#369 — Escaping Death
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Summary
Sebastian Younger is a New York Times bestselling author of several books, including Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm. He was also a co-director on the documentary, Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. And his most recent book is In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. In this episode, we talk about Sebastian s experience as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and meaning, his experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, and his lingering trauma. We also discuss the concept of awe, psychedelics, near-death experiences, and other topics related to consciousness in the brain. And I bring you Sebastian Younger, my pleasure. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We don t run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, our support is made possible entirely through the support of our listeners. Please consider becoming a supporter of our podcast by becoming a subscriber. We'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation, so that we can all benefit from what we're doing here. Thank you for listening to the Making Sense Podcast! - Sam Harris and the rest of the conversation will be available in full on our podcast, making sense of the podcast. This is a podcast that you'll get to know more about the podcast by listening to it in the making sense Podcasts and other things that you're listening to in the podcast? The podcast is making sense, too, too of that's not only that? - The Making Sense podcast by the Making sense Podcast by you can be reached at making sense in the by checking it out on that place on your own podcast, that s a good thing, and more of it, like that so you'll be helping us out there . thank you, you'll also find out more of that, right away, like it's not having it on that thing, right like that, and so much of that stuff, and they're not getting it, right of that right, and all that they're going to hear it, they'll get it, they'll have it, that's that, they're being it, you're getting it in a place like that?
Transcript
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Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if
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Today I'm speaking with Sebastian Younger. Sebastian is a New York Times bestselling author
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of several books, Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire,
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and The Perfect Storm. He was also a co-director on the documentary film Restrepo,
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which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is the winner of a Peabody Award and the National
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Magazine Award for Reporting. And his most recent book is In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to
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Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. And it is a wonderful book, which is the focus of our discussion.
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We talk about Sebastian's experience as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and
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meaning, Sebastian's experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, and his lingering
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trauma, the concept of awe, psychedelics, near-death experiences, atheism, psychic phenomena,
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consciousness in the brain, and other topics. And I bring you Sebastian Younger.
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I am here with Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, thanks for joining me.
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It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me.
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Well, I've been a huge fan of your work, I think, since The Perfect Storm, which I remember reading in
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hardcover. I don't know. Was that like 97 or something? When did that come out?
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Yeah, yeah. That was an amazing read. And I've really enjoyed several of your other books since.
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And so we're mostly going to focus on your new book, which is In My Time of Dying,
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How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, which recounts the time you almost died
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from a ruptured aneurysm in your pancreatic artery. And you make many excursions into history
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and physics that are really quite wonderful. But it is a, I mean, it's by turns a very funny,
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but also harrowing book. I actually listened to it as an audio book, and it's a fantastic audio book.
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You read it. And I was on a hike for most of it. And at one point, as you're recounting
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your unfolding medical emergency, which really does read like a thriller, I started to worry,
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wait a minute, this would be all too weird if I were to die from my own ruptured something while
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listening to this, far from a hospital or any potential rescue. And I actually, at one point,
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I just decided to head back to civilization. Like, I'm too far from a hospital for this part of the
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book. That's very funny because I had similar fears afterwards. I was very paranoid about being
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far from medical help. Yeah, you talk about that. So we'll get to that.
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I want to, let's just track through it systematically. But perhaps before we jump
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into the book, I mean, you have this history in many of your books and projects
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of courting danger. And there's a documentary on your time in Afghanistan called Restrepo that
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many people will have seen. And so you've been in war zones. Your books, Tribe and War,
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talk about the effect of war and the connection of between danger and meaning. Perhaps just let's
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talk about your proximity to danger that you have sought out more than most people.
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Yeah. Well, just to start off by saying within my population of foreign reporters, that's the norm.
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And I'm probably at the low end of risk-taking and the sort of aggregate of dangerous experiences.
