that my life began when I came home from that hospital and I was fully alive?

You know, hug your children.

Everything is worth paying attention to.

Even being stuck in traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, you know, all of it is a form of grace.

And even the tedious parts.

I now have a good mechanism for sort of short-circuiting frustration and anger.

Like, come on, you should be dead right now.

Now you're frustrated that the clerk at the DMV is taking too long.

Are you kidding?

Like, grow up.

Do you tell yourself that?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Like, grow up.

And the other thing I do with traffic, which is helpful because we've all experienced traffic, is one of the most infuriating things in the world.

It suddenly occurred to me, I'm stuck in traffic.

And, you know, it feels like a plot, like a plot to keep you from getting somewhere where you need to be.

And it's like this huge conspiracy to keep you from getting where you need.

And then as I realized, “Hey, relax, you're traffic, too.

You're traffic for the guy behind you.” You're part of his conspiracy and so on.

So, just relax.

You're part of this.

And then when you realize you are part of all these things, the tension goes out of it.

Now, here you are.

Look, you're in traffic.

You're like, you know, whatever.

Think about something nice, you know, whatever.

Like, when you get to do that otherwise.

I think people do have a hard time with the idea that you have to just live through the randomness of things.

Yeah.

And it can be unsettling for a lot of people because how you make the meaning also feels random, you know.

And so, how do you navigate that day in and day out?

I mean, how do you make sense of the fact that you could die in a traffic accident on the way home to see your family or getting on an airplane and keep doing it?

Well, I mean, like all of us, you know, I deal with it with a mix of denial and reverence.

You know, you get the ratio right, and you're pretty good.

So, I don't mean to be flip, but I mean, that is sort of what we're stuck with.

But also, I mean, the events of our lives, including some of our deaths, are random.

The events are random.

I met my wife, like most of us met our spouses, in a totally random way.

You know, if you missed the crosstown bus, or you make the crosstown bus, and you don't meet your spouse, you live a totally different life with different children and different everything else.

Like, it's just what the universe is.

But the way I sort of think, which is unsettling, is that everything that you think you are is a product of a very, very almost infinite series of extremely small chances, including which sperm met which egg.

I mean, it's just like - It's too much.

[laughs] It's too much.

But here's the thing.

If you think about this quantum idea of consciousness affecting reality, there's a possibility that in Schrodinger, which my family has this weird connection to, Schrodinger believed that there was a universal consciousness.

And he was a mathematician.

He was a complete rationalist.

And his rationality brought him to this idea that the universe was a vast consciousness and we're all part of it.

It feels good.

It does feel good.

And you don't need the God theory.

You don't need any.

You know, it's just one way of explaining the quantum reality that we see is that consciousness is part of everything and that we're part of everything.

And then when you die, the illusion of individuality is removed, and you rejoin the thing that you were the whole time.

And Schrodinger, you know, obviously is one of the, you know, geniuses of the 20th century and really of human history, and that's what his conclusion is.

So, that's not a random thought.

It's the exact opposite of random.

It's complete determinism on a vast, vast scale.

So, you're a writer, and you're good at painting pictures.

So, with our closing moments here, can you just describe what it was like to go home?

Without crying?

[laughs] I don't know.

Crying is optional.

No, I meant that seriously, it's very emotional.

My wife picked me up.

I got out of the ICU in record time.

I shocked the doctors five days later after releasing me.

And I was still pretty messed up, but I could go home.

And my wife picked me up.

It was a very hot day.

I kept the windows rolled down because I wanted to smell the world.

And drove me home, about an hour drive, you know, up the dirt road.

So, we're at the end of a dead-end dirt road inside a big piece of of woods, you know, inside federal land.

I get very remote and bumped up this dirt road.

And the trees along the dirt road, my girls had, you know, with the help of my wife and the babysitter, posted signs saying, “Welcome home, daddy.

We love you.

We miss you."

You know, things like that, you know, unicorns and rainbows and stuff.

And, you know, so by the time I got out of the car, I was just a mess.

And, you know, I hugged them.

And obviously, I couldn't stop hugging them.

And, you know, you would think that that would be sort of like joyful and celebratory.

And it's not.

It's extremely sorrowful, because all I could think about was what we all almost lost.

I mean, I was like, “Oh, my God.” But for the grace of God, you know, like, terrifying.

And it was very, very hard to let go of that and actually appreciate the moment.

I mean, it took me a long time to stop thinking about the very serious lesson that I was taught, that I learned.

Vital lesson.

But it took me a long time to sort of shake it from me so that I could actually go back to appreciating everything that I had.

And I remember at one point, you know, that evening, I put on some music, and my wife and my three year old and my six month old, we all sort of danced, like it was a big four-way hug dance.

And, you know, it was like one of the, maybe the most profound moments of my life.

Like, “Wow, I'm back.” It reminded me of coming back from war, which, again, is also not a party.

It's the opposite.

The book is called In My Time of Dying: How I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife.

It is the most life-affirming story about dying.

Thank you for writing it.

Thank you so much for the conversation.

Thank you [applause] so much for the conversation.

Thank you.

[applause] Felt wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Really nice conversation.

[music playing]