The Peter Attia Drive - #315 ‒ Life after near-death： a new perspective on living, dying, and the afterlife

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:01:04.200 My guest this week is Sebastian Younger. Sebastian was a previous podcast guest back in February of

00:01:10.100 2022, and wanted to have him back on to discuss his recently published book, In My Time of Dying,

00:01:16.340 How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Sebastian is an award-winning journalist,

00:01:23.040 documentary filmmaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Some of his previous works include The

00:01:28.680 Perfect Storm, Tribe, and Freedom, among others. I was compelled to have this conversation with

00:01:34.040 Sebastian after reading or really devouring his book, and I explained as much to him at the beginning

00:01:40.080 of this podcast. It really is a special book, and I don't think it's just because of the nature

00:01:46.880 of what I focus on professionally. I think it really is the type of book that anybody would read and be

00:01:53.320 moved by because I believe at the end of the day, we are all in some ways a little bit afraid of our

00:01:59.900 mortality and obviously curious about what it implies. In this conversation, Sebastian shares his story of

00:02:07.540 his near-death experience, and really how that's the substrate and the launching pad, if you will,

00:02:13.240 towards the investigation that leads to this book. We talk about how the universe works, what we

00:02:19.720 understand about physics, what does it mean to be sacred beyond secular, and discuss whether or not

00:02:25.420 there may be an afterlife, absent any sort of religious overtone, by the way. These two can be quite

00:02:30.580 uncoupled. We discuss how our beliefs might impact how we live our lives and what shapes our value in our

00:02:37.120 own experience. Again, I found this to be a very intriguing conversation, and one that is a bit

00:02:42.100 more philosophical than perhaps our usual discussions on the drive. I think it offers a chance, of course,

00:02:46.780 to reflect on the themes related to how we think about death, our spiritual beliefs, and of course,

00:02:52.400 this idea of an afterlife. Without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Sebastian Younger.

00:02:58.060 Sebastian, thanks so much for coming to Austin. It's great to finally meet you in person,

00:03:09.060 having spoken with you and emailed you many times over the past few years and spoken with you,

00:03:13.040 obviously, on a previous podcast. This book is really a fantastic book. It's hard to describe

00:03:18.020 the experience of reading it. I think it's so beautiful. It can almost bring you to tears in

00:03:23.620 certain sections because there are the stories within it that sort of tell us about our mortality,

00:03:28.920 but I also think there's something so beautiful about it, which I'm curious if others have explained

00:03:34.100 to you their reaction, which is you can feel so incredibly insignificant reading this, which is

00:03:41.420 actually kind of a nice thing. It makes this whole thing seem a little less scary, and by this whole

00:03:46.140 thing, I mean death. Well, our insignificance in the cosmos does sort of take the pressure off.

00:03:52.020 We don't mean anything, and that's terrifying and kind of liberating. I mean, it's sort of both,

00:03:58.020 and one of the things I talk about in the book is a kind of reverence for life, and I think it's

00:04:04.080 quite hard to find one's way in the busyness of daily life in our modern society. It's quite hard

00:04:11.440 to find your way to that reverence, it was for me, without having been terrified. Once I was terrified

00:04:17.180 by almost dying, the flip side of that terror was reverence, and I found it quite easily after that.

00:04:23.880 And so for me, one point after my near-death experience, I had a lot of psychological

00:04:29.960 struggles. I mean, you know, we can talk about that, but at one point my wife said to me,

00:04:34.920 Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that you almost died? I mean, not that you survived,

00:04:39.300 of course you're lucky, but that it happened at all. If you could go back and push a button and have it

00:04:44.020 not happen, would you push that button? I honestly didn't know how to answer. Was I blessed or cursed?

00:04:51.480 And the psychological consequences of almost dying and what I saw on the threshold, what I remember

00:04:57.440 from the threshold, they were frankly so devastating that I absolutely felt cursed. In struggling to

00:05:03.720 answer, I tracked down the origin of the word blessing. Now, I'm an atheist, but I feel that

00:05:10.340 there are secular meanings towards beautiful words like blessing or sacred that we atheists are free

00:05:19.060 to use. And so I tracked down the origin of the word blessing, and it comes from the Anglo-Saxon

00:05:24.600 bletsian, which means blood. The idea being that there is no blessing without a wounding, without a

00:05:31.940 sacrifice. And maybe there's no wounding without a blessing. And that battlefields are sacred because

00:05:38.080 blood has been shed. Childbirth is sacred because blood has been shed. In pre-Christian Europe,

00:05:44.640 often animals were sacrificed on holy days to bless fields, to bless buildings, to bless people.

00:05:50.760 The twinning of blessing and wounding, they're aspects of the same thing. When I realized that,

00:05:57.160 it allowed me to make this sort of psychological step, an important psychological step, where I stopped

00:06:03.600 feeling cursed by too much knowledge, that I'd somehow gotten too much knowledge on the threshold

00:06:08.440 of death and couldn't continue daily life with that knowledge. It was too burdensome. It was too

00:06:13.220 scary. It was too true. And once I read the origin of the word blessing, I was like, oh, I'm free.

00:06:18.720 It's both. How wonderful. And that really did sort of release me from this existential conundrum that I

00:06:25.140 was in. I think it's probably worth telling listeners if they haven't already read the book

00:06:30.520 or even heard you on another podcast where you've described the story of what happened in June of

00:06:36.800 2020. In fact, you and I actually discussed it a little bit, I believe, on our last podcast. But again,

00:06:42.580 maybe just to make sure everybody knows what we're talking about vis-a-vis your experience. Do you want

00:06:48.860 to kind of recount the story in enough detail that people will understand the technical aspects of

00:06:54.580 what happened and basically how much luck played a role in you sitting here today?

00:07:01.400 Yeah, I'm happy to. So last night at my book reading at Book People in Austin, yesterday was

00:07:09.400 June 16. And I was able to, because of the time difference, et cetera, with the East Coast, I was

00:07:13.940 able to say to the audience, this moment, right now, this moment, exactly four years ago, I started

00:07:21.240 dying. It was exactly the time. So it was during COVID. I was living with my family at the time,

00:07:28.440 a three-year-old girl and a six-month-old girl, my little daughters and my wife, Barbara. We were

00:07:33.020 living in an old house in a remote part of Massachusetts at the end of a dead-end dirt road,

00:07:38.840 deep in the woods, no cell phone service, landlines that would short out when it rained and often

00:07:45.160 didn't work. In other words, paradise. And we were there during COVID. I was in my 50s,

00:07:52.420 a lifelong athlete, in extremely good health, strong, like never thought twice about emergency

00:07:57.580 transport to a hospital. Why would I? I'm not a walking heart attack. I don't have high cholesterol,

00:08:01.860 you know, et cetera. So I know we all age and we can get cancer and things like that. But

00:08:05.120 I didn't think I had anything that would drop a middle-aged man in his tracks.

00:08:09.280 And who knew? So one afternoon, some neighbors down the road called a family that we knew and

00:08:15.560 the teenage girls offered to come over and babysit. And that was a rare opportunity.