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So just to be clear, like I look like a risk-taker to the general population, but not to my
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population. So I grew up in a very safe, pretty affluent Boston suburb in the 60s and 70s. And
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I had this sense, I don't know why, but I had the sense that as a teenager, that if I wasn't somehow
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tested in some sort of mortal way, that I would never mature into a man. I would just stay forever
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sort of juvenile. And I knew that in this suburb, nothing was ever going to, you know,
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nothing was really ever going to test me. There were no volcanoes. There were no hurricanes.
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No rebels were going to come driving down the street and pick up trucks. There would be no way
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to sort of prove my worth to society, which throughout history, young men have felt compelled
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to do. And the society needed them to do that. And I don't know why I was aware of this, but I was.
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And, you know, eventually my father was a refugee from two wars. He's born in Germany, but he grew
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up in Spain and his family, he and his family left Spain when the fascists came in in 1936 with
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Franco. And they went to Paris. His father was Jewish. When the Nazis came in, they fled to the
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United States. And so war was sort of in the background of my family's history. And in my early
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thirties, I'd worked for some years as a climber for tree companies, taking trees down. So way up in the
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air on a rope with a chainsaw and I'd actually gotten hurt doing that. But in the, in the early
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nineties, I, um, there was a civil war in, in Bosnia. And I just thought I've got a, I'm 32. I need to
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test my, I mean, I need to do something that, that demonstrates something worthy about myself. And I,
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and I flew, I went to Sarajevo and I, and I sort of turned myself into a war reporter and I, and I kept
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doing it despite having to occasionally write books.
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Yeah. So I forgot about that in your history. So you, did you, were you, um, were you on camera
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for CNN or anything like that? Or were you just writing?
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No, God, if only. So I was like plankton in the food chain of foreign reporters in Sarajevo,
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right? I mean, I was like an occasional freelance radio correspondent. I would basically phone in
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30 second, 40 second voice spots into ABC radio and what have you, Deutsche Welle. And, you know,
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it was very much a, just a sort of initiatory process. I mean, I, I, I mean, I, I learned how
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to do that work, but I didn't come close to earning anything close to a living doing it,
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but it was, it was like going to journalism school and I was in a war and I was with other freelancers
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and I, and, and I, I learned something really, really valuable about war, about humans, about
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myself. I came back feeling very, very different and really sort of in love with the idea of a job
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that had enormous meaning. I was reporting on world, even at my tiny level, I was reporting
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on world events, on things that were happening in front of me, tragic things, important things,
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and communicating that back to a population in the United States. And that to me, the sort
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of role of the messenger in society, that to me was like just absolutely intoxicating.
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Hmm. What is it that you think connects the experience of danger and meaning?
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Hmm. Well, for me, consequences create meaning. So if you're in a situation where you could get
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killed, there's an enormous amount of meaning around the idea of not making a mistake, of
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making the right decisions, of relying on other people and they rely on you and you all come
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out of it. Okay. There's an enormous amount of meaning that comes with that danger. And the
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problem with things that are free of danger and, and listen, we're, we're blessed if we have
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those things, right? I mean, many people in the world don't, but the problem with say a round of
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golf is that it might be fun. It might be pleasurable. It might be relaxing, but it actually
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has very little sort of meaning. And what I found in the, in the safe little suburb that I was growing
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up in was I was sort of desperate for meaning. And sometimes war reporters are called sort of
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adrenaline junkies or whatever. And I, in what, for me, what I think was going on more for me and
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for most of the other people that I knew, men and women, both in those situations is that there was
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more like they were meaning junkies. Like they wanted to be living lives where things had huge
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consequences, enormous amount of meaning. And that's actually the thing you sort of get addicted
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to. It's not, you know, frankly, sprinting across the street while a sniper is trying to shoot you is
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not particularly addictive. So is it the social component to it that you're, because it's something
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you, you emphasize in tribe, that the bonding that occurs between soldiers and people in conflict
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zones, or is it, can you imagine, or have you experienced the same kind of ramping up of
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consequences, but in solitude delivering the same sort of meaning?
