Speaker 1: If this is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
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Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I t
Speaker 1: E dot com. Good Lord joined today by Sebastian Younger, journalist,
Speaker 1: bestselling author, documentary filmmaker. He's reported from the battlefield as
Speaker 1: an embedded war correspondent, written about humans interacting with dangerous
Speaker 1: jobs with the natural world. Long ago he had the
Speaker 1: huge international bestseller of The Perfect Storm. He's written an
Speaker 1: outside magazine where I used to be a correspondent about
Speaker 1: many things of whale hunters for one, went on to
Speaker 1: do a ton of work about soldiers and the impacts
Speaker 1: of war. His latest book, In My Time of Dying,
Speaker 1: came out last year. It contemplates death and the afterlife
Speaker 1: after a near death experience. The paperback version. Who knows.
Speaker 1: If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might
Speaker 1: have to wait indefinitely Spring of twenty six. I'd recommend
Speaker 1: going getting the hardcover. Other works from Sebastian include Fire Tribe.
Speaker 1: I mentioned Perfect Storm already. I remember seeing when that
Speaker 1: came out, the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg
Speaker 1: after I read the book about a commercial sword fishing
Speaker 1: boat that never returned. So we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: his new book and also about his years as a
Speaker 1: war correspondent and a bunch of our stuff, man Bash
Speaker 1: and when you're when when one the Perfect Storm came out?
Speaker 1: Do that hit me hard? Like in a good way.
Speaker 1: But you know, one of the biggest things is I
Speaker 1: used to be a tree a climber for a tree service, really,
Speaker 1: and I know that the story came out of that
Speaker 1: that you were climbing, you were a tree service climber
Speaker 1: had a chainsaw injury. Yep, what was the chain saw injury?
Speaker 2: So I was doing a ton of work and I
Speaker 2: was exhausted by the area I lived and it had
Speaker 2: been hit by a hurricane.
Speaker 1: Assurance.
Speaker 2: I was just doing work for home homeowners that needed
Speaker 2: cheap tree work, and I was sort of a one
Speaker 2: man show, and sometimes they'd be actually holding the lowering
Speaker 2: line like the homeowner would be on the line like
Speaker 2: that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: I was doing a ton of work. I was a
Speaker 2: good climber. I was exhausted, and I I was I had,
Speaker 2: you know, I had a little climbing saw and I
Speaker 2: was working in a big elm and uh. And there
Speaker 2: was a little sucker that was like between my ankles,
Speaker 2: like it's sort of getting in the way, like a
Speaker 2: tiny little branch, right, and I just reached down. I
Speaker 2: was I was in the flow, right, I mean I
Speaker 2: was sort of moving right, and I would just reach
Speaker 2: down to zip it this little sucker, to sort of
Speaker 2: zipp it so it would we wouldn't like tangle up
Speaker 2: my feet. And I was just slopping in a hurry.
Speaker 2: And the tip of the bar hit the tree and
Speaker 2: popped up in the back of my ankle, and uh,
Speaker 2: it was I wasn't spiking so I was wearing I
Speaker 2: wasn't wearing big leather boots, right because I wasn't spiking
Speaker 2: the tree. It was a prune and and it just
Speaker 2: went right into the back of my ankle and I
Speaker 2: it didn't hurt, but I was like something hit my ankle.
Speaker 2: The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw. I
Speaker 2: got it, I should just at least take a look
Speaker 2: to make sure I'm all right, And UH turned off
Speaker 2: the saw and clipped it on my belt and U
Speaker 2: and pulled my pant leg up and h sure enough
Speaker 2: so I could see my achilles tendon. I mean, I
Speaker 2: was looking at it right, and but it wasn't It
Speaker 2: wasn't cut. It just had been laid open. And I
Speaker 2: repelled down to the you know, the ground, and my
Speaker 2: crew took me, took me to a sort of urgent
Speaker 2: care place and they sewed me up. But it got me.
Speaker 2: I was limping for quite a while, and it got
Speaker 2: me thinking about dangerous work and that there's all this
Speaker 2: work in this country that the nation needs, right. We
Speaker 2: need people drilling for oil, we need loggers, we need
Speaker 2: all kinds of people doing you know, commercial fishermen, and
Speaker 2: no one's really thinking about them. And they're taking casualty
Speaker 2: rates that you know, are sometimes comparable to units in
Speaker 2: the US military. Right. I mean, it's like it, there's
Speaker 2: the commercial fishing industry is deadly right, And so I thought,
Speaker 2: I'm going to write about dangerous work and because it's
Speaker 2: no one's thinking about it, and these people deserve some
Speaker 2: some love.
Speaker 1: Basically, you were already fixing the writ You were already
Speaker 1: fixing to be a writer.
Speaker 2: Though. Yeah, I'd spent my I sort of muddled my
Speaker 2: way through my twenties trying to figure out how to
Speaker 2: be a freelance writer and you know which, you know,
Speaker 2: I've waited tables for a while, and then I got
Speaker 2: this great job as a climber, which I was really proud.
Speaker 2: I was a terrible but I was a good climber, right,
Speaker 2: And so one of the things I really liked about
Speaker 2: climbing is that you know it's inherently dangerous. You're eighty
Speaker 2: feet in the air with a chainsaw or whatever, and
Speaker 2: of course you can get killed up there. But I
Speaker 2: realized there's no random element, Like if you're going to
Speaker 2: get killed doing treework is because you screwed up. You know,
Speaker 2: It's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you
Speaker 2: rolled the dice wrong, right. You lose a chess because
Speaker 2: you may bad decisions and the other guy didn't. And
Speaker 2: treework was the same way. If you don't make a mistake,
Speaker 2: you're gonna be all right. So really focus, be in
Speaker 2: the moment right now and be perfect and there was
Speaker 2: almost a sort of zen discipline to that mindset that
Speaker 2: I really really liked.
Speaker 1: Did you have awareness of commercial fishing from growing up?
Speaker 1: You grow up mass chooses, right, Yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Mean at the no, except that at the time I'd
Speaker 2: moved up to a fishing town called Gloucester with my
Speaker 2: girlfriend at the time, and I was doing treework from
Speaker 2: there locally and in Boston and writing, you know, working
Speaker 2: on this writing project. In that writing proce. My girlfriend
Speaker 2: was a violinist and uh, you know, pretty typical sort
Speaker 2: of bohemian, you know, young person's life for a while,
Speaker 2: very nice, and Gloucester was a really you know, rugged
Speaker 2: fishing town.
Speaker 1: And I was there.
Speaker 2: We were there and I was limping around from my
Speaker 2: chainsaw wound when this huge storm hit the coast of
Speaker 2: New England. And the next day I found out that
Speaker 2: a Gloucester boat, Andrea Gail, with six men, have been
Speaker 2: lost one thousand miles off shore along line here.
Speaker 1: What's that again?
Speaker 2: That storm nineteen ninety one, And then there were these
Speaker 2: crazy rescues as well, and the seas offshore were measured
Speaker 2: at one hundred feet, which was sort of record setting.
Speaker 2: The offshore data booies were registering one hundred feet and
Speaker 2: did you.
Speaker 1: Can't you can't even like a you know what I mean, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't picture it?
Speaker 3: Oh god, I mean you gotta picture five feet and
Speaker 3: a skiff is like, oh my god, I'm gonna die.
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you're yeah, you gotta like I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to think of how to you could probably explain it
Speaker 1: to listeners, but I mean, like a five foot swell
Speaker 1: of skiers everything. A five foot swell if you're in
Speaker 1: a small boat, and a five foot swell your your
Speaker 1: sub your sub wave. Yeah, I mean like when you look,
Speaker 1: it's just water, hard foot waves.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And this was a sixty eight foot steel hauled
Speaker 2: longlining long liner and but still sixty eight feet in
Speaker 2: seas of seventy eighty feet ninety feet is it'll get overwhelmed, right,
Speaker 2: It can be flipped end over end, pitch poled, rolls,
Speaker 2: you know, all kinds of things can happen.
Speaker 1: Has that Did that boat ever get recovered?
Speaker 2: No? No, they don't. They lost radio contact. They don't
Speaker 2: know where it went down.
Speaker 4: I don't mean to jump ahead to the movie, but
Speaker 4: the visual one of the visuals, I mean the visuals
Speaker 4: in the movie of the the boat going up these
Speaker 4: waves and down these waves, I think like always stands
Speaker 4: out in my mind as something that's in You're watching
Speaker 4: it and you're like, this can't.
Speaker 2: Happen on Earth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, did you ever talk to people who had been
Speaker 4: in c's like that and what as far as like
Speaker 4: what they're how accurately that captured the.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I didn't. I talked to them to
Speaker 2: research the book, So I didn't after the movie. I
Speaker 2: didn't because I'd done my work on that topic. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, the boat disappeared, and I was trying to
Speaker 2: understand what it was probably like for those guys before
Speaker 2: they went down. So I talked to other captains of
Speaker 2: other boats sort of in the area that had survived.
Speaker 2: And I even talked to a guy named Ernie Hazzard
Speaker 2: whose boat was pitch pulled off George's Bank and flipped
Speaker 2: end over ends, and he wound up trapped in the
Speaker 2: cabin in a flooded cabin upside down at night in
Speaker 2: the North Atlantic, I mean, the ultimate nightmare, right, And
Speaker 2: he managed to on a lungful of air, swim out
Speaker 2: through a busted window and make his way to the
Speaker 2: surface in this huge storm and the life raft popped
Speaker 2: up right next to him and he got in it
Speaker 2: and he managed to survive. So I interviewed him about
Speaker 2: what's it like to be trapped in a flooded boat
Speaker 2: upside down at night? What's going through your mind? Because
Speaker 2: I was trying to recreate the state of mind of
Speaker 2: those guys in their last day, the last hours, their
Speaker 2: last minutes. And yeah, so these captains said that, you
Speaker 2: know the waves, they're they're huge, and the problem isn't
Speaker 2: that their individual waves are that big that they will
Speaker 2: but they'll converge, like waves will they coming get from
Speaker 2: different directions, They'll converge, and suddenly you have a wave
Speaker 2: that's twice as high as all the other waves, and
Speaker 2: they will just overwhelm you.
Speaker 1: Hmm oh man. Yeah, uh, when you like when you
Speaker 1: developed I don't want to call it stick seems real condescending,
Speaker 1: That's not what I mean. But like when you decided
Speaker 1: to focus on that the dangerous work thing? Was that
Speaker 1: did that become like a I guess, like a strategic
Speaker 1: professional decision or was it was it personal obsession or
Speaker 1: was it just like that you wanted to make you
Speaker 1: want to make a living as a writer and this
Speaker 1: would be a wave that you could develop expertise and
Speaker 1: establish a name for yourself.
Speaker 2: So I've always been a sort of purist about only
Speaker 2: working on things that I find so compelling that I
Speaker 2: would do that work for free if I had to,
Speaker 2: just in order to find out about that topic. And
Speaker 2: this was a case where I've never made purely commercial concerns.
Speaker 2: I think that like sort of ruins your work. But
Speaker 2: this was a case actually where a sort of personal
Speaker 2: decision about what fascinated me actually coincided with something that
Speaker 2: turned out to be a great commercial decision. And you know,
Speaker 2: I didn't strategize it like that. I've never thought like
Speaker 2: that in terms of my work, but it actually was
Speaker 2: a kind of good fit for where the marketplace was
Speaker 2: at the time, and no one had really studs. Turtle
Speaker 2: wrote a great book called Working It was an oral
Speaker 2: history of work, an amazing book, but it wasn't focused
Speaker 2: on dangerous work, right, and you know, I just I
Speaker 2: just thought this is you know, there was a sort
Speaker 2: of class issue here, you know, I mean, the people
Speaker 2: that do dangerous work are mostly not exclusively mostly working
Speaker 2: class mails and they get hurt and they die without
Speaker 2: much fanfare and we're all depending on their work, right,
Speaker 2: And I mean we all we live in houses made
Speaker 2: out of wood that someone cut down, and we're eating
Speaker 2: fish and you know, gone and on, we're driving cars
Speaker 2: that oil got drilled out of the ground by somebody,
Speaker 2: you know. And and so I just all that was
Speaker 2: really compelling to me. And uh and and it turned
Speaker 2: out to be a sort of gap in the market.
Speaker 2: You know, no one had really focused on this yet,
Speaker 2: and so you.
Speaker 1: Know it works. Do you do you intentionally steer clear
Speaker 1: of some of the broader geopolitical concerns when you're getting
Speaker 1: like like if you get into if you're talking about
Speaker 1: oil workers, you don't want to set it up like
Speaker 1: it's a debate about dependence on oil, right, if you're
Speaker 1: talking about timber, you're not setting it up that it's
Speaker 1: a debate about how much old growth logging too much?
Speaker 1: Like you try to really focus on these people that
Speaker 1: are focus on the lives of people who ye are
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to put. Like Randall I talk
Speaker 1: a lot about with the with market hunters of a
Speaker 1: century ago, would be they probably if you quiz them,
Speaker 1: they're probably aware of the broader geopolitical market factors. That
Speaker 1: are pushing them to do what they do. But there
Speaker 1: their desire to participate or they're moving into participate is
Speaker 1: like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's
Speaker 1: what that's what's available to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there are great journalists, better journalists than I
Speaker 2: am in so many ways, that are writing about the
Speaker 2: sort of macro issues. I'm not an economist, I'm not
Speaker 2: a scient you know, whatever. There's there's people doing really
Speaker 2: good work about the you know, the urgent issues of
Speaker 2: our day, the economy, the climate, you know, whatever you
Speaker 2: name it. Right, I'm not that guy, right, like what what?
Speaker 1: What? Really?
Speaker 2: And it it interests me because I'm a part of
Speaker 2: the planet and part of the country, and I'm invested
Speaker 2: in the out in good outcomes, right, But I'm not Intellectually,
Speaker 2: it doesn't interest me that much. What interests me is
Speaker 2: people's experiences, and that often gets lost in the reporting.
Speaker 2: And so when I was I mean, just to jump
Speaker 2: ahead a bit in my in my career, but you know,
Speaker 2: many years later, when I was embedded with US forces
Speaker 2: in Afghanistan, you know, I had plenty of personal opinions
Speaker 2: about the war, you know, and some some positive, some critical,
Speaker 2: but I wanted to write about the soldiers, right. I
Speaker 2: was one semary third Airborne in a remote valley with
Speaker 2: a lot of combat. I was interested in those in
Speaker 2: those guys, and they were not They themselves were not
Speaker 2: thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just
Speaker 2: weren't thinking about it, right, Yeah, And and so when
Speaker 2: I wrote my book War and made my film or
Speaker 2: Strepo about those guys, there was no discussion about the
Speaker 2: larger issues because those guys were not interested in it.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to. I wanted to make work that
Speaker 2: made people understand what it was like to be an
Speaker 2: American soldier in bout Afghanistan. Like end of sentence, and
Speaker 2: you know, they're twenty years old, they're twenty one years old.