00:08:21.060 So we jumped on it. The girls came over to babysit our little girls. My wife and I went off to a cabin

00:08:26.600 that's even deeper in the woods, an even more beautiful spot, and completely cut off from

00:08:31.160 everything and down a trail. We were able to spend a couple of hours there. And thank God we did,

00:08:36.960 that I didn't go running or something that would have put me even more off the grid because I would

00:08:42.340 have died had that happened. We were in this cabin and in mid-sentence, in mid-sentence, I felt this

00:08:48.500 sort of stab of pain in my abdomen. It wasn't unbearable, but really got my attention and it

00:08:53.620 wouldn't go away. Unlike indigestion, you know, sort of digestive pain, nothing would ease it. And I

00:08:57.900 finally stood up to sort of walk it out. And the floor went reeling away from me and I almost fell

00:09:05.040 over and I sat back down and I said words I never thought I'd have to say. I said,

00:09:09.660 honey, I think I'm going to need help. I've never felt anything like this. She sort of half dragged

00:09:15.780 me out of the cabin and down the trail and we made it to the dirt driveway. And she put me in the

00:09:20.880 passenger seat of the car and ran in to tell the babysitters, try to call the ambulance.

00:09:27.000 Something's wrong with Sebastian. I'm sitting there in the car and now I start going blind.

00:09:31.140 The sky turns electric white. The electric white takes over the trees and the house and everything

00:09:38.320 around me. And I didn't know it, but I was in and out of consciousness. These were all the symptoms of

00:09:45.200 catastrophic blood loss. So what had happened was I had an aneurysm, an unnatural ballooning at one spot

00:09:53.820 in my pancreatic artery, which is this little artery that almost no one ever needs to think about.

00:09:58.680 And I had an aneurysm in this thing, which is really quite rare. And it was the result of having

00:10:05.080 a sort of a ligament sort of in the wrong place in my abdomen that occluded my celiac artery. It's

00:10:09.440 all sort of rather complicated, but basically the celiac is this garden hose. And when you cut it off

00:10:14.860 with this ligament in the wrong place, the blood has to flow somewhere else and it flows through

00:10:19.160 these smaller arteries. And if one of them has a weak spot or a vulnerability, that weak spot will

00:10:23.800 balloon. The bubble will get bigger and bigger and the arterial wall will get thinner and thinner and

00:10:29.320 it can rupture. And if it ruptures, you're now bleeding out into your own body, into your own

00:10:35.340 abdomen. If someone would just had done you the favor of stabbing you in the stomach, when they got

00:10:40.400 you to the hospital, the doctors would know where to put their finger to stop the bleed. In some ways,

00:10:44.680 it's an easier proposition, but with internal hemorrhage, it can be quite hard to find the

00:10:49.960 location. I mean, to the layman, your abdomen is just a big bowl of spaghetti. Where do you even

00:10:55.740 start looking and how do you get in there? So I didn't know all of this. I had an undiagnosed

00:11:01.700 aneurysm that had been growing probably for decades and it had finally ruptured in that moment.

00:11:08.680 And I was losing a pint of blood probably every 10 or 15 minutes into my abdomen. And there's 10 units

00:11:16.240 of blood in the human body, thereabouts. And you can lose maybe two thirds of it before you sort of

00:11:21.720 cross over to territory where it's really hard to come back from, even if you're transfused.

00:11:26.900 And we'd lived on one hour drive from the nearest hospital. So I was literally a human hourglass.

00:11:33.400 And the ambulance finally came. Off we went and I had sort of rebooted a bit. I went into compensatory

00:11:39.380 shock, which makes you feel a little bit better for a little while. And an hour later, we pulled into

00:11:44.400 the hospital. And I went out of compensatory shock right then into end stage hemorrhagic shock,

00:11:51.300 deeply hypothermic, not of right mind and actively dying and would probably have been

00:11:56.980 dead in the next 10 or 15 minutes had I not been in an ER at that moment. And they rushed me into the

00:12:03.040 trauma bay and started trying to save my life. I'll share an interesting anecdote from my days

00:12:09.880 in the trauma center at Johns Hopkins, which is that time to hospital and more specifically time

00:12:17.180 to either surgery or IR interventional radiology, which is where your life was saved is the single

00:12:23.700 most important metric. There's an amazing guy named Eddie Cornwall, who was at the time,

00:12:28.220 the chief of trauma surgery at Hopkins, who wanted to test this because of an interesting observation

00:12:34.880 he had made, which was when he was a trauma surgeon in Los Angeles, he noticed that the

00:12:43.060 gangbangers who were brought in by their buddies were surviving at a slightly higher rate than those

00:12:49.900 that were brought in by ambulance. Now, this is very counterintuitive. This is all penetrating trauma.

00:12:55.820 It's what we called the knife and gun club. And when a guy got shot or stabbed and his buddies

00:13:02.100 drove him to the ER and dropped him off and took off, because obviously everyone's in the wrong here,

00:13:07.720 those guys had a better chance of surviving than the guy who got brought in by the ambulance with

00:13:12.320 the IV fluids running in him and brought in. And so what Eddie and his colleagues postulated was

00:13:19.180 what could possibly be better about being thrown in the back of a truck than being in the ambulance?

00:13:25.480 And he realized, well, technically those guys are getting to us sooner because no one's putting

00:13:31.340 an IV in them, no one's checking their vital signs, no one's doing anything else. And so they did an

00:13:37.280 experiment, and it's kind of a crazy experiment, where depending on the day of the week, all

00:13:43.480 ambulances were going to basically randomize the trauma victims to either business as usual, which

00:13:51.420 means when a penetrating trauma victim is found, you do everything that you would normally do. You put

00:13:56.480 the IVs in them, you stabilize them, you start running IV fluids and you go, or what they called

00:14:00.760 scoop and run, which is the ambulance would get there and wouldn't do a thing, would literally pick

00:14:06.380 them up, throw them in the ambulance and get them into the hospital. So now you had a randomized

00:14:10.980 experiment, which can infer causality. And sure enough, wouldn't you know it, when you randomized to

00:14:18.640 scoop and run, you did better. The first thing I thought about, because nobody would believe this,

00:14:24.080 and it seems so counterintuitive. Had your wife been able to drive you right to the hospital,

00:14:29.300 which is the most counterintuitive thing, your odds are actually higher. Now it's fortunate that

00:14:33.840 it all worked out. But again, when I was reading the story, that was my thought was, Barbara,

00:14:40.200 just take him right to the hospital now. Don't do anything. Don't call an ambulance. Don't do

00:14:44.160 anything. Now, of course, the ambulance has some advantages. They have sirens, they can do all these

00:14:47.860 other things. But the bottom line is your life could only be saved in an operating room or in an IR

00:14:53.800 suite. Those are the only two places you're going to get saved. Right. And you can buy a little time

00:14:58.380 with a blood transfusion. Oh, you did need that as well, but you needed that as you were rolling

00:15:03.060 into those places. Right. And ambulances, it's changing a little bit now, but ambulances,

00:15:07.780 you get IV fluid, you don't get blood. And the truth was when the ambulance showed up,

00:15:11.920 they came quickly, but they were at my place for probably 15 or 20 minutes. Well, that's the other

00:15:17.120 thing about your story that's really remarkable is how you, being probably a normal dude, was kind

00:15:24.100 of like, yeah, I'm fine. I think I'm okay. I probably don't need to go in. And you almost

00:15:28.620 talked them into it. Yeah, yeah, right. This is the famous statistic that even flashed through my

00:15:33.520 mind at the time, which was married men live longer. And I watched it in action because my wife

00:15:38.920 is like, 10 minutes ago, he was passing out and going blinds. And I don't care if he seems a little

00:15:43.780 better right now. He's going downtown. You're taking him right now. But they still took quite

00:15:48.180 a while and it really upset my wife. Did they take a blood pressure on you at that moment?

00:15:53.000 Yeah. And by the time they got there, I'd gone into compensatory shock and my blood pressure was

00:15:57.520 sort of okay, I think. Because I know that your pulse was okay, which obviously is a compensation of

00:16:05.340 being fit and healthy. Right. But as I was reading it, of course, I'm thinking your blood pressure was

00:16:11.100 probably still 80 over 50. Right. And that would have been compensated enough for you to be

00:16:16.260 not passed out. But that's not a normal blood pressure. Right. Actually, I don't remember it.