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Right. Well, I imagine Alex Hanold, the free, free soloist who, um, if I said his name correctly,
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anyway, I think we know who I'm talking about. Yeah. I mean, you know, his, his amygdala is
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malfunctioning and he can free solo, uh, El Cap without apparently breaking a sweat.
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No, that's definitely a solo activity. And there's definitely a huge amount of meaning to it for him and
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for anyone understanding what he's doing. So it doesn't have to be with other people, but
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consequences sort of sharpen the contours of reality. And he's obviously dealing with enormous
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consequences when he does his work on those cliffs. But, but for most humans, I don't know if he's
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human or not, but for most human beings. He's barely human. I've never met him, but, uh, from
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judging from the, what I've seen, he is a far, far outlier of something. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems to
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be an extraordinarily nice guy. I mean, like, I mean, anyway, for most humans, uh, hardship and risk
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and danger and trauma are generally faced in a group. And that's been true for hundreds of
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thousands of years. And, you know, the war is no different. And even if you're a war reporter
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and you're in say Sierra Leone in the late nineties, like I was, or Liberia in 2003 or Bosnia in the
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early nineties, whatever it may be, an American platoon in combat in Eastern Afghanistan, as I was
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in 07, 08, you end up inevitably in there sort of these social groups, sort of survival groups,
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as it were. And the, the, the relationship between the individual and the group that they're
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find themselves dependent on for survival is very, very intense. And the deal seems to be that if you
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are willing to be sort of selfless and altruistic on behalf of the welfare of the group, the group then
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takes you in and you're, you're, you know, you're welcomed into it and you're sort of honored in
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some way. And, you know, what I saw in Sarajevo was really interesting. The, the, uh, and I immediately
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wanted to sort of be part of it almost, I almost had the totally self-indulgent thought, wow, those
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people are lucky that they get this. And what I was seeing was that every neighborhood had its sort of
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local defense group. And these were like young men typically that were using an assortment of,
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you know, hunting rifles and AK-47s and what, what have you. And they dug trenches and they were
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defending the city of Sarajevo neighborhood by neighborhood in very, very local groups.
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And they were living a kind of communal life on a frontline and it looked so tribal. And these
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young people and the women as well, cause they had a very important role as well. These young,
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young people were such a totally necessary, vital part of their, their own community and its
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survival. I just thought like, that's life. Like that's what life's supposed to be something like
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that. And again, a self-indulgent thought because there was a huge amount of suffering, you know,
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one out of five civilians was wounded or killed in that city over the three years of the siege by the
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besieging Bosnian Serb forces. I mean, just absolutely grotesque, but you know, I think we can still say
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in sort of human terms, they had a, a core human experience that's typified human life for, for a
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very, very long time. And the pity, along with the huge blessings and benefits of modern, safe,
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affluent modern society, the pity of it is that we, particularly young people get sort of deprived
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of being in a role of, of importance and urgency like that.
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Well, how do you make sense of the fact that these experiences, which seem objectively bad and worth
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avoiding, I mean, they're just the, the chaos of war, right. Can deliver to those who survive and,
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you know, scathed or unscathed, I would imagine some of the most meaningful experiences, perhaps the
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most meaningful experiences they've ever had in life. And we know from, again, this is something
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you focus on more in your books. I think it's, it might be both tribe and war, but this experience
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that, you know, for the, it's very common for soldiers to return from a war and find, you know,
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normal life and, and the safety therein really denuded of meaning. And it's, you know, on some
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level there, you could write, write this off as that, you know, they've, they're, they're essentially
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adrenaline junkies. I mean, they've just played the, the highest stakes video game ever and, and
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nothing else compares, but there are probably deeper layers to it than that. But what seems
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paradoxical about is that the kind of lives that we put a tremendous amount of energy and attention
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in seeking to maintain, which is to say lives that are quite protected from, from danger and chaos.