Speaker 2: They're I wasn't thinking about the economy when I was twenty,
Speaker 2: Like why why would they, you know, like, why would
Speaker 2: they think about the larger issues? They're they're they're they're
Speaker 2: already have their hands full of just doing the job
Speaker 2: that's right in front of them.
Speaker 1: When when, if if you go back to look at
Speaker 1: your work with your work with Swordfish Longliners, where there's
Speaker 1: a disaster, lives are lost, and then you come in
Speaker 1: after and explain that to go to become a war correspondent.
Speaker 1: You're like, you're you're not in the after. It's like
Speaker 1: you're in the mix, right, I mean that that like
Speaker 1: it puts you on the long line boat. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: the storm. Yeah? What was that? Like? How would that
Speaker 1: with your family friends? Did they think you were not slight?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: How did it come about that? You're like, man, I
Speaker 1: want to go and I want to like be with
Speaker 1: soldiers in combat. Right do I call the Pentagon? You know?
Speaker 1: How do I get this rolling?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean I'd done a little bit of that
Speaker 2: in the early nineties. That was in Idaho on some
Speaker 2: hot shot crews. They're fighting these big fires. I was
Speaker 2: really interested in wildland fire and myself I would have
Speaker 2: loved to have been on a hot shot crew. I
Speaker 2: just didn't. From the East Coast where I lived, the
Speaker 2: bureaucracy trying to figure out how to do that just
Speaker 2: on a bureaucratic level was almost impossible, and so I
Speaker 2: ended up reporting on them, spent quite a lot of
Speaker 2: time out there. So I was I sort of participant
Speaker 2: a journalist in some situations before that. But my first
Speaker 2: war was in nineteen ninety three on backup for one second.
Speaker 1: When you were doing the fire stuff, though, did they
Speaker 1: really let you get in there or was it too
Speaker 1: they did? Okay, oh yeah, I didn't know if it
Speaker 1: was like if it'd be like sort of too easy
Speaker 1: to constrain someone and keep them out of harm's way.
Speaker 2: For no, they just put They just put me on
Speaker 2: a helicopter and dropped me in and yeah, yeah, yeah
Speaker 2: it was amazing. And I mean with absolutely no I
Speaker 2: absolutely no credentials or anything. I mean, I just showed up.
Speaker 1: It's refreshing to hear that that. Yeah, someone didn't be
Speaker 1: like no, no, no, no, no, you stay here.
Speaker 2: It was the early nineties, right, I don't you know,
Speaker 2: maybe different now, But I showed up. I was like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm interested in writing about wildland fire and
Speaker 2: could you get me on a crew? And the next
Speaker 2: thing I knew, I was in a helicopter. They dropped
Speaker 2: me off for the shot crew up in the you know,
Speaker 2: mountains north of Idaho, north of Boise. It was a
Speaker 2: huge fire.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Was the process a lot different becoming a war correspondent?
Speaker 3: Like were there was there certain training you had to
Speaker 3: go through or like security clearances and.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, most wars are don't involve you as military.
Speaker 2: Most wars in the world, right, so there isn't a
Speaker 2: government agency involved in whether you can go to Sierra Leone, right, So,
Speaker 2: I mean I covered civil wars in West Africa. I
Speaker 2: was in Afghanistan in nineteen ninety six. I watched the
Speaker 2: Taliban takeover. I was with the in Kobble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you interviewed you interviewed a mom.
Speaker 2: Masud. Yes, I'm Shamsud.
Speaker 1: He was killed, Yeah, he was killed by later interviewers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I interviewed him. I spent two months with him
Speaker 2: and his forces in Badakshan in two thousand and the
Speaker 2: fall of two thousand and I was with his commanders
Speaker 2: when they took when they liberated Kabo after nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: And that's incredible, man, Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: So the guy, you know, the US government has nothing
Speaker 2: to do with that decision of yours to go seek
Speaker 2: out Masud and spend a couple of months with him
Speaker 2: fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. They have nothing to
Speaker 2: do with it, right, And so I wasn't embedded with
Speaker 2: US forces until two thousand and five, was the first time.
Speaker 2: So most of my war reporting has not been with
Speaker 2: US forces.
Speaker 1: It's just Spen. You try to get closer, closer, closer,
Speaker 1: until you're in it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I was, you know, my first war was
Speaker 2: Sarajevo in nineteen ninety three, besieged by the Bosnian Serbs.
Speaker 2: It was a you know, I would say, I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm showing my sympathies here, but I would say it
Speaker 2: was quite similar to Russia and Ukraine, except on a
Speaker 2: much scale. Right, It's not Russian Ukraine. It's the Bosnian
Speaker 2: Serbs and in Bosnia, but the same sort of awful
Speaker 2: shelling of civilians they besieged Sarajevo. It was an ethnic,
Speaker 2: ethnically driven conflict, you know, sort of a nationalistic conflict
Speaker 2: and grotesque, grotesquely violent, And I you know, I managed
Speaker 2: to convince a magazine editor I knew at a magazine
Speaker 2: called Men's Journal, which is back in the day a
Speaker 2: pretty good magazine, and he wrote, he gave he gave
Speaker 2: me a sort of letter of passage like Sebastian is
Speaker 2: working on a piece for us for which wasn't even
Speaker 2: true for the boar of civil war in Bosnia, and please,
Speaker 2: you know, help them in any way you can I
Speaker 2: just like showed that to some un guy and he
Speaker 2: gave me a un press pass and the next thing
Speaker 2: I knew, I was on a relief flight into Sarajevo
Speaker 2: and then boom there. I was like it was no
Speaker 2: credentials from anybody, right, But there were a lot of
Speaker 2: freelancers in Sarajevo who made their made their bones. I
Speaker 2: mean it sort of like learned the craft because they
Speaker 2: just put themselves in that situation. They started lansing radio newspaper.
Speaker 2: You know. I went there basically the girlfriend I was
Speaker 2: living with in Gloucester dumped me and I was, you know.
Speaker 1: I'll show you, right. So I was sort of heart
Speaker 1: heartbroken and.
Speaker 2: Like, oh I can you mean, I can do anything
Speaker 2: I want right now? Are you kidding?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: So it was that that heady mix of heartbreak and liberation,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. It's sort of an interesting
Speaker 2: moment and people in your life and uh So I
Speaker 2: went to SFO and there was a lot of other
Speaker 2: freelancers like me, and I would say eighty percent of
Speaker 2: them were young males like I was. And I would
Speaker 2: say eighty percent of those guys had just been dumped
Speaker 2: by their girlfriend, like.
Speaker 1: You know eight.
Speaker 4: So oh sorry, I was gonna say, there's a there's
Speaker 4: a book My War Gone By miss it.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I met him. Yeah, I met him in
Speaker 2: Bosnia in ninety three.
Speaker 4: I mean that I remember reading that. That probably read
Speaker 4: that fifteen or so years ago. But yeah, it's a
Speaker 4: very similar story. I mean it's like in hotel rooms.
Speaker 2: And yeah, he was probably dumped by his girlfriend. Also, yeah,
Speaker 2: he seemed like it.
Speaker 1: You know, it was seventeen years ago this summer that
Speaker 1: I first decided I didn't want to die, okay, And
Speaker 1: I realized when I was I topped my last I
Speaker 1: topped my last big tree. Yeah, and and you know
Speaker 1: that thing when you relieve that top load, it really
Speaker 1: bucks like Bucks huge. And I used to just I
Speaker 1: liked it, was indifferent to it, didn't think about it.
Speaker 1: And I was like, man, I don't want to I
Speaker 1: climbed down on that tree. Never like I changed my behaviors.
Speaker 1: And I was getting married that summer. But you have
Speaker 1: to to go do what you did, Like tree climb
Speaker 1: is one thing, but to go do you did, and
Speaker 1: like go into Afghanistan during the Civil War when for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, having an American captive is really cool.
Speaker 1: And then being able to like kill an American captive
Speaker 1: is enticing. Right, It's like you had to kind of
Speaker 1: have been like I mean, I don't sound like you know,
Speaker 1: like you had like like it's like a mental issue,
Speaker 1: but you had to be like kind of indifferent to death. No.
Speaker 2: I wasn't indifferent to death, but I felt like I
Speaker 2: was taking calculated risks that were manageable, like I wouldn't. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I would never have gone into Syria. I mean Syria
Speaker 2: there was an open market for Western Yeah, right.
Speaker 1: So when Afghanistan didn't feel that way when you were.
Speaker 2: No, I mean I was. I was with Masoud and
Speaker 2: the Northern Alliance and there were absolutely zero issues with
Speaker 2: them about they were my hosts and my protectors, right,
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: Wow, But he was also blown up, Yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: I mean right, but I don't shooting people around him, right.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's not like they would have seized
Speaker 2: me and decided to cut my head off, right, I
Speaker 2: mean I was among the people. I mean I was
Speaker 2: there to report on the frankly, the tragedy and the
Speaker 2: outrage of what the Taliban back by Pakistan were doing
Speaker 2: to the Afghan people, Right, I mean and they were
Speaker 2: full the people, the Northern Alliance and MASUD were fully
Speaker 2: on board with the fact that someone had from the
Speaker 2: West and pressed had come in to shine a spotlight
Speaker 2: on them. So I was very I.
Speaker 1: Mean, they felt protected.
Speaker 2: They would have died protecting me, right, I mean, seriously
Speaker 2: not true in West Africa. West Africa was a lot scarier.
Speaker 2: Even the indigenous forces that I was with. I didn't
Speaker 2: trust them because they were traumatized child soldiers, all high
Speaker 2: on drugs, so, you know, like it just there were
Speaker 2: a lot of variables that were terrifying, and I had
Speaker 2: some incredibly scary situations with them.
Speaker 1: What would you categorize when you say that, like, what
Speaker 1: would be the kind of scenario or situation you'd be
Speaker 1: in that you would categorize as scary, because I think
Speaker 1: most people would find that every moment was scary, you know,
Speaker 1: just to be in the proximity of shelling, to be
Speaker 1: in the proximity of war.
Speaker 2: Well, I've been shelled plenty, and that's very scary. I
Speaker 2: mean I've been shot at. I mean, lots of things
Speaker 2: have happened, But I think the two scariest moments I
Speaker 2: think were moments were where I had where I thought
Speaker 2: I was going to be executed, right, And both of
Speaker 2: them were in West Africa. One was in Sierra Leone.
Speaker 2: I was coming back from a frontline fight back towards
Speaker 2: Freetown and with a couple of government soldiers and a
Speaker 2: couple of journalists and a group of rebels stepped out
Speaker 2: of the jungle and stopped us on this deserted road.
Speaker 2: And two weeks later they wiped out two cars full
Speaker 2: of journalists on the same road, like right near where
Speaker 2: we were. These same guys stopped us and they had
Speaker 2: their rifles the machine guns leveled, and they were arguing
Speaker 2: with each other. We were in an open jeep and
Speaker 2: they were arguing with each other, seemed to be arguing
Speaker 2: with each other but whether to kill us all or not.
Speaker 2: And we just said there was nothing we could do,
Speaker 2: and we just sat there. And at one point one
Speaker 2: of them like leveled his rifle at us to fire,
Speaker 2: and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards
Speaker 2: so it wouldn't come. So, you know, I had, you know,
Speaker 2: for about ten or fifteen minutes, I was thinking this
Speaker 2: really could go down, right, And it was the extraordinary feeling.
Speaker 2: I became sort of I just associated, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: my body sort of went numb, and I was so
Speaker 2: scared that I wasn't even scared anymore. It's like I
Speaker 2: wasn't there, and the psychological effect. And then they didn't
Speaker 2: shoot us, and I don't know why, right, And the
Speaker 2: psychological trauma of that is way worse than someone shooting
Speaker 2: at you from three hundred meters and you managed to
Speaker 2: get behind some sandbags. I mean, that's child's play, right,
Speaker 2: compared to, Wow, we are totally screwed and they could
Speaker 2: shoot us or not. And then a similar thing happened
Speaker 2: in Nigeria in two thousand and six. I was seized
Speaker 2: by rebels, the Ejah Warriors, who were fighting in a
Speaker 2: group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta,
Speaker 2: a partly criminal, partly righteous like group. And they seized
Speaker 2: me in a small village in the creeks and the
Speaker 2: Niger River and in the Delta, and the accused me
Speaker 2: of being a spy. And one guy came up sort
Speaker 2: of strutted up to me, you know, machine gun and
Speaker 2: these guys, these Ejoh warriors are they they got feathers
Speaker 2: and paint and all kinds of Fea dishes on them.
Speaker 2: And they're wild looking guys, right, and really intense warriors.
Speaker 2: And he said, very matter of fact, very matter of factly,
Speaker 2: he said, when we when we kill you later today,
Speaker 2: I'm going to be the one to do it. He
Speaker 2: didn't say it meanly, he was just I just want
Speaker 2: you to know, you know, just by way of introduction.
Speaker 1: That's like Princess Bride. Remember the pirate probably kill you
Speaker 1: in the morning.
Speaker 2: Right, So I you know, I was just remember thinking,
Speaker 2: don't let your knees buckle, like whatever you do, don't
Speaker 2: let your knees buckle. And so those, you know, those
Speaker 2: two situations are.
Speaker 1: Do you think he's just tormenting you?
Speaker 2: I don't know what he was doing. There was a
Speaker 2: lot of uh, I don't know. There was a lot
Speaker 2: of aggression. There was a lot of sort of performative aggression.
Speaker 2: They didn't know who I was. Their commander. Eventually they
Speaker 2: called their commander and put me on the phone with
Speaker 2: him on a cell phone like one bar of signal,
Speaker 2: like I was standing on top of a log trying
Speaker 2: to maintain myself connection with him. And he was in
Speaker 2: South Africa, actually he was an arms dealer and Africa
Speaker 2: but indigenous Ejaw, and I talked with him and he said, okay,
Speaker 2: give the phone back to the the guy who gave
Speaker 2: you the phone. And I didn't know what he was
Speaker 2: going to say, and he say kill him or don't
Speaker 2: any I gave the phone back and the guy said, okay, sir, yes, sir,
Speaker 2: all right, we'll do it. And I didn't know what,
Speaker 2: you know, and he shut the phone, you know, flip
Speaker 2: the phone with the flip phone. He flipped the clothes
Speaker 2: and they said it's gonna be fine, We're gonna let
Speaker 2: you go. But I didn't know until that moment that
Speaker 2: it would be fine. So they might have been bluffing.
Speaker 2: I mean he might You know, I'm an American, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know there are repercussions for whacking America.
Speaker 3: Was going to ask, is there is there, like any truth?