00:16:20.660 I'm not quite sure. But whatever it was, it did not trigger their alarm. And they suggested that I stay

00:16:25.560 and drink some water and rehydrate in the shade, which would have killed me. But at any rate, we got

00:16:30.080 to the ER and they rushed me into the trauma bay. The doctors knew immediately what was going on. I was

00:16:35.100 pale as a sheet and I just had blood loss, you know, internal hemorrhage written all over me.

00:16:40.120 And the doctors said, so this is, of course, a semi sort of memoir type book. It's about my own

00:16:45.580 experience, which as a journalist, I haven't done much of that. In fact, I've been averse to it my

00:16:50.240 entire life, making myself the topic. But because I'm also a journalist, I wrote a sort of first person

00:16:56.820 account of something very intense and profound. But I interviewed everyone I could to sort of confirm

00:17:02.500 to myself that my memories are roughly correct and to just do some reporting because that's

00:17:07.280 what one does. And so I interviewed all the doctors who would talk to me. I even interviewed

00:17:11.380 my wife. I interviewed the guy who was in the back of the ambulance.

00:17:14.000 And, you know, you had, you were able to read all of the medical records, which are very

00:17:17.600 well documented, right? You timestamp every aspect of, you know, you, I mean, you would have seen

00:17:23.000 the moment you arrived in the ER, how many units of fluid, how many units of blood, all that stuff

00:17:27.880 is communicated clearly in the record.

00:17:29.440 Yeah. And just as a writer, you know, the language in these sort of specialty fields

00:17:34.180 is so fascinating. Like, even if you don't quite understand what's a French omni-flush,

00:17:39.940 whatever, you know, I mean, just the language is cool. Sometimes I put the language in there

00:17:43.660 just because it gives you the feeling of like, wow, we're in this world. And I've always done

00:17:48.460 that in my work. But at any rate, I interviewed everyone I could afterwards. And a couple of the

00:17:53.220 doctors didn't want to talk to me, I think just because they're skittish for legal reasons,

00:17:56.880 even though the outcome was amazing. They rushed me into the trauma bay. And again,

00:18:02.380 these are my memories, semi-confirmed by people who were there. The doctor asked,

00:18:07.340 I had no idea I was dying. Like, absolutely none.

00:18:10.440 What did you think was happening at that moment when you were sitting in the ER? Not in the ER,

00:18:15.880 in the trauma bay, rather.

00:18:16.620 So I sort of knew in my mind, it's not a heart attack. I don't have left side pain. I have a

00:18:23.640 healthy heart. There's no reason to think it was a heart attack. Maybe a stroke? Is that why I went

00:18:28.680 blind for a while? You know, I was sort of trying to go through the possibilities as a non-doctor.

00:18:33.140 And how much pain did you still have in your abdomen when you arrived?

00:18:35.960 Oh, I had a lot of pain.

00:18:37.560 Okay.

00:18:37.900 I mean, it wasn't kidney stone pain, which is anyone who's had kidney stones. I mean,

00:18:42.100 it's all but unbearable. But it was, I mean, I was, I'm sure I was visibly in pain. I'm wincing

00:18:48.220 and I'm like, sure, it looked like, you know, maybe the pain of a broken leg, something like

00:18:51.740 that. So what I thought, as far as I could come to a rational thought was, you know what?

00:18:57.260 Was your abdomen swelling at all?

00:18:58.860 I don't know if it was. They might have-

00:19:00.560 Nothing that you would have noticed.

00:19:01.860 No.

00:19:02.240 Okay.

00:19:02.900 There was abdominal guarding, which I guess is the muscles tensing in the abdomen to protect an

00:19:07.480 injured area. But I didn't know that. And I had the thought, the grim thought,

00:19:12.100 you know what? You might have cancer or something. You might have a tumor in your abdomen that like

00:19:16.180 ruptured and I'm making this stuff up as I go along. But I was just like, maybe something like

00:19:20.200 that happened and you're going to wake up in the morning with some pretty grim news about you got

00:19:25.320 six months. I mean, I was sort of vaguely aware of that possibility. I had absolutely no idea that,

00:19:31.640 hey man, you are dying right now.

00:19:33.580 Did an aneurysm cross your mind? Your aneurysm is a very, very obscure one. But if you think of the two

00:19:39.920 most common aneurysms in the abdomen, one would be an abdominal aortic aneurysm, the other would

00:19:45.360 be a splenic artery aneurysm, which is not that far from where yours is. Although the cause is

00:19:49.840 hereditary, yours is caused by the median arcuate ligament as you described. But I'm sure you've

00:19:55.520 heard of somebody dying from an aneurysm before. I was just curious as to what was going through.

00:20:00.480 Yeah, I have one of my best friends had an operation to replace his aorta. They had to open

00:20:07.680 him up and fix his aorta because he had an aortic aneurysm. So I knew about this, but at one point

00:20:12.280 a nurse rushed in because they did a CAT scan on me. I think it was a CAT scan. They pushed me through

00:20:16.980 the donut very quickly and I'm convulsing. I mean, I'm in deep in shock and I've got a heated blanket

00:20:21.720 on me and I was not doing well. But she came up to me and she said, you didn't hear it from me,

00:20:27.320 but good news, it's not your aorta. And so in my civilian non-medical mind, I'm like,

00:20:33.300 your aorta is part of your heart. My tummy hurts. Like what the, what, why are we even talking about

00:20:38.820 the aorta? So no, the short answer is no. I just thought I might have terrible news tomorrow morning,

00:20:44.400 but I had no idea that I was, you know, it was going down right now. And I'm so glad I didn't

00:20:49.480 because I would have been absolutely terrified. And I wouldn't have been thinking about my family,

00:20:53.300 my daughters, three-year-old, six-month-old. And my wife couldn't come with me.

00:20:59.640 When you went back to interview your wife, what did she think as the ambulance was leaving?

00:21:04.480 What was her level of concern?

00:21:06.540 She was very, very worried because she'd seen me go in and out of consciousness. And she just had

00:21:12.060 this sense like at some point he's going to go out and not come back. She kept squeezing my hand

00:21:16.020 saying, honey, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me. And I'd sort of wake up and babble and not

00:21:19.900 make any sense and then go out again. So she had to watch all that.

00:21:23.600 And then, then the ER doctor called. She couldn't follow me in the ambulance because

00:21:28.820 of COVID restrictions. And then the ER doctor called. It took him a while to get through to

00:21:33.120 the phone because the phone lines weren't working and there was no cell phone service. It was a

00:21:36.960 nightmare. He finally got through and he said, I think you should come to the hospital as fast as

00:21:43.600 possible. Don't drive a hundred miles an hour, but if this were my wife, I would be heading to the

00:21:49.440 hospital fast. She knew what that meant. So she arranged for care for the children and jumped in

00:21:56.820 the car and drove to the hospital the whole way knowing that I might not make it. Why else would

00:22:02.640 the doctor say that? And the doctor told the hospital to waive the COVID restrictions so that

00:22:08.460 she could come in. So she sort of knew, oh, this isn't good. And I later looked up the odds for

00:22:15.140 surviving what I had and they're pretty grim. And that's with a quick transport time. I mean,

00:22:19.960 it took me an hour and a half. Yeah. It's just unbelievable.

00:22:23.440 To get there from the onset, an hour and a half. Thank God I'm healthy. I mean,

00:22:27.920 if I'd had a bad heart or whatever. Well, again, only because the actual artery that

00:22:32.140 had the aneurysm is quite small. Right.