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And this is the, these are the kinds of lives we wish upon those we love and our children,
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you know, especially. Yeah. And yet you keep noticing that it's in extremis that so many
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people find the juicy goodness of actually being slammed into a full encounter with their own
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existence. Well, I think there's two things going on. First of all, survival is meaningful. I mean,
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just in basic Darwinian terms, right? Like if we didn't value survival, we wouldn't be here.
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And the behaviors that help our survival, evolution, the evolutionary process has made
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gratifying or pleasurable. So if you're hungry, eating is an important thing to do and it feels
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good. Sex feels good, right? Archery feels good. If you hit the bullseye, I mean, you get a little
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bump of dopamine, right? So all of these behaviors that, that help us survive and, and master our
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circumstances are rewarded with some kind of good feeling. And one of the good feelings is the,
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that we have is, you know, topping out on the, you know, top of El Capitan or whatever. It's like,
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you know, winning, succeeding, like over overcoming the monster, the beast, you know, like,
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like vanquishing. And, and the other one, and they're very tied together is human connection,
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right? That's also, it's the other, along with survival is the other exceedingly meaningful thing
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that we do. And after my book Tribe came out, there was some, I can't remember where it was,
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a comment. It might've been on Amazon or something. I can't quite remember, but it was a,
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a young woman whose sister tragically had died of cancer, I think. And she, she talked about how
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during those last days of her sister's life, while her sister was dying, that she missed those days
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because everyone came in, the cousins and the friends and the family. And it was just this gathering
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of forces. And there was something, as she said, as tragic as it was, she missed it because it felt
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real. And she was connected to so many people in this vital way. And if you look at, at history,
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you know, the tragedies, the catastrophes that hit human society, the blitz in London, all right?
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The German air force bombed London and other English cities night after night for six months,
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they killed 30,000 civilians, right? There were civilians digging civilians out of the rubble
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and injecting the ones they couldn't save with morphine so they could, you know, die painlessly. And
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everyone was sleeping and, you know, in the subways and rationing food. And I mean, just a nightmare,
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right? And what happened afterwards? Londoners said that they missed it. And the class,
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the ghastly class system in England sort of broke down during those days. I mean,
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if you're sleeping shoulder to shoulder with other people in a tube station,
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it doesn't really matter if you're, quote, upper class or, quote, lower class, right? And
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not only that, but the catastrophe, the crisis seemed to promote sort of psychological well-being.
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The government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties during the bombings, right? Of course
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they were. And it turns out that admissions to psych wards went down during the bombings and then
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back up after the bombings stopped. And after Hurricane Katrina, there was a similar thing along
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the Mississippi coast. I have friends who lived down there. He said people really missed the time of
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sort of community effort and bonding that happened in the wake of that terrible hurricane.
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So yes, it seems sort of odd that these catastrophes elicit such fond feelings, but they give people
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a purpose, a meaning that is survival, and they bring people together. And those are the things
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that make humans happy. You know, we're social primates. Like, you know, we're adapted for that.