Speaker 3: Is it like a myth that like being a member
Speaker 3: of like the American press, affords you some degree of
Speaker 3: safety in those situations.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean it protects you with people that don't
Speaker 2: want to get on the wrong side of America, and
Speaker 2: the e Jaw, as badassed as they are, probably don't want,
Speaker 2: you know, the American military as an adversary. They you know,
Speaker 2: they have their hands full of the Nigerian military, right. So,
Speaker 2: but then there's groups like ISIS who make you know,
Speaker 2: there the point of their existence is to fight America,
Speaker 2: to fight the infidelal to fight the West. So you know,
Speaker 2: it's like depends what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: How different did it feel for you when it was, uh,
Speaker 1: when when you got to a point and the global
Speaker 1: War on terror started and all of a sudden it
Speaker 1: was like you were with like Americans.
Speaker 2: Oh it was. It was so nice, right because I
Speaker 2: didn't have to worry that the people I was with
Speaker 2: were gonna kill me. Right if I got wounded, I
Speaker 2: knew I'd be evacuated. Like I knew that these guys
Speaker 2: would do whatever they could to help me, and and
Speaker 2: as I would them as I got to know them, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, I really this one, you know. So I
Speaker 2: spent most in beds are a week or two, right,
Speaker 2: And but I spent a year off and on with
Speaker 2: one platoon, which was like thirty forty guys at this
Speaker 2: remote outpost called Bristreppo was named after the platoon medic
Speaker 2: who was killed, you know, basically at the bottom of
Speaker 2: the hill. And so I really became part of that
Speaker 2: platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of
Speaker 2: a group, you know, I mean a really ancient and
Speaker 2: a really ancient and pretty much a way that's been
Speaker 2: pretty much lost to our society here at home. I
Speaker 2: felt like, Wow, I belonged to this thing, and they
Speaker 2: would risk their lives for me, and I know I
Speaker 2: would for them, and here we are, let's get it done,
Speaker 2: you know. And it was. It was absolutely extraordinary, and
Speaker 2: so that that experience really changed me, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: I feel like in our society we don't get to
Speaker 2: enjoy that group affiliation at such a profound in such
Speaker 2: a profound way. And it is what our evolutionary past
Speaker 2: consists of, right, that we're social primates. We survived. We
Speaker 2: survived not because we're rugged individuals, but because we affiliate
Speaker 2: very well. And in when we're in groups like that,
Speaker 2: the individuals in them will risk their lives or give
Speaker 2: their lives to protect the group.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like firemen or something, right, And that's our evolutionary past.
Speaker 2: And when you find yourself in a situation like that,
Speaker 2: it is almost intoxicating. It plays to so much evolutionary
Speaker 2: wiring It plays to so many profound human emotions, and
Speaker 2: I just kept thinking, this is this is all I want,
Speaker 2: Like I don't want to go home? Why would I
Speaker 2: want to do that?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: It was quite extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And that was with how that was a group of
Speaker 1: what size? Then?
Speaker 2: You know, thirty guys or so? I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: so thirty to fifty people was the anthropologists will tell
Speaker 2: you it was the typical group size in our evolutionary past. Right,
Speaker 2: so the groups of about that size that are affiliated
Speaker 2: by clan or by tribe with other groups around that size.
Speaker 2: But the sort of survival community is about that size,
Speaker 2: and it you know, it's sort of a perfect size.
Speaker 2: It's the largest number that you can have quite close
Speaker 2: emotional relationships with. And you can't be emotionally close to
Speaker 2: five hundred dudes, right, it's not happening. Right, even if
Speaker 2: you're in the same battalion. That's a rather abstract knowledge, right,
Speaker 2: But thirty forty people, You're like, wow, these are my people.
Speaker 2: What wouldn't I do for them?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: And of course in our evolutionary past, it wouldn't be
Speaker 2: all one sex, it wouldn't be all male. It would
Speaker 2: be a mix, right, it would be a mix of
Speaker 2: old and young, male and female, et cetera. And what
Speaker 2: wouldn't you do with you know, with your family, what
Speaker 2: wouldn't you do to protect them? Like? Nothing, you would
Speaker 2: do anything to protect them, right, Feeling that way about
Speaker 2: thirty or forty people. That is the human experience and
Speaker 2: evolutionary terms, and it's the loss of that experience for
Speaker 2: most people in modern society is a tragic one.
Speaker 1: The other day, we had some anthropologists here and they
Speaker 1: were excavating. They had been working on an excavation of
Speaker 1: an ice age encampment and wyoming. Okay, so these are
Speaker 1: like mammoth hunters, right right, and we're about, well, how big,
Speaker 1: like how big was the encampment? Then he's like thirty
Speaker 1: forty people? Yeah, yeah, yah, yeah, exactly, yeah, age, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, that's exactly, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There's the thing I've been like, you should feel
Speaker 1: free as we're talking. I would. I appreciate that you're
Speaker 1: not doing this, but I I appreciate the impulse. Please
Speaker 1: tie into the books. Oh yeah, like what you're talking
Speaker 1: about now is your book tribe? Yes?
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, Yeah, I wrote a book, right, I wrote
Speaker 2: a book tribe.
Speaker 1: That's not what you're talking about, but you're yeah, these
Speaker 1: ideas are explored and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: No. I was trying to figure out, why does this
Speaker 2: modern society, which is so safe and so affluent, have
Speaker 2: such high rates of mental illness, you know, depression and anxiety, suicide, addiction.
Speaker 2: Why was it that along the American frontier at his
Speaker 2: various points in Pennsylvania and the Ohio and further west
Speaker 2: all the way to Texas and Arizon, Like why we're
Speaker 2: pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native society and disappearing
Speaker 2: in native society and the natives didn't do the opposite,
Speaker 2: and and what it really seemed to be And in
Speaker 2: Benjamin Franklin wrote about this because of course, if you're
Speaker 2: like a good Christian, the idea that like white Christians
Speaker 2: would rather live with what they called the savages, like
Speaker 2: is it flies in the face of the entire sense
Speaker 2: of Western superiority, right, And Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about
Speaker 2: this like what is the appeal? And the appeal is
Speaker 2: that that those kinds of organic hunter gatherer societies are
Speaker 2: extremely egalitarian. The leadership is not imposed, it's granted by
Speaker 2: the people. I mean, all these sort of like democratic
Speaker 2: ideals that are that we do not live up to
Speaker 2: actually are acted out in societies of that scale. And
Speaker 2: and there's community, there's community, really close community. And and
Speaker 2: of course if you're a young man, instead of having
Speaker 2: to plow fields all day, you can go hunting, like
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, like what like what's not
Speaker 2: to like sort of yeah, and and so that so
Speaker 2: that was my the genesis of my thought that maybe
Speaker 2: what people are really drawn to is close connection to
Speaker 2: each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with,
Speaker 2: against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo. They
Speaker 2: got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars
Speaker 2: and everything, you know, all the things young men like.
Speaker 2: He's like, whoa. I mean, A number of them said
Speaker 2: to me, if we could take a helicopter back to
Speaker 2: Restrepo right now and do another year out there, we
Speaker 2: would do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And that's how that So my book Tribe was about
Speaker 2: that phenomenon.
Speaker 1: We recently had a guy on a guy named is
Speaker 1: pastor Shane Yats, who's sitting right in that chair, and
Speaker 1: he was talking about coming home from thanks Yeah, coming
Speaker 1: home from Iraq. No, coming home from I think it
Speaker 1: was in Afghanistan. Coming home from Afghanistan. Was that where
Speaker 1: it was was the kids like eating. He's like, there's
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're literally watching children looking in the
Speaker 1: garbage for food, competing with dogs in the streets. And
Speaker 1: he said, and like you get home so fast and
Speaker 1: as you're just home and he's standing there and here's
Speaker 1: a woman arguing with a Starbucks employee about the state
Speaker 1: of her latte, and he's like, I wanted to kill her.
Speaker 1: He's talking about just the heart, like the very difficult adjustment.
Speaker 1: But there's this thing I've been and think about what
Speaker 1: you're you're talking about and the ideas that you explore
Speaker 1: and tribe. It's like, I'm kind of struggling with this
Speaker 1: thing I'm seeing happened later. I'm just becoming aware of it.
Speaker 1: And it's very troubling to me about American culture, where
Speaker 1: what when you're on the internet, what you if you
Speaker 1: solely relied on the Internet, you would get a view
Speaker 1: of American culture that does not at all match the
Speaker 1: view of American culture that you have as you're alive
Speaker 1: being an American outside of the web, right, meaning any
Speaker 1: one of my neighbors. Any one of my neighbors would
Speaker 1: if my house was on fire, any one of my
Speaker 1: neighbors would go into my house to get my kids.
Speaker 1: I would go into any one of my neighbors houses
Speaker 1: to get their kids. And when I say this, I'm
Speaker 1: not like I have no idea of the political affiliation
Speaker 1: except for one of my neighbors, I have no idea
Speaker 1: of their political affiliation zero. But like, you get this.
Speaker 1: I used to think of people think of the like
Speaker 1: the radical right and the radical left as being like
Speaker 1: diametrically opposed. I'm starting to view it more like that
Speaker 1: these are just symptoms of a that these are symptoms
Speaker 1: of an ailment. Yeah, It's like you could have a
Speaker 1: certain ailment and you might get like like stunning headaches,
Speaker 1: or you might have a certain ailment and be other
Speaker 1: people would have the same ailment and be that that
Speaker 1: they can't get a full breath or whatever, or all
Speaker 1: the weird shit that would happen to people with COVID.
Speaker 1: It's like too much time online is the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then the symptoms are you could be radicalized in
Speaker 1: one direction, you radicalize in the other direction. Don't You're
Speaker 1: like you want it being that you're just bound by
Speaker 1: what you hate, Like your culture is my people that
Speaker 1: I find are people that hate what I hate, right,
Speaker 1: and that's my team. And dude, and like the part
Speaker 1: of your time, I was like that need like like
Speaker 1: build a team that's not based on just that you
Speaker 1: all hate the same shit.
Speaker 2: Right. Well, you know, in evolutionary terms, outrage is a
Speaker 2: powerful unifier because you're you're unified with other people who
Speaker 2: are out who are outraged by the same thing, and
Speaker 2: it creates a sort of pugilistic state of mind that's
Speaker 2: good at defending itself. So you think in evolutionary terms
Speaker 2: that that that anger and outrage response is a very
Speaker 2: effective defense against the threat. Right, And the algorithms that
Speaker 2: are used in social media are very good at generating outrage.
Speaker 2: It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle but
Speaker 2: also very important feelings of love or sadness or regret.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a gentler emotions that also are really
Speaker 2: important for keeping society and people glued together. Right, shared
Speaker 2: value is shared I shared warmth with each other. You know,
Speaker 2: those are hard. They don't have the algorithms for that.
Speaker 2: The algorithms for hatred are very very simple. There's a
Speaker 2: threat over there. We have to unify, we have to
Speaker 2: denounce the threat and unify against it, and then we'll survive. Right,
Speaker 2: So you're going into very very ancient human history when
Speaker 2: you gin up those emotions. And you know, it used
Speaker 2: to be that at the town hall, someone might stand
Speaker 2: you know, before the internet, right before the apocalypse of
Speaker 2: the internet that came along, you got, you know, the
Speaker 2: town hall and someone would stand up with a different
Speaker 2: view about you know, paving the streets or whatever, and
Speaker 2: you'd be like, Okay, I'm totally against that, but that's Joe.
Speaker 2: I know his you know I have, I have a
Speaker 2: relationship with Joe, like and I don't agree with them,
Speaker 2: and I might even at them, shouting at him. But
Speaker 2: we're all in this together. We all live in this
Speaker 2: little you know. That's gone right, And so you can
Speaker 2: hate on people online and there are no repercussions. You know,
Speaker 2: the person is not going to come grab you by
Speaker 2: the shirt front and say, do not speak to me
Speaker 2: like that in front of my community or in front
Speaker 2: of my family. You're not any danger, right, You're free
Speaker 2: to be a sort of cowardly adversary and that's very
Speaker 2: seductive to a lot of people. And so I, you know,
Speaker 2: I don't the internet's a great tool for all kinds
Speaker 2: of things. I don't, you know, I have a flip
Speaker 2: phone because I think the smartphones are just like killing people,
Speaker 2: like literally literally killing people. There. It's a it was
Speaker 2: a deliberate addiction designed by the tech companies, right, It's
Speaker 2: a very powerful addiction. It's particularly powerful with our children.
Speaker 2: And I think it's you know, I think it's destroying
Speaker 2: the society. I just refuse to participate in it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Man, it's tough because, like I use the Internet
Speaker 1: to find out how the Internet is destroying society because
Speaker 1: I'm into this thing right now. It's like American Veterans Institute.
Speaker 1: It's like interviews with World War Two veterans. They just
Speaker 1: they've been very good. Like when these guys they kind
Speaker 1: of were catching all these dudes in their eighties nineties.
Speaker 2: I've seen some of those amazing.
Speaker 1: It's like, I'll tell my wife, I'm sitting there on
Speaker 1: a Saturday morning. I'm sitting there doing some work and
Speaker 1: I got one bottle was playing and I was like, uh,
Speaker 1: I said, this is going to sound so nostalgic. But
Speaker 1: holy shit, we've fallen far. Like listening to interview after
Speaker 1: interview after interview with these guys about they all kind
Speaker 1: of start like, where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?
Speaker 1: Right right in the portraits they paint, there's this dude,
Speaker 1: there's this Italian dude. And he says, like he goes
Speaker 1: down to he goes down to a gas station or
Speaker 1: something to buy soda, you know, and everybody's in the
Speaker 1: gas station's listening because Pearl harvard'st got attacked. He goes home,
Speaker 1: his dad listens to the address from Franklin. Roosevelt calls
Speaker 1: his four sons down into the room informs them, you
Speaker 1: will all fight because we move to this country. We
Speaker 1: have a house in a car. This country cannot fail.
Speaker 1: And he says when he goes to the train station,
Speaker 1: his dad makes a point that his dad wants to
Speaker 1: drive him alone to the train station, so he's expecting
Speaker 1: some kind of lecture. His dad never says a word
Speaker 1: to him all the drive. They get to the train station,
Speaker 1: and you know what his dad says to him. He
Speaker 1: says to him, an Italian, don't do anything that will
Speaker 1: cause me to hang my head in shame. Wow, that
Speaker 1: was it, Dude out the door, and I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, Mad is getting stuf about it, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it's just like I feel like something's crowding. Like
Speaker 1: I'm just like, I have this terrible anxiety about culture
Speaker 1: right now, with with like the internet hatred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I still you know, we're we're all
Speaker 2: We're still all human. And I think that same noble
Speaker 2: those same noble sentiments and actions individuals today are just
Speaker 2: as capable of them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: But what's gone not gone. But what's in danger, what's
Speaker 2: under threat, is the idea of a nation that is unified,
Speaker 2: that thinks of itself as a nation despite its internal differences. Right.