00:22:33.980 Like had it been a splenic artery, if it was the abdominal aorta, you wouldn't have made it out of

00:22:38.920 the cabin. Right. But a slightly larger artery, and I don't think you've survived given that you

00:22:45.080 probably lost 60% of your blood volume into your abdomen. Is that what they were guessing? Something

00:22:51.160 like that. Yeah. I'm just sort of imagining how obscure this is. If I were in that situation,

00:22:56.800 I would be assuming this was sort of a gastric ulcer gone bad. Did they tell you what else they

00:23:03.260 were assuming this was? Because it was pretty clear to them, I would guess, the second you

00:23:07.460 arrived. Because not only do they see your vital signs, your clinical signs, at some point they've

00:23:12.020 drawn blood and they've probably seen that your hemoglobin, instead of being 14, which is what

00:23:17.080 it should be, or your hematocrit in the mid-40s was probably 10 or less at this point.

00:23:22.700 The doctor said he had almost never seen hemoglobin so low. My blood pressure was 60 over 40,

00:23:28.200 but he was like, it was the hemoglobin that really alarmed him. No, they didn't explain anything to me.

00:23:32.400 Oh, I just wonder if after the fact, they walked you through their thought process,

00:23:36.260 because they had a very difficult decision to make, which was to take you to the cath lab

00:23:41.160 or take you to the OR. That's a very, very big decision. You do a great job in the book of

00:23:47.000 explaining the pros and cons of each. They made the right choice.

00:23:51.860 Yeah. Well, I stabilized on hemodynamically stable, I think is the term. I stabilized on three

00:23:57.660 units of blood.

00:23:58.280 Which is kind of amazing because that's a fraction of the blood that you lost.

00:24:01.940 You would have probably lost six or seven units. The detail of this, I think for the listener is

00:24:09.420 interesting, right? So what has to have been happening is there has to have been some tamponade.

00:24:14.460 Yes.

00:24:14.620 There has to have been, you lost, call it six, seven units of blood, but it must have created

00:24:20.940 enough pressure around in what's called the retroperitoneum to create just enough to prevent

00:24:28.180 more blood from going in. So that when they gave you those three units, those three units stayed in

00:24:33.180 your vasculature as opposed to just continued to leak out.

00:24:36.400 Right. And the problem with going into the OR and opening you up is you lose that back pressure

00:24:40.920 and your blood geyser's out of there and they have to find the bleed before you bleed out and

00:24:46.760 just sounds like a ghastly nightmare.

00:24:49.840 And their only option, honestly, in that situation is to do what's called cross clamp the aorta.

00:24:54.460 So they actually have to take literally as ridiculous as that sounds, you take a big clamp

00:24:58.720 and you go above the diaphragm. They might even open your chest and they put a clamp across the

00:25:03.420 aorta.

00:25:03.760 Good God.

00:25:04.560 And what that does is it absolutely stops any blood flow below that point. So the good news is your heart

00:25:10.680 is going to be fine because your heart gets perfused above the aorta. Your head is fine.

00:25:15.280 Those are the two most important things. And what's going to happen is your kidneys are going

00:25:18.940 to start dying. Everything below the body is going to have no perfusion, but that buys them enough

00:25:24.440 time to find what's wrong.

00:25:26.180 Can they find it if it's not bleeding?

00:25:28.260 Well, I mean, it's very difficult because they're going to have to go and see where the clot was and

00:25:33.700 then they're going to let the clamp off, see what comes, re-clamp.

00:25:38.960 Oh my God.

00:25:39.900 Yeah. This was something we had to do all the time in trauma. And sometimes you would have to do this

00:25:45.220 in the emergency room. Like a guy would come in and he'd have a gunshot wound or a stab wound

00:25:51.020 to his aorta. And you have to literally open his chest without anesthetizing him because of course

00:25:57.420 he's already not responsive at this point. And put your hand in, move his lungs out of the way,

00:26:01.540 get all the blood out of the way and get a clamp across the aorta.

00:26:03.620 Good God. Wow.

00:26:05.800 And I'm sure when you were covering the wars, this is stuff that was being done in the field.

00:26:11.120 Right. Some of it was developed in the field apparently. So they stabilized me with three

00:26:15.320 units over the course of an hour and then sent me into the IR suite while they were trying to

00:26:19.940 track down the interventional radiologist.

00:26:22.540 What time is it now? It's late.

00:26:24.440 Yeah, it's like nine o'clock at night.

00:26:25.840 Okay. Yeah.

00:26:26.400 So they sort of called him in from sort of dinner, as it were, from his home, Dr. Phil Dombrowski.

00:26:31.540 Who was sort of known in the hospital as the magician because he was like super, super good

00:26:35.860 at his job. So interventional radiology involves putting someone on a fluoroscope, which is like

00:26:42.260 a sort of video feed x-ray machine and inserting catheters or rubber or wire, rubber tubes or wire

00:26:49.460 into the venous system, usually through the right groin into the femoral artery and then threading

00:26:55.720 it around through your body, trying to get through the twists and turns of your vasculature, trying

00:27:00.340 to get it to the site that needs work and your aorta or your pancreatic artery or whatever

00:27:07.020 it may be. And that avoids having to open the person up because you can work from the

00:27:10.460 inside out, from inside the vascular system. I mean, I know you know all this, but it's

00:27:14.460 fascinating. You know, a lot of people don't. I mean, you know, one interventional radiologist

00:27:17.860 was like, even our spouses aren't entirely sure what we do. Like it's a rather lesser known

00:27:22.980 of the medical specialties, but absolutely crucial.

00:27:25.720 And then there's one other thing that they can do there, which I'm sure they explained was

00:27:29.880 they can also, when they want to, inject contrast.

00:27:33.400 They did that. Exactly.

00:27:34.240 And then you can look for, oh, where is it bleeding? Like, where is it leaking out of

00:27:37.620 this system here?

00:27:38.820 So my wife finally got to the hospital and they've stuck her in her basement. There's no really

00:27:42.700 waiting room because it's COVID. So she's by herself in this room. The janitor comes through

00:27:48.400 once in a while to get the mop or whatever, but she's sort of stuck there. And at one point,

00:27:52.620 after hours, a doctor sprints through shouting into his cell phone, it's the pancreas. It's

00:27:58.720 the pancreas. She didn't know, but he was talking about me. They'd finally located the

00:28:02.860 bleed in my pancreatic artery. One of the, I think, five that goes into the pancreas.

00:28:07.840 So they started trying to get the catheter from my right groin in through my vasculature

00:28:12.760 to the pancreatic artery. And partly because of this strange anatomy that I have, the vasculature

00:28:19.620 in my abdomen is very difficult to navigate. And they tried and tried. And over the course

00:28:26.020 of some hours, I just kept failing to get there.

00:28:29.360 Because I listened to your book on audio, I didn't actually check. Are there figures in

00:28:33.200 the actual book? Did you have an anatomic diagram of what the celiac artery looks like coming

00:28:38.780 off the aorta into its pancreatic tributaries?

00:28:41.600 There's no diagrams.

00:28:42.680 I think it would be really wonderful for people listening to us now to just go on Google and go

00:28:47.460 to Google images and look up celiac branch of the aorta or something like that with all

00:28:52.960 of its tributaries. And I think what they'll appreciate, especially if they just look at

00:28:55.880 the arterial system, is you have to imagine what it's like to put a catheter in the femoral

00:29:01.060 artery, which is in the groin. And then you have to snake it up the femoral artery, which

00:29:06.240 is really easy. It becomes the aorta, no problem. And then you're going to pass some major branches.