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Is there anything you have done differently in your life, born of having understood this,
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again, somewhat paradoxical lesson of how attention and bonding gets sharpened up
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in extremis in this way? I mean, can you graft this on in a more orderly, less death-defying way
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And again, we'll get to your encounter with the actual abyss pretty soon. But prior to that,
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did you consciously change your life in response to what you were learning when you were researching
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Yeah. So after I came back from a year off and on with a platoon in combat, with American forces
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in combat in Eastern Afghanistan, I made a documentary called Bristrepo with my buddy,
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Tim Hetherington. And I came back from there and the guys that I'd been with were, I was quite
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surprised. Like they, a lot of them wanted, I mean, this was a hellish hilltop, right? They were like,
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it was all men that they were getting, we were getting shot at just about every day. There was no
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communication with the outside world. There was no internet. There was no way to call your
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girlfriend. There was no, for the first three months, there wasn't even electricity. They
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didn't even have a generator, right? They were sleeping in the dirt with the tarantulas and the
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scorpions and et cetera. And, and they spent 15 months up there. And so they finally got brought
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back to Italy and all the pleasures and delights of civilization. And you can imagine what that looked
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like for a while. But then the party sort of died down. And a lot of them said they wanted to go
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back. They couldn't deal. They wanted to go back to Restrepo. A lot of them said that. And
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I remember I had a, um, I was very fortunate to have a surrogate uncle named Ellis who I've written
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about. And he was part Apache, part Sioux, I believe. At any rate, he was Native American. He
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was born out West in the late 1920s and an incredibly learned man and extraordinary man. And I remember him,
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sorry, I'm going to have to be a little improper here, but, and this is his language. But I remember him
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saying to me, Sebastian, all throughout the history of the United States from the earliest days
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on, uh, he said, you white people were always running off to join us Indians, to, to join the
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tribes. And he said, we Indians never ran off to join white society to, you know, plow fields and
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go to church on Sundays and all that stuff. It was always towards the tribal. And I, you know, in my
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mind, I'm like, oh, right. Yeah. Okay. Right. You know, I didn't know if Ellis was sort of selling
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me a bill of goods or whatever. And then when I was trying to understand the soldiers, I
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thought, oh my God, maybe Ellis was right. Maybe that's true. Maybe what these guys miss
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is that tribal component of like, we're all equal. We're all together. We need each other.
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We're in the fight together. Like maybe that's actually what's intoxicating. And you come back
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to safe America and yeah, of course, it's great to not get shot at anymore, et cetera, et cetera.
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And again, we're blessed to live in those circumstances, but there is a real human loss.
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I mean, the more affluent and safe you are, the less you need other people to survive.
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And then you end up without human connection, which is the ultimate, I mean, human connection
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is the ultimate drug, right? I mean, the ultimate thing that makes you feel good. Again, we're
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social primates. Humans don't survive by themselves in the wilderness. They die almost immediately.
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We survive in groups and we have a lot of sort of neurochemical reinforcement of those oxytocin
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and all these other hormones that allow us to, that make us feel good when we're collaborating
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in a group. And so I realized that, you know, Ellis was right. And I looked back into the history
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books and indeed along the frontier, the Pennsylvania frontier where my ancestors settled in the 1780s,
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all the way on up through the Midwest and the West and the Southwest, young men and sometimes
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young women would run off and join the native culture or even if they're native society. And
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even if they'd been kidnapped during raids, if often they didn't want to go home, they didn't
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want to go back, right? They wanted to stay, quote, Indian. And so that to me suddenly made
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sense of this thing. So how do you live your life in a, I live in America. It's a modern affluent
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country, right? It's a highly mechanized, industrialized country. How do you live in
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such a place? And to your question, keep some, what decisions can you make to keep some sort of
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tribal feeling? And so, you know, what I would say, first of all, is, I mean, I grew up in a pretty
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affluent suburb and I've just made it a point in my life. They're extremely alienating places and I've
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just made it a point in my life to never, to never do that. And, uh, so I live in a very much
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a mixed income, mixed race, Lower East Side, on the New York's Lower East Side community, which is
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sort of small enough and human enough that, you know, people recognize each other. We need each
00:22:32.040
other. There's all kinds of sort of street level collaboration and it feels very, very communal and
00:22:37.820
good. And, um, the building that I live in with my wife and two little girls before I was in
00:22:43.880
there during Hurricane Sandy, uh, there was an extraordinary example of this sort of
00:22:48.820
communality that you would get in a poor neighborhood. And, and I think not in a rich
00:22:52.880
one. Hurricane Sandy shut off the lights and, you know, in New York city, 34th street and below.