Speaker 2: I love that there's Republicans and Democrats. I happen to
Speaker 2: be a Democrat, but I don't care whatever. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's great that you know that the country is My
Speaker 2: father's a refugee from two wars. He's an immigrant, right,
Speaker 2: And the country's made up of people like my dad, right,
Speaker 2: And I'm you know, I was born in this country. Whatever,
Speaker 2: It's all great. So the idea that we're all unified
Speaker 2: in this American project is an incredibly powerful one, right,
Speaker 2: And and it transcends, it should transcend all these other divisions,
Speaker 2: including left and right. And I think one of the
Speaker 2: problems right now is that the internet. Look, I have
Speaker 2: a laptop, I'm online, I research stuff, I get it.
Speaker 2: I just don't have a smartphone because I don't want
Speaker 2: that following me around all day and being where my
Speaker 2: brain disappears when I have thirty seconds to spare while
Speaker 2: I'm waiting for the bus, Like, I just that to
Speaker 2: me is horrible, right for the brain. But I uh,
Speaker 2: I think that I think I think we've sort of
Speaker 2: lost sight of the idea that there is one, that
Speaker 2: there's the ultimate, that the ultimate category we're all in
Speaker 2: is American.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's what that's as a patriot. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm getting worried about increasingly. Was that your quote were
Speaker 1: you quoting somebody when you said the journalists I can't
Speaker 1: mary if you said it should or shouldn't or is
Speaker 1: it not should or do or whatever. But like, journalists
Speaker 1: don't tell you what to think.
Speaker 2: Right, journalists don't tell you what I was. I was
Speaker 2: paraphrasing someone else who was actually talking about theater. Oh
Speaker 2: it's interesting, right, but I repurposed it for journalist journalism as.
Speaker 2: Journalists don't tell you what to think, they tell you
Speaker 2: what to think about. And if a journalist is telling
Speaker 2: you what to think how to think, they're not a journalist.
Speaker 2: Don't listen.
Speaker 1: They're a commentator, right, an analyst or a commentatory.
Speaker 2: Worse than an analyst, like and we need analysts, they're commentator.
Speaker 2: They're a commentator. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And you know, and
Speaker 2: so I feel like the internet as and their political
Speaker 2: forces in this country that are depending on the ability
Speaker 2: to fracture people in order to achieve their agenda and
Speaker 2: and also make money. I mean, there's you can sort
Speaker 2: of monetize this, right, and and what they are sacrificing,
Speaker 2: maybe not deliberately and consciously, but ultimately what's happening is
Speaker 2: they are they are sacrificing the cultural and political unity
Speaker 2: of this country for smaller for smaller gains, for smaller
Speaker 2: personal gains, you know, including many politicians who do that.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about your health scare man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've never heard of that. Yeah, me, neither happened
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 1: And that funny. We're going through that with my boy
Speaker 1: right now. My little boy has a thing that like
Speaker 1: not any person in our social circle has ever heard of? Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: like a like a cartilage issue.
Speaker 3: You know, you gotta be careful here, Steve, because you
Speaker 3: might get your your thing where you you think you're
Speaker 3: developing a problem because he talks about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have this like if someone's telling me, like whatever,
Speaker 1: any problem someone tells especially internal. Oh yeah, Like you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I got a whatever in my kidney. I'm like,
Speaker 1: well a bit now I got a weird feeling of
Speaker 1: my kidney.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Well that that sort of paranoid is very
Speaker 2: human and it and it and and uh it helps
Speaker 2: keeps us, keep us alive. Right, Once in a while,
Speaker 2: someone does have a weird thing in their kidney and
Speaker 2: they weren't aware of it until someone mentioned it, and
Speaker 2: they go to the doctor and say, you know, so
Speaker 2: there's a there is a sort of use for that.
Speaker 2: But so basically what happened to me. I have a
Speaker 2: I have a ligament in the wrong place, my median
Speaker 2: arcuate ligament, which sort of goes across your abdomen about
Speaker 2: where your sternam is.
Speaker 1: I would know you had I guess you do have
Speaker 1: a ligament in your abdomen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and it can cross it crosses right near
Speaker 2: the bottom of your rib cage, crosses your abdomen, and
Speaker 2: mine is too tight. So it has it's called median
Speaker 2: arcuate ligament syndrome. It has crushed the celiac artery. Now,
Speaker 2: the celiac artery is like a garden hose that irrigates
Speaker 2: all of your organs with blood. Right, you imagine how
Speaker 2: big it is, and.
Speaker 1: It comes right on I don't want to know. I
Speaker 1: have this thing I'm trying to do where when someone's
Speaker 1: telling me someone I don't understand. Yep, you know, the
Speaker 1: impulse is going huh.
Speaker 3: I'm trying to picture it when I'm cutting a deer
Speaker 3: open would be.
Speaker 1: Like, I don't understand.
Speaker 2: So, so the celiac comes out out of the aorta
Speaker 2: and the descending aorda, and it branches down and it
Speaker 2: brings blood to the liver and the intestines and the
Speaker 2: stomach and the all the organs in your abdomen. Right,
Speaker 2: So a lot of blood goes through this if you
Speaker 2: block it with a ligament.
Speaker 1: So also this ligament is like on the outside pushing it,
Speaker 1: binding in right, and it's just crimping it off exactly.
Speaker 2: It's just an irregularity It isn't because I led a
Speaker 2: bad life and them filled with cholesterol and nothing like that. Right,
Speaker 2: It's just a sort of bad design, right, It's very rare.
Speaker 2: But what the body does, because the body is a
Speaker 2: walking miracle, is it's like, okay, we still got to
Speaker 2: get the blood to where it needs to go. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of uh, sort of redundancy in the vascular system,
Speaker 2: so the blood flows to where it needs to go
Speaker 2: through smaller arteries, these branch arteries that are not designed
Speaker 2: to take that kind of blood flow, right, that kind
Speaker 2: of pressure. So what they do is they dilate so
Speaker 2: that they can carry all this blood they're not supposed
Speaker 2: to take. It works fine, right, the problem they're meant
Speaker 2: to dilate, but if there's a weak spot in one
Speaker 2: of the arteries, instead of dilating, it will bubble out.
Speaker 2: It will balloon outwards, and it's called an aneurysm. Okay,
Speaker 2: and the artery wall will balloon outwards and it will
Speaker 2: get bigger over the course of decades. So it's there's
Speaker 2: no symptoms. Uh, it's very hard to detect, and it
Speaker 2: very slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then
Speaker 2: when it ruptures, and it will. When it ruptures, you
Speaker 2: are suddenly bleeding. You're bleeding out from an artery. You
Speaker 2: know what arterial bleed is, deadly right, You're bleeding out
Speaker 2: from an artery, a smaller artery into your own abdomen.
Speaker 2: So if someone stabbed you in the stomach and you
Speaker 2: made it alive to the hospital, the doctors don't have
Speaker 2: anything to figure out. They're like, oh, we know what
Speaker 2: the problem is exactly. They know where to stick their
Speaker 2: finger almost literally to stop the bleed. Like it's there's
Speaker 2: no mystery there with internal hemorrhage, it could be anywhere, right,
Speaker 2: And so this happened five years ago and it was during.
Speaker 1: But you know when the blood's coming out, Well.
Speaker 2: I didn't know that's what was happening, but I felt
Speaker 2: a lot of pain, right, But I'm an old stoic, and.
Speaker 1: It's like high pressure blood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean blood, blood's and irritant when it's
Speaker 2: not in the vascular that's what's causing the pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I'm like, there's blood around my kidneys and around
Speaker 2: my liver, and it just like feels odd. It's very
Speaker 2: very full of a sudden in mid sentence, ruptured so I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean we're taught.
Speaker 1: What was the sentence?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm gonna live forever. I think this is a sentence.
Speaker 2: So so it was. It was during COVID and my
Speaker 2: so I have two little girls and a eight and
Speaker 2: five at the time, there were three three years old
Speaker 2: in six months, and my wife and we were it
Speaker 2: was during COVID. We were We own a property in
Speaker 2: Massachusetts that's very remote. It's in the woods at the
Speaker 2: end of a dead end dirt road. There's no cell
Speaker 2: phone coverage there. The landlines are old and when it
Speaker 2: rains they short out, so there's no landlines. We're surrounded
Speaker 2: by atlant It's basically paradise, right. It's an old house
Speaker 2: from eighteen hundred, and we were there during COVID, and
Speaker 2: I built a post and bean cabin deeper in the woods,
Speaker 2: and one day we managed some teenage girls who lived
Speaker 2: up the road that we knew called When does this
Speaker 2: ever happen? They called and said, Hey, we're free this afternoon.
Speaker 2: Would you like some babysitting time? Right? And I was like, yes,
Speaker 2: we pay one thousand dollars an hour, Like how long
Speaker 2: can you how long can you stay? Right? Yeah? So
Speaker 2: they came over a few hours and my wife and
Speaker 2: I went out to this.
Speaker 1: Beautiful little cabin.
Speaker 2: It's totally off the grid, like oil lamp, woodstove. You know,
Speaker 2: I felt it myself, you know. So we're in this
Speaker 2: place of peace and beauty and and just to sort
Speaker 2: of enjoying our you know, a couple of hours of
Speaker 2: alone time, and all of a sudden, this is pain.
Speaker 2: Am I at them, like, oh, what was that? And
Speaker 2: it wouldn't stop, and so I stood up to sort
Speaker 2: of work it out. I thought it was some crazy indigestion,
Speaker 2: and I almost fell over. And what was happening was
Speaker 2: I was bleeding out in my abdomen. My blood pressure
Speaker 2: was tanking, and I was graying out right. And I
Speaker 2: sat back down. I said to my wife, I'd never
Speaker 2: thought i'd have to ever say these words to anyone.
Speaker 2: I said, I think I'm gonna need some help. And
Speaker 2: you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young.
Speaker 2: I was a really good competitive runner. I've always been
Speaker 2: very fit, very healthy. I just never thought that I
Speaker 2: would need physical help from anybody. You know. It's just
Speaker 2: like never, never, And now my wife's dragging me out
Speaker 2: of the woods, like literally dragging me down a trail
Speaker 2: to get me to help, and we finally got there
Speaker 2: was no cell phone.
Speaker 1: She had one of those like mysterious bursts of power.
Speaker 2: Well I got, you know, she didn't care. I mean
Speaker 2: I had my arm over her shoulder. I wasn't unconscious,
Speaker 2: but I was sort of half Oh I got. I
Speaker 2: thought she was like pulling in yeah, right right, the
Speaker 2: car off the baby nor so, so the ambulance game,
Speaker 2: you know, it took him twenty minutes to get there.
Speaker 2: I'm losing a pint of blood maybe every ten or
Speaker 2: fifteen minutes in my aben but all in you, all
Speaker 2: in me, and and you can lose about half your
Speaker 2: blood before you die. And we live an hour from
Speaker 2: the hospital, so you can do the math like it was.
Speaker 2: I was a human hourglass and they, you know, they
Speaker 2: their ambulance got there, and I had sort of rebooted
Speaker 2: it that you go into compensatory shocks, so your body,
Speaker 2: it's extraordinary. Your body knows when there's a five alarm fire,
Speaker 2: even though even if you don't, right, I didn't know
Speaker 2: I was dying, had no idea, right, and so it
Speaker 2: it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body
Speaker 2: that you don't need to survive your your your surface areas,
Speaker 2: your skin, your legs, your arms, and it pools it
Speaker 2: in your brain and in your abdomen, in your heart,
Speaker 2: around your heart. So when it does that, your blood
Speaker 2: pressure goes back up, and and I became sort of
Speaker 2: clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there. They
Speaker 2: were like, you know, it's a hot day. You probably dehydrated, sir.
Speaker 2: You know they're looking at me. I'm fifty eighth. They're like,
Speaker 2: you're an old man, you know, twenty right, dehydration thing man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and why don't you sit in the shade and drink
Speaker 2: some water and call us if you still don't feel well?
Speaker 2: And my wife, oh my god, my wife said, you
Speaker 2: got you're taking him to the hospital, like he couldn't
Speaker 2: walk a few minutes ago.
Speaker 1: Like I've seen thirsty people. Yeah, right exactly. And he
Speaker 1: was not in my mind at the time.
Speaker 2: I remember thinking, I've always heard that married men live longer.
Speaker 2: This is why I'm seeing it right now.
Speaker 1: So because your wife's I was like, why don't you
Speaker 1: see somebody about it? So they put me in.
Speaker 2: They started the long drive, and my compensatory shock held
Speaker 2: for most of the drive and right when we got
Speaker 2: to the hospital.
Speaker 1: And they've got no idea what's going on.
Speaker 3: So they didn't like, check your bib alls. Well they
Speaker 3: say that something was well.
Speaker 2: They did. So the thing is if you're if you
Speaker 2: have internal bleeding, your heart tries to compensate for the
Speaker 2: drop in blood pressure by beating faster, which pressure pressurizes
Speaker 2: the system. Right, you run the pump, you pressurize the bike. Okay, right,
Speaker 2: except I'm very fit. So they looked at my heart
Speaker 2: rate and was probably in the eighties. They're like, all right,
Speaker 2: he's almost sixty years old. His heart rates in the eighties,
Speaker 2: that's pretty normal, got it right, My heart rates fifty five,
Speaker 2: So they didn't know I was thirty beats up. Had
Speaker 2: they known that, they would they were like, oh, this
Speaker 2: is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But I my
Speaker 2: fitness level was masking it, right, So they were totally
Speaker 2: cavalier about it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: We almost stopped for coffee practically, you know, Like, and
Speaker 2: we got to the hospital and I I just went
Speaker 2: off a cliff. Your body decompensated. It has to decompensate
Speaker 2: at some point. And when I went into end stage
Speaker 2: hemorrhagic shock. I'm convulsing with hypothermia, and they rushed me
Speaker 2: into the trauma bay. The doctors know immediately what's going
Speaker 2: on and immediately diagnosed me immediately and sent me through
Speaker 2: a cat scan. They saw that where the blood was pooling,
Speaker 2: and they and oh, so I'm in the trauma bay
Speaker 2: and well, h yeah.
Speaker 1: That's want to mention what you were just described? And
Speaker 1: would you say your hype Like, what'd you say?
Speaker 2: Uh, hemorrhagic chuck? So is that?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 4: They said something about hypothermia.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you go into hypothermia when you have when
Speaker 2: you're in hemorrhagic shock, your body gets hypothermic.
Speaker 1: I understand that. Why Why is that?
Speaker 2: It's as if you're very, very cold. Your body can't
Speaker 2: keep up its internal temperature.
Speaker 1: All right, Which is you feel did you? I guess
Speaker 1: when you're one of your super hypothermic, you don't know
Speaker 1: you're cold. I mean, did you did you feel like well?
Speaker 2: I was convulsiate. I mean I was having like these
Speaker 2: spastic shivering like oh really oh yeah yeah yeah yeah No.