00:29:12.720 So the first thing you're going to pass on the right and left will be the renal arteries,

00:29:16.880 one going to each kidney. And then there's like these little vertebral arteries and things on

00:29:21.280 the way. But the really big ones you're going to see will be two big ones that go to the gut.

00:29:25.480 They're called mesenteric arteries. But then you get to the celiac. And the problem with the celiac

00:29:30.420 is, and this is not even before we're talking about yours, which is more problematic because it's

00:29:36.080 compressed by the median arcuate ligament. But the problem is it's coming down. So you described

00:29:43.020 this very well, but I think sometimes the picture says a thousand words is like, how are they going

00:29:47.540 to get the catheter to go up, then come down, then twist this way, then twist that way. That's the real

00:29:54.900 challenge with that big 180 degree hairpin turn.

00:29:59.060 Right. And then my vasculature around the pancreas was very contorted and distorted by

00:30:06.460 the ligament in the wrong place. So I'm in the IR suite and I'm conscious. I mean,

00:30:13.380 they couldn't sedate me. They didn't sedate me. They gave me a little bit of fentanyl and verse it.

00:30:17.340 I'm conscious. I'm in enormous pain because all this blood has settled around my kidneys and my back.

00:30:23.100 And my back was just in agony. And I think it was all the blood that was around my organs.

00:30:27.000 Are you conscious of time?

00:30:29.980 No, I knew it had been forever. I'll put it that way. It seemed like a very long time.

00:30:35.420 I didn't have a normal sense of, wow, it's probably been about three hours.

00:30:38.540 I wasn't clocking it with that kind of precision, but I was in and out of some minds. I was a lot

00:30:43.940 more there than I wished I'd been. At one point I started seeing terrifying faces in the machinery

00:30:48.880 and the fluoroscope that was above my head that was really terrifying and reminded me of a very scary

00:30:54.360 incident in Africa that happened to me years earlier. But then I watched the doctors come

00:31:00.400 to this moment and I watched one of them shrug his shoulders and basically was like, we tried.

00:31:07.120 This isn't going to work. And the other one sort of nodded. And I couldn't believe that I was sort

00:31:12.140 of watching this. And then the first doctor, who I think was Dr. Dombrowski, said, maybe we can try

00:31:20.420 one last thing, which is going through his left wrist instead of his groin. And the other doctor,

00:31:25.300 Dr. Gorin, said, I like the way you think. And that somehow allowed them an approach that ultimately

00:31:32.880 worked. So they went through my left wrist and through the celiac from above and they had to get

00:31:39.920 through the occlusion because the ligament is completely blocking the celiac and has been for

00:31:44.300 my entire life. And they inflated it. They were able to push it open and pass a catheter through

00:31:52.440 that and eventually get it to the spot where they could embolize the rupture, they could block the

00:31:57.120 rupture and pull their gear out and, you know, they're on their way to saving my life. But I should

00:32:01.700 just say, just because medicine is so extraordinary and I'm alive because of any number of people,

00:32:07.460 the team that was in the room, but decades of doctors, researchers inventing this incredible

00:32:14.100 technology and the 10 people who donated blood that they pumped into my veins to keep me alive.

00:32:19.700 I owe my life to many, many good people. But one of them is a German doctor named Forsmann who

00:32:25.580 invented the venous catheter. And he did it. It's kind of a funny story. It was almost exactly 100 years

00:32:32.240 ago. And he was a young guy, young doctor in a small German hospital. He just had this idea,

00:32:38.220 why can't you push a catheter from a vein into your heart? Why can't you do that?

00:32:42.640 Or from an artery.

00:32:43.380 Or from an artery, right. So he asked the director of the hospital for permission to do it on a patient.

00:32:50.560 And the director was like, no, we're here to heal them, not to experiment on them. Like,

00:32:55.180 I think it was 1923 in Germany. So he's like, okay, well, how about a dying patient? He's like,

00:33:00.520 no, we still can't do it. So he snuck into the hospital. He had a confederate and a young nurse.

00:33:06.020 And he told her that he was going to do this procedure on her and she would be the first person

00:33:10.020 to have a catheter inside her heart. I think she was kind of sweet on him. It doesn't seem like

00:33:15.100 much of an inducement, but she went for it, right? And so she laid down on the table. He had her lie

00:33:20.380 down on the table and he strapped her arm down, ready for the procedure. And after she was strapped

00:33:25.260 down, he turned away and numbed his own arm and cut his arm open and threaded a catheter.

00:33:30.520 Into his venous system in his arm and pushed it through. And he had the tube marked off to where

00:33:36.460 it would be just about in his heart. And he pushed it to the marker. And then he released her from

00:33:41.960 the table. She was absolutely furious, apparently, that she'd been cheated out of being like a medical

00:33:46.640 first. They walked down the hall to x-ray and he told the technician to take an x-ray and prove that

00:33:53.060 he was in his own heart with a catheter. So I owe my life to that guy too. And to the nurse in some ways

00:33:58.920 who got cheated. I remember the very first time I put a catheter into the heart, I was actually a

00:34:05.760 medical student. I think today it might not be something they would let medical students do.

00:34:09.620 They might want to wait for you to be a little bit more senior, but it was a little looser 25,

00:34:14.880 30 years ago. And of course it was under supervision, but to put what was called a swan-gans catheter

00:34:20.920 from the subclavian vein into the heart and then ultimately into the pulmonary arteries to measure

00:34:28.680 the pressure of the pulmonary system. And you're sort of doing this and you can't believe that you

00:34:34.860 can do this. You can't believe the human body, which on the one hand is so delicate and you've seen what

00:34:41.740 these walls of veins look like. And that's even more scary than the walls of arteries because they're

00:34:46.880 so thin. And you think, boy, if you screw this up, this person will be dead in about a minute.

00:34:55.280 And then you sort of fast forward to what you experienced and the level of skill that is

00:35:01.240 required. I mean, to put a balloon catheter from the subclavian vein into the pulmonary artery,

00:35:07.120 believe it or not, is not that difficult. I mean, you have to absolutely know what you're doing. But

00:35:11.400 what happened in your case is two orders of magnitude more skill required because they're

00:35:16.960 threading something very small from your radial artery all the way up into the subclavian, into the

00:35:23.960 aorta, retrograde down. And then of course they still have to do everything you just described. And

00:35:29.120 again, it's, you can't use too much force. You can't be a brute. It's a finesse thing.

00:35:34.340 So I was at a reading a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta talking about my book and I was talking

00:35:39.820 about putting the, uh, we didn't, I didn't discuss this.

00:35:42.240 Oh, you put the cordis in your neck. Yeah.

00:35:43.560 Right. Right. So I was talking about putting the line into my jugular and there was a guy in

00:35:47.660 the audience who had needle phobia and I watched him just pass out in his seat while I'm talking

00:35:53.680 about this, like right in front of me, eyes rolled back in his head, awful sort of strangling sounds

00:35:59.300 coming out of his throat. I mean, just like I dropped him unintentionally. And so I called for a

00:36:05.720 doctor and is there a doctor in the audience? Never thought I'd have to say that.

00:36:09.820 And this older guy, two guys came rushing forward, a younger guy who was a paramedic

00:36:13.500 who wrote a wonderful book called A Thousand Naked Strangers, which is a book about working

00:36:18.440 on an ambulance. And then another older guy came forward and they helped this guy. He just passed

00:36:22.700 out. They helped them. He was fine. Thank God. But the older guy who came forward had trained the

00:36:28.720 guy who saved my life, Dr. Dombrowski. That was his mentor. He said maybe 5% of interventional

00:36:34.300 radiologists could have done what Dr. Dombrowski did. He said, you're really, really lucky,

00:36:38.720 extraordinarily lucky. You really threaded the needle here medically.