00:22:58.640
So at nighttime, it was quite, quite frightening in Manhattan, actually gangs of young men roaming
00:23:02.960
around and all kinds of sort of quasi apocalyptic scenes, right? So in this particular building is a
00:23:09.120
tenement building and mostly Spanish speaking and a lot of interrelatedness between the apartments,
00:23:13.660
cousins and uncles and what have you. Uh, one of the mothers, Dominican or Puerto Rican, I'm not
00:23:18.680
sure which, uh, got a machete because they were worried about a break-ins because a lot of the
00:23:23.200
people who had children had to leave the building because there was no water. There was no running
00:23:26.520
water. So the people with young children left the building. So there's empty apartments. They're
00:23:30.700
worried about break-ins, right? So. You had your own Restrepo on 34th street. You could just,
00:23:35.860
just add some tarantulas and scorpions and you're good to go. That's right. So she got a machete
00:23:41.620
and she got a bunch of teenage boys and young men and gave them a sort of guard roster. And so there
00:23:47.540
was a young man with a machete in front of the, you know, in front of the door 24 seven until the
00:23:51.480
lights went back on. Now that's community, right? Right. Like that's, that's the fact, that's the
00:23:56.120
fabric of human society. And so, you know, one of the decisions I made was just, just not,
00:24:00.740
not live in, in affluence and, um, not live in suburbia.
00:24:04.060
Hmm. Okay. So let's, let's, uh, talk about how you can't quite escape death or near death,
00:24:11.560
even, even in, um, you know, the pristine surroundings. You weren't, you weren't in the
00:24:16.200
city when this went down. You were, you were outside of it. So let's walk, walk me through
00:24:20.680
your medical emergency and, um, then we'll get into the, um, the more ethereal topics that, uh,
00:24:29.160
Yeah. So I, if I could, I'll start, I'll back up a few years after being a war reporter
00:24:34.100
for, for many years and having had many close calls, um, I was blown up by an IED, had bullet
00:24:40.860
hit next to my forehead into a sandbag, et cetera. My colleague, my brother, my friend, Tim
00:24:45.720
Hetherington, who I made Restrepo with was killed in Libya. He caught a mortar fragment in his
00:24:51.120
groin and he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck, looking at the blue Libyan sky as
00:24:57.280
he raced to the Misrata hospital. He got there a few minutes too late. And I, so I got out of the
00:25:02.220
war business at that point. I didn't want to devastate all of the people who loved me. Like
00:25:06.840
I had just watched Tim do to everyone who loved him. And did you have your daughters at that point?
00:25:11.040
No, I didn't. I didn't. I was in my first marriage and that I had a lot of psychological
00:25:15.480
struggles after Restrepo and after Tim was killed. And among other things, it contributed to
00:25:22.560
costing me my marriage. But you know, then I, you know, I sort of, things got better again. I,
00:25:27.980
I, and I got together with Barbara, my wife, and we had a family and everything was amazing. Right.
00:25:33.660
And I, I did, I never looked back. I stopped war reporting. I never looked back. Now at this point,
00:25:37.940
I have a family and I definitely, they're, they're my absolute priority. And so, and then COVID hits.
00:25:44.480
And so when COVID hits, we have a newborn and a three-year-old, almost three-year-old and COVID
00:25:51.060
hits. And we are lucky again, you know, I'm extremely lucky person. And, and we had the
00:25:56.320
choice of leaving New York, this little apartment. We live in a tiny apartment and, um, you know,
00:26:01.920
we co-sleep. It's like 500 square feet. And it's like, we're camping in an apartment. Right. I mean,
00:26:06.200
it's really small. The idea of going through COVID in that with, you know, two young kids just seemed
00:26:10.540
really tough. And we, I, we own property in Massachusetts in the woods, an old, old house
00:26:15.340
in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road. And it was a no-brainer. Right. So we,
00:26:19.840
we moved in there and it was in June of 2020. I, you know, the, I don't think in terms of medical
00:26:27.560
emergency, because I'm, I was, I'm a lifelong athlete. I was a really good distance runner when
00:26:32.220
I was young. I've got an athlete's heart. I'm not a walking, you know, I'm not, my heart's not a,
00:26:37.260
you know, ticking time bomb. I'm not going to have a stroke. I mean,
00:26:40.160
all these things that drop middle-aged men in their tracks. I'm just, I just don't have
00:26:44.060
those worries. Right. So I just never thought I would have to rush to the hospital for anything.