Speaker 2: I I don't know what was going on, but I
Speaker 2: kind of sensed it wasn't good. I didn't know I
Speaker 2: was dying.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of you knew it was
Speaker 1: a cold feeling.
Speaker 2: Well, yes, I was shaking. I've only shaked. I've only
Speaker 2: shaken like that when I was very very cold. And
Speaker 2: I've never even convulsively shaked. Huh right, shaken, shaked, shaken,
Speaker 2: whatever it is.
Speaker 1: So I knew.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of when you're dying, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of denial. I had no idea I was dying, but
Speaker 2: I was like, Okay, I was going blind a while ago,
Speaker 2: I couldn't talk, and now I'm convulsively shaking, but I'm fine,
Speaker 2: like you know, like they're just yeah, exactly. So so
Speaker 2: it never crossed my mind. Of course everyone else knew,
Speaker 2: and they.
Speaker 1: So they were they like they were able to look
Speaker 1: at what's going on because you know, I mean, it
Speaker 1: would never occur to me like perhaps they're having internal bleeding,
Speaker 1: like they're good enough where they're like this, dude, do
Speaker 1: you have enough?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I had all this. I had all the symptoms, right,
Speaker 2: And and then they saw it on the CT scan
Speaker 2: and so my blood pressure was sixty over forty, right,
Speaker 2: I'd lost half my blood at that point. I was
Speaker 2: probably ten minutes from dead right, I needed ten units
Speaker 2: of blood to stay alive, which is basically a full
Speaker 2: oil change.
Speaker 1: Like, how do they get the old blood out? They
Speaker 1: pump it out.
Speaker 2: No, it's in your abdomen and then it takes a
Speaker 2: few months to be reabsorbed by your body if you survived.
Speaker 1: So they don't try to get it out.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, it's not doing it. They got like they
Speaker 2: got their sun pouch. No, no, no that they don't.
Speaker 2: That doesn't matter, like that they would, Yeah, they don't
Speaker 2: need to worry about that. I was probably ten minutes
Speaker 2: from dead right, and they put me in the trauma
Speaker 2: bay and a doctor, a doctor starts prepping my neck
Speaker 2: to insert a large gauge needle through my neck into
Speaker 2: my jugular to transfuse me because I need a lot
Speaker 2: of blood fast right. And he asked my permission to
Speaker 2: do this, and I still didn't get I was like,
Speaker 2: you mean, in case there's an emergency. He's like, this
Speaker 2: is the emergency right now. If you say so, my life,
Speaker 2: you know. My wife seemed worried also, But if I
Speaker 2: you know, whatever, do what you gotta do. And I'm
Speaker 2: lying there while he's working on my neck and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden and I have to stop and just explain.
Speaker 2: I'm an atheist, right, my dad was an atheist and
Speaker 2: a physicist. She's like as well, yeah, well sort of
Speaker 2: atheist squared right, like hyper rational. And I'm a lifelong atheist.
Speaker 2: So you need to know this for what I'm about
Speaker 2: to say, because it flew in the face of a
Speaker 2: lot of of my understanding of reality, understanding of life
Speaker 2: in the world. A little bit, uh so beneath me,
Speaker 2: into my left, this sort of yawning blackness opened up,
Speaker 2: like the universe had sort of cracked open. He said,
Speaker 2: this just infinite black void, and I was getting pulled
Speaker 2: into it, and I didn't want to go. I was
Speaker 2: like a wounded animal, like I didn't I wasn't thinking
Speaker 2: about my family. I didn't know I was dying. I
Speaker 2: just didn't want to go into the vast darkness, right,
Speaker 2: like when you take your dog to the vat and
Speaker 2: dog doesn't want to go to the I was like that, like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not going in there. And I was getting pulled
Speaker 2: in and I couldn't stop it, and I was panicking.
Speaker 2: And then above me, to my left suddenly appeared my
Speaker 2: dead father. He'd been dead eight years and he was
Speaker 2: there in this just energy form, like it wasn't even
Speaker 2: quite vision that I used to perceive him, like, it
Speaker 2: was a sense that I it was a sense that's
Speaker 2: not familiar to me. But it was absolutely like, Oh,
Speaker 2: there's my dad, Like what is he doing? He was
Speaker 2: very benevolent and he was communicating with me. He was
Speaker 2: hovering right above me, and he was communicating with me basically,
Speaker 2: you don't have to fight it, you can come with me.
Speaker 2: I'll take care of you. He was very very paternal
Speaker 2: and loving and caring, and you know he was so
Speaker 2: he was a physicist, he was, I realized later on
Speaker 2: the spectrum he was not a particularly emotional person. Right
Speaker 2: like I loved him, but my connection to him was
Speaker 2: not visceral and loving in that in that way that
Speaker 2: he was at that moment, like he was in some
Speaker 2: ways the most loving, sort of viscerally loving thing he'd
Speaker 2: ever done for me. Right in that moment, It's like,
Speaker 2: I'll take care of you. And I was horrified. I
Speaker 2: was like, you're dead, why would I go with you?
Speaker 2: I'm alive. The parties over here, like what are you
Speaker 2: doing here? I mean, I was shocked and horrified, offended,
Speaker 2: almost offended that he would think I would want to
Speaker 2: go with him and not want to stay alive with
Speaker 2: my family. I was really offended. I was like, what
Speaker 2: do you what do you think? And I said to
Speaker 2: the doctor, you got to hurry. I'm going.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask you if you were aware
Speaker 3: that you were conscious or not.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: I was talking to the doctor. And then there was
Speaker 2: my dad and I said said to he was over here,
Speaker 2: I said, you got to hurry. I'm going right now.
Speaker 2: I'm being taken. Oh.
Speaker 1: Did the hole in your dad seem like diametric? They were?
Speaker 2: They they were connected to each other. He was like,
Speaker 2: don't be sort of he didn't say this, but he basically,
Speaker 2: don't be scared of what's happening right now.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't a different directions, no, no, no, well, he
Speaker 1: was there, the pit was above me.
Speaker 2: He was up there. But basically he was saying, you
Speaker 2: don't have to I was fighting going into the hole. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he's like, you don't have to fight it. I'll
Speaker 2: be like, I'll be with you, I'll take care of you.
Speaker 2: It's okay.
Speaker 1: I'll accompany you into them. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they eventual and.
Speaker 1: You're and you're still talking to this doctor.
Speaker 2: Yeah yep. And you know, they couldn't sedate me because
Speaker 2: my vital signs were too low, so everything that they
Speaker 2: did they had to do with me fully conscious. I
Speaker 2: had a little bit of fentanyl, but it didn't didn't
Speaker 2: do anything. I was in a huge amount of pain,
Speaker 2: and they brought me into the Indivendual Radiology Suite. And
Speaker 2: which is this IR is this sort of like magic. Basically,
Speaker 2: like you're on a fluoroscope, which is an X ray
Speaker 2: machine that takes real time video, and they pop a
Speaker 2: hole in your groin and they thread a wire up
Speaker 2: your femoral artery and they can snake it around to
Speaker 2: any part of your body. So instead of if they
Speaker 2: need to put a stint in your orda, they can
Speaker 2: put it in by wire instead of opening your heart
Speaker 2: up right, It's amazing what they can do. And they
Speaker 2: were trying to get the wire to the ruptured artery
Speaker 2: to embolize it, to block it so I would stop bleeding.
Speaker 2: And the alternative to doing that, this is what they
Speaker 2: would have had to do twenty years ago, is like
Speaker 2: cut me open and try to find the bleed before
Speaker 2: I bled out. Right, and the outcomes are terrible for that.
Speaker 2: And if they'd had to do that, they would have
Speaker 2: brought my wife into Sagabye. They told me that later,
Speaker 2: like we would have brought her into say goodbye, because
Speaker 2: you probably wouldn't have made it. So they were trying
Speaker 2: and trying with this wire to thread its way through
Speaker 2: my sort of weird vasculature because the ligament can totally
Speaker 2: contorted all my vasculature when it compensated, right, and they
Speaker 2: couldn't get the wire to the place. And I was
Speaker 2: in the on the fluoroscope for hours, and now it's
Speaker 2: two in the morning, and I remember the doctors giving up, right,
Speaker 2: and I remember them so when I'm shrugging, is like, well,
Speaker 2: we tried, we did everything we could, and now I
Speaker 2: finally realized that I might die, like I didn't know
Speaker 2: it until then.
Speaker 3: And during this they're pumping blood to you and you're
Speaker 3: just bleeding it out.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like, yeah, that's right. And also you
Speaker 2: know you can't just replace blood without consequences, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: you can die from blood loss with a full complement
Speaker 2: of blood in you, but blood from other people, and
Speaker 2: there's a chemical process that gets going when you experience
Speaker 2: extreme blood loss that they can't acidosis and they can't
Speaker 2: get ahead of it, and it will kill you. So
Speaker 2: I I was right at the edge of where that
Speaker 2: process would start, right, and so I was barely hanging on.
Speaker 2: The nurse was there holding my hand, and that human
Speaker 2: contact was so important, I mean literally important for survival. Right.
Speaker 2: You need the doctors that you know the mechanics, but
Speaker 2: you also need some because it's very lonely. Dying is
Speaker 2: being being a patient in a hospital, extremely lonely. Right,
Speaker 2: everyone's mask, there's very bright lights. You don't know what's
Speaker 2: going on. And to this nurse she was holding my hand,
Speaker 2: she was like, breathe with me, It's okay, keep your
Speaker 2: eyes open. I'm right here. And you know, I was
Speaker 2: choosing by like lifeline. And one of the reasons I survived.
Speaker 2: I shouldn't have survived. The doctors didn't think I would
Speaker 2: and they're sort of amazed that I did. But one
Speaker 2: of the reasons I survived was that human connection along
Speaker 2: with amazing medical.
Speaker 4: Did you have a glove on or it was skin?
Speaker 2: I don't remember, it was skin and it was skin. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was just absolutely crucial. And so the I watched
Speaker 2: the doctors give up, and I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to make it. And I thought I
Speaker 2: was just in for belly pain. What's going on? Right?
Speaker 1: I had no idea?
Speaker 2: And then the doctor said, why don't we try going
Speaker 2: through his left wrist? And the other doctor was like, wow,
Speaker 2: I like the way you think that. And so because
Speaker 2: of the wed my weird vasculature, that was a different
Speaker 2: angle of attack that the doc, the IR guy thought
Speaker 2: my work and it did. And he saved my life.
Speaker 2: And you know, he'd been called from dinner an hour
Speaker 2: away and had driven to the hospital to save my life.
Speaker 2: Like I mean, what these doctors do is just amazing.
Speaker 2: Like he was on call and he and uh so
Speaker 2: they brought me up to the ICU. You know, then
Speaker 2: they sedated me, they put me under, and you know,
Speaker 2: I was in this sort of wild darkness for like
Speaker 2: one hundred years or something like. I felt like I
Speaker 2: was gone for a very long time. And then the
Speaker 2: next thing I knew, I heard this really intense Boston
Speaker 2: accent a woman speaking in a So this isn't on
Speaker 2: Cape cod at Massachusetts, right, You all know the Boston
Speaker 2: accent not the loveliest accent on the planet.
Speaker 5: Right, pretty harsh you said that, yeah, us, Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: pretty harsh, pretty harsh, pretty harsh accent, right, and just
Speaker 5: this woman speaking a really intense Boston accent. And I'm
Speaker 5: still in my darkness, right, my eyes are closed, Like.
Speaker 2: Where am I? Like there? Probably don't have these accents
Speaker 2: anywhere you want to go later, right, might not.
Speaker 1: Be a good signs getting me. So I.
Speaker 2: Opened my eyes and she said, congratulations, mister younger, you
Speaker 2: made it. You almost died last night. No one thought
Speaker 2: you were going to make it. You're kind of a miracle.
Speaker 2: And I was like, well, that's some straight shooting cout
Speaker 2: right there, right, And I was shocked. I have no
Speaker 2: idea I almost died, right. I was absolutely shocked. It's
Speaker 2: quite traumatic to find that out right, particularly if you
Speaker 2: have young kids. I was absolutely shocked. Then she left
Speaker 2: because she was doing her rounds, and I'm a mess.
Speaker 2: I'm throwing up blood, I got wires coming out all
Speaker 2: over the place. I'm a total mess. But I couldn't
Speaker 2: stop thinking about what she told me. And she came
Speaker 2: back and she said, how you doing. I said, well,
Speaker 2: not that great, actually, Like what you say is terrifying.
Speaker 2: I had no idea. I'd almost died and I can't
Speaker 2: stop thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing
Speaker 2: I think just about anyone has ever said to me.
Speaker 2: She said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like
Speaker 2: something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.
Speaker 1: Then she walked up.
Speaker 2: I later tried to find her, you know, two weeks later,
Speaker 2: to find her, to thank her and ask her what
Speaker 2: did she mean? Because I made my own use of
Speaker 2: that advice. Right, I'm an atheist. The word sacred is
Speaker 2: a very important word to me, and for me, it
Speaker 2: means anything that anything that helps preserve human dignity, Like
Speaker 2: that's a sacred task. It might be a school teacher,
Speaker 2: it might be a shrink, it might be a nurse,
Speaker 2: you know, it might be a minister. Sacred work happens
Speaker 2: in church as well, right, you know, So anything that
Speaker 2: preserves human dignity. And as a journalist, on our best
Speaker 2: days we bring back information that our country, the world
Speaker 2: can use responsibly to help alleviate human suffering. That's a
Speaker 2: sacred job, you know, on our best days, that's like
Speaker 2: sacred work. Right, So I thought, I've been going to
Speaker 2: front lines my whole life. I stopped. After my buddy
Speaker 2: Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate
Speaker 2: front line my own mortality. I was allowed to come back.
Speaker 2: Did I come back with sacred information that would help
Speaker 2: myself and others face the terrifying prospect of our mortality?
Speaker 2: We're all going to face it. Do I have sacred
Speaker 2: information from this? That's the meaning I took, right But
Speaker 2: I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, like
Speaker 2: what did you mean by that? And I couldn't find her.
Speaker 2: And not only could I not find her, no one
Speaker 2: at the hospital in the ICU, no one knew who
Speaker 2: I was talking about. All there is no one here
Speaker 2: by that description, like why did she totally disappeared? And
Speaker 2: she might have been, as you know, I'm not getting
Speaker 2: all woo woo here, like she might have been a
Speaker 2: visiting nurse and just I mean, who knows. But I
Speaker 2: couldn't find her, and it contributed to what afterwards was
Speaker 2: a terrible sense of unreality, Like I worried when I
Speaker 2: finally got home, I started to worry that I had
Speaker 2: died and that I was imagining everything. It was my
Speaker 2: dying hallucination that I actually didn't survive and.