00:36:43.540 After many hours, they managed to embolize the rupture. And then I think they just knocked me out

00:36:49.080 and sent me up to the ICU. I briefly remember seeing my wife and holding her hand afterwards

00:36:53.020 as I was getting rolled out. My back was still in agony. And I sort of, on the way through,

00:36:59.420 I begged her for a quick back rub. The nurse was like, no, no, no, no back rubs. We're going to the

00:37:04.660 ICU. I was just in agony. And then they knocked me out. And I woke up to the sound of nurses' voices

00:37:09.960 in the ICU the next morning and woke up completely, completely ignorant that I'd almost died. I had

00:37:16.680 no idea. And it was the ICU nurse that said, man, no one can believe you're alive. You made it.

00:37:22.600 Now, was this the ICU nurse that you later spoke about?

00:37:25.660 Yeah.

00:37:26.260 Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that discussion.

00:37:28.680 So as soon as she said, Mr. Younger, congratulations, good morning, you made it.

00:37:33.420 It's a miracle. As soon as she said that, I was shocked, horrified and shocked. And then I had this

00:37:39.560 memory from when I was on the threshold. It came back to me instantly, particularly for me as an

00:37:46.040 atheist. This was the central mystery of my experience. And whether it's brain chemistry or not,

00:37:51.580 this is the central mystery that I've grappled with. So when I was in the trauma bay, the doctor

00:37:57.840 said to me, ask permission to put a line through my neck into my jugular, which didn't sound like a

00:38:03.820 lot of fun. And I had no idea I was dying and I didn't know what all the fuss was about. And so I

00:38:08.020 said, is that really necessary? Why? And I said, in case there's an emergency? And he said, this is

00:38:14.000 the emergency, Mr. Younger. And he was a young guy. He was like probably 25. I'm like, kid, I'm three

00:38:18.880 times your age. Like what's happening here, right? So he started working on me and they use an

00:38:24.940 ultrasound probe and result procedure that I think probably doesn't take particularly long. It felt

00:38:29.380 like a long time to me. While I'm lying there and I'm feeling this pressure on my neck while they're

00:38:34.120 starting to prep the area and you're under a sheet. I'm under a sterile sheet, clear plastic sheet.

00:38:39.800 Yes, if I'm claustrophobic. And since being in combat, combat may be extremely claustrophobic for

00:38:45.360 some reason that I don't understand. Apparently that's quite common. He said, are you claustrophobic?

00:38:49.740 And I said, I am actually. And he said, well, that's too bad. And he put the sheet over me.

00:38:54.080 And I was like, oh, finally someone with a sense of humor. They're working on my neck. And to my shock,

00:38:59.600 to my horror, suddenly beneath me and to my left, I sensed this black void open up, this abyss.

00:39:06.140 And it's like this infinitely dark pit without dimension. And I'm getting pulled into it. And again,

00:39:14.360 I have no idea that I'm dying, but I was like a wounded animal. I just had this animal sense,

00:39:19.520 like don't go into the pit. Because if you go into the pit, you're not coming back.

00:39:23.320 Your eyes are open? Your eyes are closed?

00:39:25.360 Well, I'm conversant with the doctor. So I don't know if they're open or not. I mean,

00:39:28.780 and I'm frankly not craning my neck to look down at the floor. So it's not like I

00:39:32.480 visually saw it, but I felt it. Suddenly there was this pit. It was like standing on the edge of a

00:39:39.140 cliff. You can kind of feel the void. And I was like, oh my God, I'm getting pulled into this hole.

00:39:43.400 And it was a completely new experience. I hadn't felt it before. It was there very suddenly and it

00:39:49.220 was unopposable. I mean, it was just, this is what's happening. And I got very scared. And as

00:39:55.660 I got scared, suddenly I, in quotation marks, saw my dead father above me. Now, not only am I an

00:40:03.680 atheist, but my father was an atheist. He died eight years earlier. He was a physicist,

00:40:08.360 a rationalist and trained me well in all those practices, basically. That way of thinking about

00:40:16.140 the world. My mother, who was kind of a bit on the woo-woo side, he drove her crazy by sort of

00:40:21.820 asking precise questions about her beliefs. Like, what do you mean bad energy? How does bad energy

00:40:28.520 make you sick? You know, like, I mean, he would ask things like that, which it's amazing they stayed

00:40:32.320 married. But at any rate, suddenly my dead father was above me and to my left. And I was shocked to

00:40:40.700 see him because I'm still talking to the doctors, right? It's not like I had cardiac arrest and I'm

00:40:44.720 in some netherworld. I'm still there and there he is above me in the room. And he communicated to me

00:40:51.020 something along the lines of, it's okay, you don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care

00:40:56.820 of you. And I was absolutely horrified. I mean, it was almost grotesque. I was almost offended.

00:41:04.140 Like, go with you. You're dead. Why would I go with you? I'm alive. We have nothing to talk about.

00:41:11.020 And I love my dad. I said, we have nothing to talk about. I'm not going anywhere with you.

00:41:15.380 Why do you think you weren't comforted by him in some way? For example, you hadn't seen him in eight

00:41:21.880 years. It's clear from your book that you have an amazing affection for your father. It's not like

00:41:27.580 this is a person you don't love or miss. I just find it interesting. And there's no answer to this

00:41:33.140 question, but your aversion to his presence, does it suggest to you that something about engaging with

00:41:43.520 him in any way was tantamount to death for you? He was clearly inviting me to join him where he was.

00:41:51.080 And I knew he was dead. I wasn't literally thinking in my mind, I have two little girls,

00:41:56.160 I'm married, I have a lot to live for. I'm only 58 for God's sake. I mean, I wasn't thinking those

00:42:00.840 thoughts precisely, but there was this basic dichotomy. There's the black pit, there's my

00:42:06.680 dead father, and that's all death. That's nothingness. You're outbound on a journey you're

00:42:13.080 not coming back from into the nothing. That's what it felt like. And he was part of that.

00:42:17.780 And I was almost offended that he would imagine that I would prefer to go with him into that than

00:42:25.880 to stay in my life. And I almost worried that it would hurt his feelings. I mean, it was like on

00:42:31.440 that level of, don't you want to spend time with your daddy? And I was like, no, you're dead.

00:42:36.680 I want to spend time here for the rest of my life. We'll talk later. It was a very,

00:42:43.400 very visceral response. And I really was horrified. And one of the theories about near-death experiences

00:42:48.260 is that it's an adaptive sort of behavior that's a form of comforting. It's comforting to the dying

00:42:54.720 person that they see beloved loved ones. And, ah, I'm not just leaving this life. I'm sort of

00:43:00.120 crossing over into this beautiful world of all these dead people that I miss, and it's going to

00:43:05.280 be fine. Like, that was absolutely not the case for me. I was horrified. And I said to the doctor,

00:43:11.460 because he just kept fumbling around, what to me felt like fumbling around with my neck.

00:43:15.680 I know that's not fair to him, but that's what it felt like. And I said, you got to hurry. I'm going.

00:43:20.320 I didn't know where I was going. I didn't know I was dying, but I knew I was going somewhere where I

00:43:24.660 wasn't coming back. I knew that much. And he got the line in, and they started transfusing me.

00:43:31.680 So are you realizing this for the first time in the ICU the next day, or are you just remembering

00:43:38.200 it and now experiencing it sort of through your memory the second time?