00:26:49.340
And, um, so in this house, there's no cell phone service. It's a long dirt road through the woods
00:26:54.360
to get there and sometimes impassable. And the phone lines don't, the landline doesn't work
00:26:59.140
when it rains because the lines are old and they short out. So that's the context for what's about
00:27:03.860
to happen now. So it's June 16th, 2020. And the, we got, we had a little bit of babysitting from
00:27:10.840
some teenage girls who live down the road and they came in to take care of our six month old and our
00:27:16.720
three-year-old. And I had built a cabin sort of even deeper in the woods, just like oil lamps and
00:27:23.060
wood stove, like a really primitive place. And my wife and I went out, Barbara and I went out there to
00:27:28.440
just chill out for a little bit and, um, very beautiful spot. And in mid sentence, in mid
00:27:33.720
sentence, I felt this jolt of pain in my abdomen. And I was like, Ooh, what is that? You know, it was
00:27:40.060
sort of, it was like incredibly bad indigestion, right? I just know what it was. It was burning.
00:27:44.900
And I just stood up to try to walk it out. And, and I almost fell over. And I mean, the floor just
00:27:51.040
went reeling away from me. And I sat back down and I said words I never thought I'd ever say. I said,
00:27:57.340
I'm going to need help. I've never felt anything like this. And, um, so Barbara sort of dragged me,
00:28:03.600
half dragged me out of the woods and, um, sort of keeping me upright and my arm around her shoulders
00:28:08.720
and got me to the driveway and put me in the passenger seat of the car. And then ran in and
00:28:13.300
told the girls, like whispered to the babysitters, you know, Sebastian's, Sebastian has to go to the
00:28:18.920
hospital. Something's really wrong. So one of the, the phone lines weren't working. Nothing was
00:28:23.060
working. One of the girls managed to get one bar of cell phone connection on her cell phone and called
00:28:28.580
911. And, um, so I didn't know this, but I had a, I had an undiagnosed aneurysm, a sort of ballooning
00:28:38.200
of the, of the blood vessel in one of my pancreatic arteries. It's extremely rare and it's not, you know,
00:28:44.200
it's a random defect, right? It's not high cholesterol or what have you clogged arteries. It's,
00:28:48.720
it really is sort of a random freakish thing. And, and, and aneurysms are deadly because they
00:28:54.580
have no symptoms. And if they rupture, the mortality rate is incredibly high. It's very hard
00:28:59.280
to fix that. And people just bleed out inside into their own abdomen, which is what I was doing.
00:29:05.040
I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. And so my blood pressure was just tanking.
00:29:11.220
So I'm in the car and I'm in and out of consciousness and I start going blind,
00:29:14.680
all symptoms of blood loss, extreme blood loss. And, um, I'm basically a human hourglass and the
00:29:22.060
hospital is, is an hour drive away. And I would have, the odds would have been long if it, if the
00:29:28.800
hospital had been five minutes away. Right. And it's an hour and I hung on. They put me in the
00:29:35.020
ambulance. They didn't know what was wrong. They didn't think it was particularly serious, but we
00:29:38.440
went to the hospital and right when we, I sort of kept it together, something called compensatory
00:29:43.820
shock where your body shuts down all unnecessary blood flow to your, to your limbs, et cetera,
00:29:48.960
to your skin and pools it where it's needed in your chest and your brain. Your body can do that
00:29:53.880
for like an hour or so. And then it can't do it anymore. And that's what happened. As soon as we
00:29:57.940
pulled up to the ER, I went from compensatory shock into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I went,
00:30:03.860
I was convulsing and totally disoriented. And they, the doctors knew immediately what was happening.