Speaker 3: Did did that moment with your father and the darkness,
Speaker 3: did that like stick with you through that process or
Speaker 3: is that something that you came back to later.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean as soon as this nurse said
Speaker 2: that to me, I remembered my dad. I was like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I saw my father and the pit,
Speaker 2: you know, and I and that stayed with me in
Speaker 2: sort of troubling ways. I mean, so I started researching
Speaker 2: NDEs near death experiences. Right, They're very common. They have
Speaker 2: it all over the world. They're not infinitely varied right there.
Speaker 2: They fall into three or four basic buckets, one of
Speaker 2: them being that you know, the dead show up to
Speaker 2: either tell you to go back or help escort you across.
Speaker 2: And it's very very common as every society in the world.
Speaker 2: It's quite a mystery. And I started researching NDEs and
Speaker 2: there's some pretty good rational explanations rooted in medicine and
Speaker 2: neurochemistry for many of the visions that people have when
Speaker 2: they're on the threshold. I'm a rationalist, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: all right, that that sort of makes sense. I get
Speaker 2: at the tunnel, the out of body experience. You can
Speaker 2: do that with drugs, you can do that in a
Speaker 2: human center views like fighter pilots undergo. You know, there's
Speaker 2: way The one thing that didn't quite make sense to
Speaker 2: me is the consistency of the vision. Right, so the
Speaker 2: many many people see the dead when they're dying in
Speaker 2: hospice in ers, and like, I mean, it's a really
Speaker 2: really common thing. And you know, if you give a
Speaker 2: room full of people LSD, they will all hallucinate. There's
Speaker 2: no mystery there. The chemistry of that is well known,
Speaker 2: but they won't all hallucinate the same thing. What's odd
Speaker 2: about dying is the consistency of the hallucinations that they
Speaker 2: involve the dead, even people that don't know they're dying,
Speaker 2: even people who don't like the dead person who showed up. Right,
Speaker 2: it's not a comforting vision necessarily. And that's the only
Speaker 2: part of this that really made me sort of wonder,
Speaker 2: like do we really understand anything about reality? And you know,
Speaker 2: I started I went into quantum physics to try to
Speaker 2: sort of understand, like, maybe the problem is that we
Speaker 2: think we live on a flat earth and it's actually
Speaker 2: a globe. You know, Maybe the problem is this boundary
Speaker 2: between life and death that we assume is absolute, maybe
Speaker 2: it actually isn't the boundary we think it is. And
Speaker 2: you know, I hate the word after life. I think
Speaker 2: it's a misnomer and misleading. But there might be at
Speaker 2: some sort of quantum level a reality that we don't understand,
Speaker 2: involving consciousness and life and death and time and all
Speaker 2: these sort of basic components of the universe. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm an atheist with questions, which is a huge step
Speaker 2: for an atheist or for a person of faith. Also,
Speaker 2: you know, if you're a person of faith and have questions,
Speaker 2: that's also a huge step in the right direction.
Speaker 1: There's this guy I knew that wrote me an email
Speaker 1: one time, and he had had He was tipping over
Speaker 1: a tree. Here we are chainsaws and trees. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was tipping over a tree and the wind picked up
Speaker 1: and he lives okay, And all of a sudden, she
Speaker 1: was going away. He didn't anticipate, and he tripped and
Speaker 1: fell and the tree landed on him. But he was
Speaker 1: in just enough of a depression where the tree didn't
Speaker 1: kill him, but it messled him. So he had a
Speaker 1: thing like you just mentioned. He later went back a
Speaker 1: few days later. He describes going back and looking into
Speaker 1: that hole. Yeah, he's in such a weird state mentally
Speaker 1: that he went back looking in that hole, half thinking
Speaker 1: that he would see himself in that hole. And he
Speaker 1: was so tripped up that he did what you said
Speaker 1: where he's like, maybe I did die, Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: I'm in a weird spot. And he went to look
Speaker 1: yeah and weird like he was in. It got that
Speaker 1: weird for him over those next few days.
Speaker 2: You know, it's I didn't know this, but it's really common.
Speaker 2: I talked to a woman who was rear ended by
Speaker 2: a truck at a red light and medically was hurt
Speaker 2: a little bit. It wasn't didn't have an NDE, but
Speaker 2: after that she was just plagued with the fear that
Speaker 2: she had died in the accident and didn't know it.
Speaker 2: She was in limbo and eventually would find it. And
Speaker 2: so I had to say I had the same problem.
Speaker 2: And part of my part of my problem was that.
Speaker 2: And this is and I'm not woo woo, I'm really
Speaker 2: not a mystic. I mean, I'm I really am a rationalist, right,
Speaker 2: but our rationality doesn't understand everything. And this is that's
Speaker 2: where I have questions. But so the dawn of the
Speaker 2: day before, right right before dawn that we could my
Speaker 2: family and I co sleep, right, So my wife and
Speaker 2: I am are little girls sleep in the same you
Speaker 2: know area on the pad on the big pad on
Speaker 2: the floor. It's like we're camping basically, except at home. Right,
Speaker 2: it's very very nice. And I had a dream that
Speaker 2: I didn't know was a dream but at the time,
Speaker 2: but I had a dream that my family was below me,
Speaker 2: my wife, my little two little girls, and they were crying.
Speaker 2: They're crying about me, and I was waving. I was like,
Speaker 2: I'm right here, it's okay. I'm like and they didn't
Speaker 2: couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me, and I was
Speaker 2: I was floating above them, and I was made and
Speaker 2: I was in this sort of darkness looking down at them,
Speaker 2: and I was made to understand that they couldn't see
Speaker 2: me or hear me because I was dead. I was
Speaker 2: a spirit. I had died, and that I was headed
Speaker 2: out and there was no going back and that's it.
Speaker 2: And I woke up in a panic. I mean I
Speaker 2: woke up and then it was shocked to realize that
Speaker 2: I wasn't dead. I mean, that's how real the dream was, right,
Speaker 2: And God, that was just a dream, and I was
Speaker 2: really shaken, and thirty six hours later it started, I
Speaker 2: started dying. Right. So, when I started researching NDEs, another
Speaker 2: common ende is that you're floating above the doctors, above
Speaker 2: your body, above your fans.
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask about that, the bright light and
Speaker 1: the floating.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I started researching NDEs, and again, you know,
Speaker 2: like the rationalist explanations for most of it, I kind
Speaker 2: of buy, right, And what are they?
Speaker 1: Oh that?
Speaker 2: You know, it's the brain is being traumatized by low
Speaker 2: blood oxygen and it releases endoor fins and you can hallucin,
Speaker 2: you know, brains hallucinate during times of stress. I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, there's all these just sort of sort of
Speaker 2: neurochemical explanations that do a pretty good job at explaining
Speaker 2: most of the phenomena of NDEs. Not the visions of
Speaker 2: the dead, the specificity of that can't be explained by
Speaker 2: low blood oxygen. Right, and only the dying seemed to
Speaker 2: see the dead. And but another common experience is sort
Speaker 2: of floating above your loved ones. Right, And so I
Speaker 2: was seized by this fear. Oh my god, maybe I
Speaker 2: died in my sleep. Maybe the rest of it is
Speaker 2: a dying hallucination, the trip to the hospital, the return home,
Speaker 2: the tearful reunion with my children, my reading a you know,
Speaker 2: a story to my to my daughter who's on my
Speaker 2: lap right at this moment. Maybe it's all a hallucination.
Speaker 2: I actually died in my sleep and my wife woke
Speaker 2: up next to her dead husband, Right, How would I
Speaker 2: know that's not true? Right? So it's really really this.
Speaker 2: It's called derealization. It's really really common with people who
Speaker 2: have almost died, either for medical reasons or from a
Speaker 2: near you know, a near miss, like your like your friend.
Speaker 2: And so I got pretty crazy, right, I really started.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma
Speaker 2: is anxiety and panic, and another is depression. And I
Speaker 2: actually went through those phases, a classic trauma reaction, but
Speaker 2: I didn't know at the time. At the time, I thought,
Speaker 2: oh my god, it's been revealed. The word apocalypse means
Speaker 2: the revealing of all things. Right, as I've gone, I've
Speaker 2: experienced the apocalypse. I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing
Speaker 2: of what reality actually is. It's actually I'm we're not here,
Speaker 2: you know, Like, I really got crazy, And at one
Speaker 2: point I went up to my poor wife. Her name
Speaker 2: is Barbara. I said, honey, just can you just tell
Speaker 2: me that you see me? No spouse wants to hear this, right,
Speaker 2: Can you just tell me that you see me, that
Speaker 2: I'm right in front of you, that I survived, Like,
Speaker 2: just tell me that that I'm here. And she's like, yes, sweetheart,
Speaker 2: you're here, I see you. You survived for the last time.
Speaker 2: You're fine.
Speaker 1: Can you please take the garbage? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Can you please say exactly how about them dishes? Right?
Speaker 2: But in my mind I was like, that's exactly what
Speaker 2: a hallucination would tell you to maintain the hallucination. I
Speaker 2: didn't believe it. And she eventually said to me and
Speaker 2: another very profound like this nurse, like incredibly profound thing.
Speaker 2: She said, Okay, Sebastian, do you feel lucky? You're unlucky
Speaker 2: that this happened to you? Right? Not that you survived,
Speaker 2: of course, you're lucky to survive, But if you could
Speaker 2: push a button and have none of it have happened,
Speaker 2: would you push that button? And I know what she
Speaker 2: was talking about, because, on the one hand, yourself sort
Speaker 2: of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead or
Speaker 2: the reality doesn't exist, or would all these existential epistemological
Speaker 2: sort of terrors. Right. On the other hand, I was
Speaker 2: sort of allowed to look over the final precipice and
Speaker 2: return home. I had a special trip, right, like when
Speaker 2: I was granted special access, I didn't have to pay
Speaker 2: with my life. I was allowed to come back and like,
Speaker 2: was I lucky or unlucky? And I couldn't answer. I
Speaker 2: didn't know, And it really torment me that I couldn't
Speaker 2: answer that question. And I finally answered it by putting
Speaker 2: it in more sort of mythological terms. I was like,
Speaker 2: all right, she's really saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right?
Speaker 2: And often when I'm at a sort of dead end
Speaker 2: in my work, I will look up the etymology the
Speaker 2: origins of the important words in the topic that I'm researching,
Speaker 2: to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what
Speaker 2: significance they attached to these words.
Speaker 1: So they're give me an example, what you mean.
Speaker 2: Uh, well, I will right now. I will right now
Speaker 2: with the word blessing. So the word curse, curse, no
Speaker 2: one knows what his origin is. It's a total blank, Like,
Speaker 2: nobody knows there's no known origin for the word curse.
Speaker 2: But blessed. Yeah, but blessing. There's some theories that is
Speaker 2: really to the word course, like a course that you're
Speaker 2: on that you can't deviate from. There's some theories, but
Speaker 2: no one knows. With blessing, they do know what the
Speaker 2: origin is and from the Anglo Saxon word bletson, which
Speaker 2: means blood, and the idea was that there is no
Speaker 2: blessing without a wounding, that the shedding of blood actually
Speaker 2: confers the blessing. Right, So battlefields are sacred because blood
Speaker 2: was shed on them, childbirth is sacred because blood blood
Speaker 2: is lost. And they think it might date back to
Speaker 2: the pre Christian rituals of animal sacrifice where you kill
Speaker 2: the sheep or whatever, and the spilling of the sheep's
Speaker 2: blood is what makes that moment and that place sacred.
Speaker 2: And so it's suddenly I got it. I was like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's not that, it's always they're twin. Blessed and cursed
Speaker 2: are twin. They're part of the same thing, right, And see,
Speaker 2: you actually it's a false question. You don't choose, You
Speaker 2: don't even get to choose. If you're blessed, you're also cursed.
Speaker 2: If you're cursed, you might also be blessed. And the
Speaker 2: story of Jacob actually goes right back to that. He's
Speaker 2: crippled by he wrestles with God and is crippled by God,
Speaker 2: but also blessed like God bleod unjo his hip and
Speaker 2: cripples him for life and blesses him at the same time.
Speaker 2: And so it's a very ancient human human thought and
Speaker 2: that just believed me for some reason and helped relieve
Speaker 2: me of this sort of like unanswerable terror.
Speaker 1: If you might go so in the next twenty years,
Speaker 1: this is gonna happen again sometime, maybe.
Speaker 2: More of the aneurysm.
Speaker 1: I no know that you're gonna die.
Speaker 2: Oh they're gonna die? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, are you h How did this shape your yeah?
Speaker 1: How did this shape your awareness that you'll have that
Speaker 1: you'll do this again? You know, you'll like you'll you'll
Speaker 1: have another moment and maybe there will be the hole
Speaker 1: in your dad.
Speaker 2: You know. You know, if if part of my unconsciously,
Speaker 2: I think part of my horror at you know, if
Speaker 2: I was if I was in a lot of pain
Speaker 2: and dying of cancer, I think my dad would have
Speaker 2: been a blessing and a relief to see and I
Speaker 2: would have thrown my arms around. I'm like, please take
Speaker 2: me away from my pain racked body. I'm done right,
Speaker 2: thank you. And one of the problems was that I
Speaker 2: was in the midst of my life. I had young children,
Speaker 2: and being taken away felt unimaginably tragic. And so if
Speaker 2: I live long enough that my girls are okay on
Speaker 2: their own, that my wife is not left as a
Speaker 2: single mom, that everything's okay. You know, I'm going to
Speaker 2: miss them, but you know, but I'll be at peace
Speaker 2: with it. You're not you know, you leave children behind.
Speaker 2: You're not a piece. I mean you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: like you you're a dad, I mean, imagine, right, Like so.
Speaker 1: It's the worst thought.
Speaker 2: It's the worst thought is and that I'm going and
Speaker 2: I won't be around to protect them if they need
Speaker 2: it and to love them when they need it. And
Speaker 2: it's unthinkable, right, And so it's the point of my
Speaker 2: I'm an older dad. My first daughter was born when
Speaker 2: I was fifty five. Being a dad is what I'm doing, right,
Speaker 2: I'm not doing you know, I write books as I
Speaker 2: need to make a living. I could care less. Right,
Speaker 2: being a dad is what I'm doing. It's the center
Speaker 2: of my identity. My existence and if I can get
Speaker 2: through to where they're okay, like, you know, I'm good.
Speaker 1: In your research, what did you turn up about that
Speaker 1: that feeling of your life? People that have that, they'd
Speaker 1: say their life passed before their eyes. What's going on there?
Speaker 2: Well, again, you know, we don't know the answers of
Speaker 2: these things, but on a sort of neurochemical level, the
Speaker 2: brain gets very active when you're dying. And and they've
Speaker 2: they've had they've actually monitored people's brains while they were
Speaker 2: dying because they had to for other medical reasons. They
Speaker 2: need to know what was going on with the brain.