00:43:42.780 Well, in the ICU, I remembered experiencing it for the first time. It was an extremely powerful

00:43:50.660 memory. And it was terrifying. You know, I'd just woken up from whatever they put me under with,

00:43:56.860 and I was woken up by the nurse talking over me, talking to the other ICU nurse. And I was woken up

00:44:03.140 by voices. I opened my eyes. She said, good morning, Mr. Younger. Congratulations. And as soon as she said

00:44:09.080 it, I remembered that I'd had this terrifying encounter, this horrifying encounter with my father

00:44:15.120 and with the pit. And it was the next thing I thought. So my brain was so confused. It was like

00:44:21.720 I was extremely drunk or something like that. My brain was so confused in those moments. I was

00:44:26.660 rational enough to speak to the doctor, but I was in a very strange state of mind. So it wasn't like

00:44:31.220 in that moment, I was thinking, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I'm seeing my dead father. I didn't

00:44:35.820 have that kind of self-conscious awareness of the moment the way when we might now. I mean,

00:44:41.660 if I saw my dead father above me right now, I'd be like, do you see that above us? Because he's

00:44:47.260 right there. Like, it wasn't like that. But it was the first thing that came back to me when I

00:44:53.280 woke up. And it was the first thing I asked my wife, because again, I'm a journalist and I'm a

00:44:58.400 skeptic. And I was sort of worried that I'd somehow unconsciously cooked all this up later. And so I asked

00:45:04.860 my wife, like, when you came into the room, what happened? And she said, she said, the first thing you

00:45:11.220 said to me was, I almost died last night and it's all my father. It was the first thing I told her.

00:45:17.900 Whatever that means, I'm confident that I had some sort of experience in those moments and not

00:45:24.900 one that was sort of like conjured later retroactively. I can't prove that, of course,

00:45:29.220 but that's my sense about it. So say more about this nurse. What else did she tell you?

00:45:33.320 She dropped that bomb on me and left to go attend to the other patients. I'm lying on the bed. I've

00:45:42.220 got six units of blood and floating, sloshing around in my abdomen. I got 10 people's blood

00:45:46.960 inside me. Got tubes all over the place. I'm in incredible pain. I'm throwing up blood because

00:45:52.460 somehow the blood got into my digestive system as well. I was throwing up blood that whole morning.

00:45:57.160 It was really unpleasant. I'm trying to digest this news that I almost died. It just seemed

00:46:03.580 inconceivable. It would be as inconceivable as when you wake up in the morning, you know,

00:46:08.840 tomorrow morning when you wake up, instead of waking up in your bed at home with your wife,

00:46:14.320 you wake up in a hospital and first thing you hear is, honey, you almost died last night.

00:46:18.980 It was that inconceivable. Like what?

00:46:20.980 Even though you remember the events of the day that led you there.

00:46:27.740 You know, I didn't know anything about what dying feels like and I've pictured it to feel

00:46:31.820 way more catastrophic than what I experienced. I was in compensatory shock the whole drive down there

00:46:37.620 and then I was in a very, very weird state and in a lot of pain and it just was inconceivable to me

00:46:42.900 that this was it. This is the big deal. This is dying. It just seemed like there'd be more blood

00:46:49.040 on the floor. There'd be something. I had belly pain. Like it just didn't.

00:46:52.180 But it didn't resonate to you yet that if there were 10 pieces of Swiss cheese that were placed

00:46:58.260 on top of each other, you happened to be one of those 10 stacks where a pencil still made it through.

00:47:05.220 Did that occur to you yet? Because there was, again, there's so much freakish luck.

00:47:10.060 We could recount it all, but we don't need to. At this point, there were 10 things,

00:47:14.500 all of which had to happen for you to survive right up into including having the right

00:47:21.560 interventional radiologist there. Did that resonate yet?

00:47:25.440 Not till later. And when I found that out as I started to do the research,

00:47:28.840 every time I encountered another facet of how unlikely it was, I would get incredibly depressed.

00:47:34.500 It still depresses me. When I talked to the mentor of the guy who saved my life and he said,

00:47:40.400 Dr. Dombrowski is one of maybe in the 5% of all IR guys who could have saved your life,

00:47:48.620 I felt my spirits just plummet. And there wasn't any of this sort of like former athlete in me of

00:47:55.140 like, yeah, I did something almost no one else can do. There wasn't any pride in there.

00:47:59.500 Is there a sense of, I don't know what the right word is. It's not gratitude. That's a bit glib.

00:48:04.380 Is there a sense of awe in that? Or is there a sense of, do you believe there's meaning in that?

00:48:09.080 Or do you believe that there's no meaning in that? And it's just as much luck as the world is full of

00:48:14.720 bad luck. I'm much more familiar as I'm sure you and many people listening are. We're much more

00:48:20.460 familiar with the opposite, right? It's like the person who did everything right. And they just

00:48:25.640 happened to get hit by some drunk idiot who ran a red light and there was virtually nothing they

00:48:30.340 could have done to have prevented it. It's purely a lightning strike. And how often does bad luck

00:48:36.260 take a life just as remarkable luck saved a life? Do you process it like that at all?

00:48:43.520 Yeah, I do. We all are sort of looking for meaning in the universe and there are no coincidences and

00:48:49.640 everything happens for a reason. And all those sort of like narratives that we put on, I think,

00:48:55.620 a fairly random universe. I mean, random, but for the laws of physics. But in terms of the events of

00:49:00.940 our life, I was at an American outpost in Afghanistan and I was shocked to feel some

00:49:07.240 sand flick into the side of my face. Bullets travel faster than sound. And the outpost would

00:49:12.880 get attacked from about 500 meters out, which is quite a long shot for an AK-47 or a PKM. And

00:49:18.280 the bullets arrive way before the sound does. So some sand flicked into the side of my face. I just had

00:49:24.140 time to think, what was that? I was standing against some sandbags. What was that? And then I heard

00:49:29.120 da-da-da-da-da. So that was the first burst of an hour-long firefight. And the bullets had to have

00:49:33.560 hit with maybe an inch or two from my forehead, right? In my opinion, utterly random. I was blown

00:49:39.220 up by an IED. It went off under the engine block instead of under us. The Taliban guy with the clacker

00:49:44.520 and the ravine missed it by a second, a second. But the whole rest of my life unfolded. It's contained

00:49:50.560 in that second in some ways because we were spared. And so at one point I was at a reading early,

00:49:58.060 early on, right when the book came out, and a guy raised his hand at the end. He was quite agitated.

00:50:03.320 And he said, I'm Christian and you're alive because of God's grace. And you have to come

00:50:10.020 to Jesus and understand that it was only God's grace that saved you. And I said to him, one of

00:50:15.620 my best friends, my brother, my colleague, Tim Hetherington was killed in combat in Libya on an

00:50:20.760 assignment I was supposed to be on. His death was what got me out of war reporting and then had a

00:50:25.640 family, et cetera. And he bled out also, I mean, from a wound in his groin, but he was in a war

00:50:31.260 zone and they couldn't save him. And so I said to the guy, I said, you know, my problem with that

00:50:35.640 way of thinking, that there's some purpose here, some meaning here, is why me, right? Like why me

00:50:42.480 and not Tim? For that matter, why me and not some nine-year-old with cancer? I'm sorry. And if God is

00:50:48.840 running a random lottery for his grace, I don't want any part of it. I think that the universe,

00:50:54.620 it unfolds in random ways. And I just got super, super lucky. But the fact that I got that lucky

00:51:02.620 makes me profoundly grateful and is also incredibly depressing to me for reasons that I can't quite

00:51:08.720 understand. But I just sort of think about what was statistically supposed to happen by a factor

00:51:15.080 of maybe 10 to one or something or more. Probably more. Probably more. Have you spoken with others?