00:30:08.860
And they rushed me into the trauma bay and a doctor started getting ready to insert a large gauge
00:30:16.680
needle, needle through my neck into my jug, straight into my jugular to transfuse me, which is
00:30:21.740
actually, I mean, it sounds horrifying, but it didn't hurt at all. I don't know. This might've been
00:30:26.620
the point where I turned around on my hike. So. Right. Well, and you know, I didn't know, I had no
00:30:31.560
idea I was dying. Right. And the doctor said to me, do I have permission to do this procedure? And I,
00:30:36.060
you know, it didn't sound very fun. I said, you mean in case there's an emergency? Yeah. And he
00:30:40.000
said, sir, this is the emergency right now. So you're pretty much in the middle of the emergency.
00:30:44.400
Yeah. And I had no, you know, I had no idea. And so, you know, I should say right now,
00:30:49.800
so people don't get the wrong idea. I'm an atheist. I'm a stone cold atheist. My father was a
00:30:55.340
physicist. He was an atheist. I'm not a mystic. I'm not spiritual. I don't think coincidences
00:31:01.940
mean anything. I don't think things are meant to be or not meant to be. Like I just, I don't believe
00:31:08.340
in anything. Right. And so while the doctor is working on my neck, trying to get the needle in
00:31:15.620
there, which is, takes a little while, I suddenly become aware of this black pit that has opened up
00:31:21.660
underneath me slightly to my left and I'm getting pulled into it. And it's sort of infinitely,
00:31:26.340
infinitely black and infinitely deep. And it's eternity.
00:31:31.100
When you say, so the description that you're now giving suggests a visual experience, but is this,
00:31:39.600
is it more just, how are you, how are you locating it in space if it's not something you're seeing
00:31:45.500
with your open eyes? You know, I'm good question. And I don't know. I sensed it. I just became aware
00:31:51.560
that there was a pit to my left below me. And then I was getting pulled into, into this darkness
00:31:56.760
and, and it was a final darkness. And again, I didn't know I was dying, but I had the sense like
00:32:02.920
you go in there, you are not coming back out. And I was panicking. And then my dead father appeared
00:32:09.220
above me, above me and to my left. And when you say everyone, what do you think your eyes were closed
00:32:14.340
at this point or your eyes open? I, they were open. I mean, I was still talking to the doctors,
00:32:18.980
but I was also, you know, in a, it was like, I was incredibly drunk. Like my mind was not working
00:32:25.040
right. And I was in and out of consciousness. And I, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say, it's not like
00:32:31.180
I saw him in the ceiling, like a cardboard cutout of my father. I mean, it wasn't that tangible,
00:32:36.680
but he, he was there in a sort of energy form. I mean, I don't, there aren't even really words to
00:32:43.520
precisely say what it was I was seeing or feeling, but I was startled. I was startled to see him. I'm
00:32:49.300
like, my dad, like, what, what are you doing up there? He'd been dead eight years. And, um, he was
00:32:55.900
a physicist. He was definitely, I found out, you know, realized later in my life on the spectrum,
00:33:01.040
a very sweet man, but not hard to be close to emotionally close to that was my relationship with
00:33:06.920
him. And suddenly there he was, and he was communicating to me. It's okay. You don't have to
00:33:12.120
fight it. Like, I'll take care of you. You can come with me. And my reaction was horror. I mean,
00:33:18.620
I didn't know I was dying. So when he said, come with you, I'm like, you're dead. I'm not going
00:33:22.060
anywhere with you. We have nothing. We have nothing in common. Like it was, the suggestion was
00:33:27.040
grotesque. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
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00:33:39.260
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