Speaker 2: And they were actually able to watch the gamma rays
Speaker 2: and the different gamma waves and the different waves in
Speaker 2: the brain that like are part of consciousness. They got
Speaker 2: to watch them change around the moment of death. And
Speaker 2: one of the things that happens as you die is
Speaker 2: that the parts of the brain that are engaged in
Speaker 2: memory activate when you die, right, So you you know,
Speaker 2: like when you're dreaming, like you can have a dream
Speaker 2: that feels like it takes you know, ten minutes, right,
Speaker 2: And they know that those you know, supposedly ten minute
Speaker 2: dreams happen in seconds, right, So one of the things
Speaker 2: that might be happening when and this is in the
Speaker 2: neurochemical part side of the explanation for what for NDEs.
Speaker 2: One of the things that might be happening is that
Speaker 2: equivalent to a dream that you have an experience of
Speaker 2: a long you know, vast amount of time and a
Speaker 2: vast sort of perspective, right, you're seeing all of life
Speaker 2: in one moment, the kind of overarching knowledge that you
Speaker 2: can have with dreams, Like in dreams you you sort
Speaker 2: of understand things that you can't understand, you know, there's
Speaker 2: this sort of all encompassing knowledge sometimes. So that might
Speaker 2: be what's going on with that. And let me just
Speaker 2: say that there could be neuro perfectly good neurochemical explanations
Speaker 2: for NDEs, and also a part of NDEs which neurochemistry
Speaker 2: can't explain that do tie into some basic question about
Speaker 2: quantum physics and what is reality? What is consciousness? I mean,
Speaker 2: the quantum physicist of one hundred years ago realized that
Speaker 2: conscious observation changes quantum reality, like if you observe quantum reality,
Speaker 2: if a conscious observers observes quantum reality, it changes it.
Speaker 2: And so the obvious question is does consciousness in the universe,
Speaker 2: human and other otherwise, does consciousness in the universe create
Speaker 2: the universe that that consciousness then exists in, right? I
Speaker 2: mean it's a profound question. So when you're talking on
Speaker 2: those terms, the idea that the consciousness that you enjoy
Speaker 2: as when you're alive, that there's some other version of
Speaker 2: it that continues on as part of the universe, a
Speaker 2: kind of universal consciousness continues on after you die. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not an insane question, right, It's a legitimate question.
Speaker 1: You get it like this stuff. You know I was
Speaker 1: saying earlier about if I don't understand something, I try
Speaker 1: to ask. I know I can't because I know that
Speaker 1: I can't understand quantum mechanics quantum physics. But uh, there's
Speaker 1: a thing that there's a trippy thing like if if everything,
Speaker 1: if everything in the universe, like if everything's electro chemical
Speaker 1: with life, it's all electro chemical, you get into this
Speaker 1: problem where there cannot be free will, right, like if
Speaker 1: everything is happens according to physics, and you go like,
Speaker 1: well life is electro chemical, right, right, there's no room
Speaker 1: then like then someone then a really good person who's
Speaker 1: really good at predictive modeling, would be able to you'd
Speaker 1: be able to like run all of it and predict
Speaker 1: the future because everything is electro chemical, everything conforms to physics,
Speaker 1: you know, So when you get lots of it's just
Speaker 1: like it's kind of when you say, sitting there and
Speaker 1: you're looking outer space and you're like, even if there
Speaker 1: was like a big brick wall out there, there's shit
Speaker 1: on the other side of the brick wall.
Speaker 2: Well, the sort of the sort of like joker card
Speaker 2: in the deck, there is consciousness is scientists don't understand.
Speaker 2: They can't even define what it is, right, there's the
Speaker 2: definition is something around the ability to think about itself
Speaker 2: right or self reflective, but they don't have a good
Speaker 2: explanation or a good definition of it. And they have
Speaker 2: no explanation for it, right, and the exp you know,
Speaker 2: the fact that consciousness can can determine outcomes in the
Speaker 2: physical world simply because it is exists and is observing that.
Speaker 2: You know that. So basically, if that's possible, all bets
Speaker 2: are out, all bets are off sort of right, So
Speaker 2: you're right in a purely mechanistic universe, But how do
Speaker 2: you fit consciousness into a mechanistic universe? And it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be it. Consciousness resides in the brain, which
Speaker 2: is a sort of electrical chemical like process, but it
Speaker 2: doesn't itself have it's not itself manifested physically consciousness itself, right,
Speaker 2: but it can affect the physical world in profound ways,
Speaker 2: at least at the quantum level. So, and let me
Speaker 2: just say, you don't understand quantum physics. Neither do quantum physicists. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: I mean that's the great mystery. Like, you know, what
Speaker 2: they've shown is that things happen in the quantum world
Speaker 2: that sort of don't make sense in the macroscopic world, right,
Speaker 2: But it doesn't mean they can't explain why, right, And
Speaker 2: and for that matter, they can't explain why there's a universe.
Speaker 2: I mean, there really shouldn't be a universe, and you know,
Speaker 2: the universe basically religion and physics are. They're closer than
Speaker 2: you might think. So when religion, you have to believe
Speaker 2: that God is self creating. Otherwise you're stuck with, oh, well,
Speaker 2: someone created God, why aren't we worshiping that entity? Right?
Speaker 2: Like it, God has to be self creating. From that
Speaker 2: point onwards, it all works fine if you just take
Speaker 2: that leap like work with me here Gods self creating,
Speaker 2: and then from now on where we was believing that God,
Speaker 2: we're all good. Right, Quantum physics is the same or
Speaker 2: physics is the same way in some ways, like the
Speaker 2: universe is self creating. After that we can explain everything. Right,
Speaker 2: So there's a similar act of faith, this this leap
Speaker 2: that both have to take. I'm not saying that they're
Speaker 2: intellectually equivalent. I think religion is a story and physics
Speaker 2: is an attempt at an explanation, and stories and explanations
Speaker 2: are very very different beasts, right, but on some level
Speaker 2: they both required active faith that is probably beyond human comprehension.
Speaker 3: When you when you finished the book, did you end
Speaker 3: that process with like like, did you have your did
Speaker 3: you now have your like your own understanding or your
Speaker 3: own ideas of stuff or where you're just like, man,
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'd still well, of course I don't know, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm like, yeah, I did you feel better? More like yeah.
Speaker 2: So there's this idea about consciousness affecting the physical world
Speaker 2: at a macroscopic level. I mean, so one of the
Speaker 2: proposals is that consciousness, like gravity, is essential to the
Speaker 2: physical reality of the universe. I mean, it suffuses the
Speaker 2: entire thing. It's not visible, but it makes the entire
Speaker 2: thing possible. Without gravity, there wouldn't be a universe, there
Speaker 2: wouldn't be planets, there wouldn't be anything, right, magnetism. Likewise,
Speaker 2: these sort of like invisible forces. And you know, we
Speaker 2: get used to the idea of gravity. But if you
Speaker 2: didn't know anything and someone said to you, you know what,
Speaker 2: there's this invisible force, and the closer two objects are
Speaker 2: to each other, the stronger the force is. And if
Speaker 2: you throw a rock out a window, like, why wouldn't
Speaker 2: it float in mid era? Right? It doesn't because of
Speaker 2: this invisible force called gravity, and it exists throughout the
Speaker 2: universe and we don't know why. Right. That would sound
Speaker 2: like the rantings of a schizophrenic, Right, I'm sorry. Likewise,
Speaker 2: with conscious and there's a sort of serious proposal that
Speaker 2: consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe
Speaker 2: like gravity is, and that our individual consciousness returns to
Speaker 2: that great, greater entity when we die, and it's you know,
Speaker 2: you can't prove it or disprove it. It's a sort
Speaker 2: of pleasing theory for me as an atheist. It gave
Speaker 2: me a sort of slightly more comfortable place rather than
Speaker 2: the just pure nihilism of where a bunch of salism
Speaker 2: when we die, we're done. I also don't want to
Speaker 2: have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now
Speaker 2: for eternity, like thank you no, right, like they I
Speaker 2: had a moment of.
Speaker 4: Panic earlier in this conversation starting to contemplate that possibility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's like, careful what you ask for, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, eighty years is a long time,
Speaker 2: and we can sort of limp through it at the end, thinking,
Speaker 2: thank God, there's a finish line here in some ways, right,
Speaker 2: we'd imagine eternity and eternity of conscience. I mean, just
Speaker 2: you remember what math class felt like in fifth grade? Like,
Speaker 2: imagine that for eternity, right, Like just well never ends
Speaker 2: like that. That's where I don't quite get about people
Speaker 2: of faith wanting an afterlife. I think they want to
Speaker 2: see their loved ones, is what's going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let me hate you. Another one that used to
Speaker 1: that troubled me for a while. I had a scary
Speaker 1: thing happened one time, and and I had that feeling
Speaker 1: of things. I had that feeling of of my focus
Speaker 1: becoming singular, and in reading about why that was like
Speaker 1: a feeling of like slowing down. Things slow down. And
Speaker 1: then I was intensely focused on a thing, and I
Speaker 1: was reading about that people in people in traumatic experiences,
Speaker 1: people near and experiences. It's not so much near death experiences,
Speaker 1: but people in proximity to that that there's like two paths.
Speaker 1: And the example that I read about one day was
Speaker 1: that there's a there's an explosion, okay, and there's chaos.
Speaker 1: Some people can be in that moment and they there's
Speaker 1: an arm on the ground. The only thing they see
Speaker 1: is the arm on the ground, and it's they just
Speaker 1: get lost in like a sort of timeless consideration of
Speaker 1: the arm on the ground. There's people that all they
Speaker 1: see is everything right, it's utter chaos, nothing makes sense.
Speaker 1: And then there's people that are like that guy needs help, right,
Speaker 1: that's happening, that's gonna fall right, And in certain disciplines,
Speaker 1: they're looking for the people that don't have those And
Speaker 1: your and your experiences in war and your experience with
Speaker 1: the with with death, like, have you have you ever
Speaker 1: grappled with that or did you find any of that
Speaker 1: in your research about these different these different sort of
Speaker 1: responses people have.
Speaker 2: I mean I've had. I think we're all capable of
Speaker 2: all of them. I don't think there are you know,
Speaker 2: like rigid categories where some people do this, some people
Speaker 2: do that. You know, it partly partly depends on how
Speaker 2: much preparation you have. And you know, one of the
Speaker 2: things they do when they train environment and they train
Speaker 2: soldiers what have you is they just get them to
Speaker 2: rehearse and practice the actions they'll need to take in
Speaker 2: a crisis moment over and over and over again, so
Speaker 2: that you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out airplanes.
Speaker 2: You know that, you know, they got that muscle memory
Speaker 2: of whatever they do, you know, count to count to
Speaker 2: five and whatever, you know, whatever it is like, they
Speaker 2: get that muscle memory down, so that doesn't depend on deliberate,
Speaker 2: deliberate thought. And so there's a lot of tactics in
Speaker 2: combat that are somewhat formulaic, like football is, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: there's this sort of team team coordination that doesn't have
Speaker 2: to be thought about in detail in order to be enacted.
Speaker 2: And if you have no training like that, your brain
Speaker 2: hasn't been properly formatted for that kind of situation and
Speaker 2: it's scrambling to get enough information to make a good decision,
Speaker 2: and then of course people go into shock. And so
Speaker 2: I've had all I have. I've had all of them.
Speaker 2: I mean one time we got hit very when I
Speaker 2: was with American soldiers. We got hit very unexpectedly, very hard,
Speaker 2: and I, for I don't know, about twenty seconds, I
Speaker 2: was frozen, like I just couldn't move right. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's bullets hit in the ground around like, and then
Speaker 2: I snapped out of it. And that was hyper functional.
Speaker 2: Other times I've.
Speaker 1: I in that twenty seconds, where were you mentally? Were
Speaker 1: you on an object or like, like what was your phone?
Speaker 2: It was it was a blur, right, and I couldn't
Speaker 2: keep up with the blur. So I couldn't make good
Speaker 2: decisions because it was like this jumbled blur. And my
Speaker 2: buddy Tim was behind a Hesco barrier and we were
Speaker 2: taking a huge amount of fire and one of the
Speaker 2: problems was I didn't have my camera and my bulletproof vest.
Speaker 2: If you're in a situation and you have a job
Speaker 2: to do, you're a medic, you're a journalist, you're a soldier,
Speaker 2: you're a parent with a child, who's indeed, you know,
Speaker 2: whatever it is you had job to do, like that's
Speaker 2: a refuge from your fear. The job you have to
Speaker 2: do provides a shelter from your own feelings of fear
Speaker 2: and self concern. If you have no job to do
Speaker 2: because you're not holding your camera, you know, your fear
Speaker 2: just moves in and sets up camp. Right, And so
Speaker 2: Tim threw across you know, we we were this far away,
Speaker 2: like between me and you, like five feet. We couldn't
Speaker 2: there was too much gunfire to He threw me my
Speaker 2: bulletproof vest and my camera. And as soon as I
Speaker 2: was like geared up, boom, I was good. Huh right yeah,
Speaker 2: And and so it gives you insight into how soldiers
Speaker 2: perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they
Speaker 2: got it, you know, they got the gear, the tools
Speaker 2: they need. They have something they have to do. They're
Speaker 2: not thinking about their own fear because they are charged
Speaker 2: with such responsibility for their for each other. And and
Speaker 2: and it looks from the outside it looks like bravery. Actually,
Speaker 2: those roles that soldiers play in combat are a very
Speaker 2: powerful protection from fear. To understand, you don't have to
Speaker 2: overcome fear to do them. They are a protection from
Speaker 2: the fear, as would be true if I mean, I
Speaker 2: find grizzly bear is absolutely terrifying. Right, if my child
Speaker 2: was in danger from a grizzly bear, I don't think
Speaker 2: I would find the grizzly bear terrifying. I would try
Speaker 2: to distract it, you know what I mean, like totally
Speaker 2: changes that fear equation.
Speaker 1: I was with my fire one of my buddies who
Speaker 1: was a firefighter yesterday and this kind of seems random,
Speaker 1: but we're looking like we're looking at this thing in
Speaker 1: my yard, and there's a big cobweb, okay, And I
Speaker 1: wanted to clean this trough out. And I was saying
Speaker 1: that I was gonna have my kids do it, but
Speaker 1: my daughter that I've come to respect my daughter's hatred
Speaker 1: of spiders, and I'm like, it's her. I was like, dude,
Speaker 1: you could hand my daughter anything on the planet. She's
Speaker 1: gonna grab it if I said to grab it, unless
Speaker 1: it's got a cobweb on it. And he said, he says,
Speaker 1: for me, as eyeballs, that's that seems avoidable. Not my
Speaker 1: line of word.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you know I can see, yeah, and one
Speaker 2: one traumatic incident. Yeah, and then it's locked in eyeballs like, no,
Speaker 2: thank you. I mean, I'm an I have a racknophobia
Speaker 2: since I was a young child. I sympathized with your daughter.
Speaker 2: I mean I remember at one point I was sort
Speaker 2: of joking around. I said to my wife, listen, I'll
Speaker 2: protect you and the family from anything, grizzly bears, home intruders, whatever,
Speaker 2: anything except except spiders. Like we're camping in the Southwest
Speaker 2: and there's a transla it's yours, Like, I'm not doing it.
Speaker 2: And you can tell it's a phobia because someone people
Speaker 2: with phobia phobias have trouble even looking at a photograph
Speaker 2: of the thing you're scared of, right, I.
Speaker 1: Know, I've tested it out. I was skeptical. I've tested
Speaker 1: it out. It's legit.
Speaker 2: It's legit.
Speaker 1: I've come to accept it. Yeah, I used to be like,
Speaker 1: give me a break.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, it's and it has nothing to do with
Speaker 2: the danger that's posed. Right, And that's where the photo
Speaker 2: comes in. You can't even look at a photo. It's
Speaker 2: a really deep suited, a deep seated panic reaction. You can't.
Speaker 2: You can't just turn it off.
Speaker 1: What's interesting about it is she has incredible detection skills
Speaker 1: like I wish she was afraid of deer. She'll come
Speaker 1: in the room, like if she walked in this room
Speaker 1: and there's a spider like you know somewhere, Yeah on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely looks a great skill. Oh totally, but just applied
Speaker 1: to something I'm not interested in.
Speaker 4: Well, if she was in the tribe, that would be
Speaker 4: her job, spider, you our own little Yeah, what are
Speaker 4: you gonna work on next?
Speaker 2: I don't know?
Speaker 1: Are you searching a little bit?
Speaker 2: I mean this? You know this this book felt felt
Speaker 2: like I sort of capstone of my career. You know,
Speaker 2: I'm sixty three, and it's about such an ultimate question,
Speaker 2: uh that it was hard to think about something. You know,
Speaker 2: then what's next after writing about what you know?
Speaker 1: Life?
Speaker 2: You know, like, what are you gonna do?
Speaker 1: Well, you can write a book about what you ought
Speaker 1: to have done different? Right?
Speaker 2: So so I don't know, I'm you know, I'm I'm.
Speaker 2: I've spent a lot of time as a as a dad,
Speaker 2: as a parent, and my wife had stin pretty made
Speaker 2: a surgery less fall. So we've been sort of in
Speaker 2: a follow period because of that as well. She's coming
Speaker 2: out of it, so you know, something going to work
Speaker 2: on something I don't. I don't know quite what yet,
Speaker 2: but you might wrap it up. No, I love writing.
Speaker 2: I mean it's like you know, I'm I love running.
Speaker 2: You know, I don't run races anymore, but I love
Speaker 2: the act of running. So I still run, and I
Speaker 2: love the act of writing like it's just it's it's
Speaker 2: one of my one of the most powerful experiences I've
Speaker 2: ever had.
Speaker 1: And you like the act of it. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: it doing it, doing it, doing it. I only like
Speaker 1: having done it.
Speaker 2: Right. We all other people to treat running like that, right.
Speaker 2: I don't like doing it, but I love it afterwards, right,
Speaker 2: And uh no, I love it. It's it's a a
Speaker 2: higher state of mind for me doing it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, h good for you.
Speaker 2: Not always, not always, but when it's when it's good.
Speaker 2: You know, musicians say the same thing, right, you know,
Speaker 2: when they're really.
Speaker 1: Fun fun Man's well for me.
Speaker 2: For me, it's a kind of music, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: the sentences have to have cadence, to have to rhythm,
Speaker 2: and they got you know, like there's a lot of
Speaker 2: musical components for me to the experience of writing.
Speaker 1: The writer Ian Fraser, Yeah, yeah, he once told me that,
Speaker 1: you know, he wrote a lot of humor. He was
Speaker 1: a humorist. I mean some of his stuff is very
Speaker 1: I mean he wrote about Stalin and you know, the programs.
Speaker 1: But uh, he also wrote a lot of humor. And
Speaker 1: he said when he wanted to be a writer, when
Speaker 1: he was young and he wanted to be a writer,
Speaker 1: he always imagined a writer sitting at his typewriter chuckling
Speaker 1: to himself in that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, right.
Speaker 1: You know who's got an interesting philosophy about Like you're
Speaker 1: talking about whether you'll do another one. I don't know.
Speaker 1: If you're a Quentin Tarantino fan, I am sure so
Speaker 1: very much. So. I don't know if he'll stay true
Speaker 1: to it. But he has said for a long time
Speaker 1: I will make ten movies. I've made nine. Wow, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that we'll see.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, turned into a washed up director.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm like skeptical. Yeah, he's he's gonna do
Speaker 1: ten and then but right, yeah, I mean it's hard
Speaker 1: to picture the end, man, but it all ties into
Speaker 1: that mortality ship, you know.
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to write a book just because
Speaker 2: I should write a book, Like it has to be
Speaker 2: a topic that I find so compelling that I can't not, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's that's what That's what it has to feel like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, David Grant, you know, the writer David Grant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: of course he when he was on. He came on
Speaker 1: recently after finishing The Wager, and I just sounded interesting.
Speaker 1: He was like actively searching, right, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But he was hunting for a topic, right, right, which
Speaker 1: is cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a different way to do it. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's you know, it's I feel like it kind of
Speaker 2: has to come to you, like falling in love. If
Speaker 2: you're actively looking for your your wife out there, like
Speaker 2: you may not you may not find her, you know,
Speaker 2: you may not recognize like, and I feel like it's
Speaker 2: a little bit like that, like if you're if you're
Speaker 2: trying trying too hard at it, like you won't see
Speaker 2: the essential things that you need, the essential qualities that
Speaker 2: you need in that thing, you won't you might not
Speaker 2: see them, you know. And I feel like it's and
Speaker 2: you know, I feel that way about God as well.
Speaker 2: Like sometimes people are like, are you kidding, You're still
Speaker 2: an atheist? You haven't found God. I'm like, look, God
Speaker 2: has to find me, right, I mean, if I'm making
Speaker 2: a decision to believe in God. It's a decision and
Speaker 2: it doesn't have much content to it, right, Like.
Speaker 1: I'm not understand what you mean.
Speaker 2: Well, God, my understanding about faith is that it's an
Speaker 2: overwhelming feeling of love and connection.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So it's like, if you're just deciding to marry Susie,
Speaker 2: you might not be in love with Susie. Right, It's
Speaker 2: a it's a higher level decision about something you want
Speaker 2: to have in your life. Fine, no problem, right, but
Speaker 2: that's not I'm not sure that that's love. Right, And likewise,
Speaker 2: a higher level of decision to Oh, now I'm going
Speaker 2: to believe in God. I was. I was mortally terrified.
Speaker 2: I almost died. Now I'm going to believe in God
Speaker 2: just to just to be on the safe side, because
Speaker 2: you know, maybe maybe He gave me a break. That
Speaker 2: isn't what religion really should be about. Religion should be
Speaker 2: about an overwhelming feeling of connection and love, and that
Speaker 2: like love for another person, I think it has to
Speaker 2: find you if you're out seeking it.
Speaker 1: I understand you understand what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: So, like, if somehow God came to me in some
Speaker 2: form and overwhelmed me in a moment with a profound
Speaker 2: feeling of connection. I'd be like, Okay, you convinced me.
Speaker 2: I got it right. I wasn't looking for you, you
Speaker 2: found me. I'm all yours like war do you got
Speaker 2: to say? I'll listen.
Speaker 1: We just released this. It wasn't our project in this room,
Speaker 1: but one of our guys on our at work had
Speaker 1: this episode that he made. He does these kind of
Speaker 1: mini documentaries, audio documentaries, you know, so what hell, what's
Speaker 1: the word I'm looking for? What's an audio documentary podcast?
Speaker 2: I know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but no, maybe you could have a podcast. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just like a distribution platform, right whatever, You're right,
Speaker 1: it's like a documentary. He I was tuning his bit
Speaker 1: on this guy and the guy has what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: The guy has an epiphany in a moment and was
Speaker 1: an addict, you know, right, and he describes like where
Speaker 1: he's standing on what day, what was happening, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, like all was made clear, right and
Speaker 1: dropped his addictions. Yeah, committed himself to his wife, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean. And it was like he had
Speaker 1: like an epiphany. Well that's like he got overwhelmed, right,
Speaker 1: and that's that's very powerful. I mean For me, I
Speaker 1: would need evidence to believe in God.
Speaker 2: I need evidence of God, right like I believe in gravity,
Speaker 2: because there's evidence that gravity. You know, throw a rock
Speaker 2: out of window, it will fall. I believe in gravity.
Speaker 2: I need evidence of God. And for me, evidence of
Speaker 2: God would be that God suddenly presents I'm gonna have
Speaker 2: to say itself because the idea of applying gender to
Speaker 2: God is silly itself in my life in an overwhelming
Speaker 2: way where I cannot turn away, and I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 2: that passes the test.
Speaker 1: Yeah right. A lot of dudes listening are like, it
Speaker 1: happened when he almost died?
Speaker 2: Well, no, except I didn't see God right like I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean I saw my dad right, and I saw
Speaker 2: the nurse and the you know, I actually did not
Speaker 2: see God, And if I had, we'd be we might
Speaker 2: be having a different podcast right now, right or But
Speaker 2: I didn't. The things that I saw were very real
Speaker 2: world and mundane, and one of them I can't explain,
Speaker 2: which is my dead father hovering above me. But it
Speaker 2: may just be I can't explain him because our minds,
Speaker 2: our human minds, are sufficiently did that that that ultimate
Speaker 2: reality is not accessible to us.
Speaker 1: Well, man, I'm glad you pulled through.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming on the show. Do you mind what's
Speaker 1: the best way for people to go do We have
Speaker 1: a good list of all all your books here on
Speaker 1: our document.
Speaker 2: I'll rattle them off right now, off Man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you had a book about you had a book
Speaker 1: about a murder, like do the whole thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So my first book was called The Perfect Storm. It
Speaker 2: was about this huge storm in nineteen ninety one sword
Speaker 2: fishing boat that was lost off shore one hundred foot waves,
Speaker 2: et cetera. My next book was called Fire. It was
Speaker 2: a collection of my long form journalism, including quite a
Speaker 2: lot about wildland fire fighting, hotshot cruise. And then after
Speaker 2: that was a death in Belmont when I was six
Speaker 2: months old my parents. We lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. My
Speaker 2: parents were building an addition to their house and one
Speaker 2: of the three carpenters was a guy named al Al
Speaker 2: de Salvo and he a couple of years after they
Speaker 2: finished building the additions to the house, Al confessed to
Speaker 2: being the Boston Strangler and he actually he was killing
Speaker 2: people while he was working at our house. And there
Speaker 2: was a murder down the street that was a classic
Speaker 2: Boston strangling. But a black handy man from Mississippi happened
Speaker 2: to have cleaned this lady's house that day left his
Speaker 2: phone number on the counter. The police got the phone number,
Speaker 2: chased him down. He was convicted, convicted, and sent to prison.
Speaker 2: He died in prison for a murder. He says he
Speaker 2: didn't commit. And no one knew that al DeSalvo was
Speaker 2: down the street at our house that day all day
Speaker 2: by himself, then he might have committed the murder. So
Speaker 2: a death in Belmont is about that possibility. It's a
Speaker 2: it's a cold case who done it? Basically. After that,
Speaker 2: I wrote a book called War about this platoon in
Speaker 2: the one seventy third Airborne that I was with off
Speaker 2: and on for a year in the Corngall Valley. I
Speaker 2: also shot a lot of deal with my buddy Tim
Speaker 2: and we made a documentary called Verstreppo. I was nominated
Speaker 2: for an Academy award a couple of months after we
Speaker 2: were at the Oscars. We didn't win, but a couple
Speaker 2: months later we were supposed to go on assignment to
Speaker 2: Libya together to cover the Arab Spring, and at last
Speaker 2: moment I couldn't go and Tim was killed he died
Speaker 2: of blood loss from a shrapnel wound and scroin in
Speaker 2: the city of Masrada. And after that I decided to
Speaker 2: give up war reporting, and I wrote a book called
Speaker 2: Tribe about community and how it works and how soldiers
Speaker 2: experienced that Native Americans and how the loss of community
Speaker 2: has affected people in this country and the nation as
Speaker 2: a whole. And after that I wrote a book called Freedom.
Speaker 2: It was an examination of successful underdog groups and how
Speaker 2: they defeat greater powers, Like if smaller individuals couldn't defeat
Speaker 2: larger individuals in combat, or if smaller groups couldn't defeat
Speaker 2: larger groups, the empire would always win, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: the world we've been made up of like fascist coalitions,
Speaker 2: And but that's actually not true, Like under smaller underdog
Speaker 2: groups are very actually very good at winning as long
Speaker 2: as they have certain attributes. And so the book, my
Speaker 2: book Freedom goes into what those characteristics are that allow
Speaker 2: smaller groups or smaller individuals to win over a larger,
Speaker 2: more powerful adversary, like.
Speaker 1: Why did the Americans win the Revolution? Why did the
Speaker 1: viet Cong win Vietnam?
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly? And the problem, you know, just the brief,
Speaker 2: very brief version is with strength and size comes a
Speaker 2: loss of mobility, a loss of agility. That's true for
Speaker 2: an individual in a boxing ring. It's also true for
Speaker 2: you know, the US military or any military. And the
Speaker 2: smaller you are, the faster you are, and that and
Speaker 2: that that more than can more than compensate for your
Speaker 2: lack of size and strength. So with out, without that
Speaker 2: unique trait, it's unique to humans and every other species,
Speaker 2: size winds, size dominates, right, Only in humans can the
Speaker 2: smaller entity win, and that allows for human freedom, for
Speaker 2: human autonomy, self definition, you know. And then finally, my
Speaker 2: recent book is called In My Time of Dying. It's
Speaker 2: about my near death experience and what that might mean
Speaker 2: for all of us facing our mortality and what it
Speaker 2: might mean for how we understand the universe to function.
Speaker 1: Great, And then people, you have a website, like if
Speaker 1: people want to track you down, Yeah, not not you
Speaker 1: down personally, but go find collection of all your stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah so yeah, I mean obviously on Amazon or your
Speaker 2: local bookstore.
Speaker 1: It's easy to get. You probably have one of those
Speaker 1: author profiles on there where people can see everything packaged
Speaker 1: on Amazon and stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but you can also go on Sebastianyonger dot
Speaker 2: com is my website and it's j U N G
Speaker 2: E R Sebastian Youonger dot com and all my stuff
Speaker 2: is there as well.
Speaker 1: Thanks for doing the show Man. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2: I loved it. That was a wonderful conversation. Thank you
Speaker 2: very much.
Speaker 1: Thanks