00:51:20.960 Because I'm just very curious about that, Sebastian. The gratitude makes a lot of sense

00:51:25.560 to me. And I don't know how I would feel in your situation. So this is curiosity and not,

00:51:30.560 certainly not judgment. I'm curious though, if you've spoken with others who have survived

00:51:35.320 similar experiences. I think of my friend, Rick Elias, I should introduce you guys. So Rick was on that

00:51:39.520 US Airways flight that had to emergency land in the Hudson. So again, you've got this guy,

00:51:44.860 Captain Sullenberger, who he's the one out of 50 of heat. That's exactly right. He's the one out of

00:51:51.900 50 guys that could have actually make the right decision with enough time to spare and then carried

00:51:59.460 it out. And again, he wasn't supposed to live. I've never asked him this question. This would be an

00:52:05.720 interesting topic, is how many other people on this planet who are alive only because of monumental

00:52:13.280 luck? What is the balance between the gratitude and the heaviness of that that tips into dysthymia?

00:52:22.120 Well, if I didn't have children, I think it would be psychologically a little easier.

00:52:25.920 But what it would have left them with was such a legacy of pain and absence. And my poor wife,

00:52:32.300 that made it harder. The things that would have consoled me, like holding my daughter,

00:52:36.340 like I survived. And here I'm holding my daughter in my lap. And I immediately think,

00:52:39.540 oh, but this wasn't supposed to happen, right? She's supposed to be grieving me right now. By odds

00:52:43.200 of 100 to 1, she should. And it's a miracle. And then I would just spin out into what could have

00:52:48.220 happened. And I eventually talked to her shrink. I mean, my wife was like, honey, you're getting a

00:52:53.380 little hard to live with. Can you seek help? And it was a great thing to do. And it really,

00:52:57.440 really helped me. And my therapist was basically, she was like, listen,

00:53:00.480 if you keep telling yourself this narrative that you almost died, you're never going to escape this

00:53:05.600 incredible anxiety and panic disorder and depression that you've worked yourself into.

00:53:10.360 You have to stop telling yourself this story. She was absolutely right. And apparently this sort

00:53:14.880 of negative storytelling is very, very common in people who almost died. And the sequence of

00:53:21.320 really, really profound anxiety and fear, medical paranoia, it's going to happen again. Any moment,

00:53:27.520 I'm going to bleed out again, you know, like that sort of paranoia. And then that finally eased off

00:53:32.240 and I wound up in this unbelievable depression. And I've never been depressed in my life. I'm not a

00:53:37.900 particularly anxious person. And I was amazed at how debilitating depression was. And I finally got

00:53:43.100 it because I've had friends who have struggled with depression. I lost a friend to suicide. And

00:53:47.160 suddenly I was like, oh, this is what they're talking about. Why bother going through the rest of

00:53:52.400 your life? Like that kind of thought? I had no idea. It really opened a door to like, oh, I had no

00:53:58.300 idea. That's what, when people say depression, this is what they're talking about. And it was quite

00:54:03.660 frightening. One of the problems, so I had trouble, I know we have to get back to the nurse, which is

00:54:08.920 part of this problem, this reality problem that I had. I was having trouble understanding, being

00:54:14.120 confident about what reality was and what it wasn't. And part of that stemmed from this somewhat

00:54:20.240 clairvoyant dream that I had. So, and I just have to reiterate, I'm really not a spiritual,

00:54:25.420 mystical, or woo-woo person. I'm really not. Which is why this stuff unsettled me so much.

00:54:30.500 Much more your father than your mother.

00:54:32.140 Much more, right? Which is why this is unsettling to me.

00:54:36.140 36 hours prior, the only symptoms I had that something was awry in my abdomen was sort of

00:54:41.420 intermittent pain that would come and go. And if I were more responsible, I would have gone to the

00:54:46.000 doctor and they would have scanned me and they would have seen a big ass aneurysm in my pancreatic artery

00:54:50.620 and they would have fixed it without all the drama. But I didn't do that and it wasn't consistent

00:54:55.760 enough to like get me to the doctor. And I just thought anything that's going to kill me is going

00:54:59.940 to be agonizing in a stupid way. I was like, if I can bear the pain, what could it do? So, I thought

00:55:06.420 I had irritable bowel syndrome as I sort of cooked up for some internet Googling. And what it probably was,

00:55:12.260 was the aneurysm starting to dissect a little bit and leak a little bit of blood into my abdomen.

00:55:16.000 And that's the pain I was feeling. And my body on some level, I think knew there's a five alarm fire

00:55:22.620 coming. So, 36 hours prior to nearly dying, I was woken up at dawn. So, my family, we co-sleep

00:55:32.020 on a big pad on the floor. And I was woken up at dawn by this horrific nightmare, a nightmare that I've

00:55:39.640 never, of the sort I've never had, I've never even heard of. And in the nightmare, I was

00:55:45.240 already dead. It started with me already dead. I'm a ghost. I'm a spirit. And I don't know that

00:55:53.360 I'm dead. And my family is below me and they're grieving. And I realized they're grieving me.

00:55:59.580 And I don't know I'm dead. So, I'm like waving my arms and shouting, hey, I'm over here. I'm right

00:56:04.600 here. I'm right here. And they can't hear me and they can't see me. And then I'm made to understand

00:56:08.680 that it's too late. That because of my own stupidity, like I didn't take my life seriously.

00:56:16.600 And I assume this to mean the intermittent pain in my abdomen. Because I didn't take things

00:56:21.100 seriously. I was cavalier about life. Capital L, life. I was cavalier about life. And now it's too

00:56:28.000 late. There's no going back. You're dead. And you're outbound. And you're not coming back.

00:56:32.980 I was so frantic with terror and anguish and shame. Incredible sense of shame.

00:56:39.620 In the dream or when you woke up?

00:56:40.760 In the dream. Just that I had somehow squandered this great treasure of life. I just hadn't taken

00:56:46.920 something seriously. And now there's no going back. There's no retrieving it. It woke me up.

00:56:53.400 And suddenly I'm in my bed. I'm like, oh, thank God I'm not dead. Because it had felt so real.

00:56:58.940 No. I sort of clutched my little girl. Woke up next to my eldest daughter. And I clutched her like

00:57:03.860 I've seen her clutch her stuffies, right? Just like, oh, thank God you're here. Like that I'm

00:57:07.880 here. I mean, I was just overwhelmed with gratitude and fear.

00:57:12.680 Were you in pain when you woke up? Was the abdominal pain present?

00:57:16.160 No. It wasn't. It was just a dream.

00:57:19.760 Pain was very, very rare and intermittent, but sort of unmistakable.

00:57:23.440 How long had it been going on?

00:57:25.460 About six months.

00:57:26.140 Did the dream, because you had a full day after that dream, before the day this all happened,

00:57:34.540 in that one lucid day, did it cross your mind?

00:57:39.040 I talked to my wife about it. And, you know, I'm an older dad. I had my first child at 55. And I

00:57:44.600 sort of ascribed it to just sort of mortality, anxiety about being an older dad. How long am I

00:57:49.540 going to live into their lives, into their hopefully adult lives? I didn't really think about it. And lots

00:57:55.340 of compartments in my head. I put things places where I can't reach them. Dealing with fear and

00:58:01.620 other things as a journalist, you need those compartments and you can't function. And I got

00:58:05.080 extremely good at sort of like having these firewalls that separate me from emotions that

00:58:10.800 are problematic and get in the way of what I'm trying to do. To some degree, it's adaptive and

00:58:15.720 helpful in our lives. And after a certain point, it's maladaptive. And I, you know, clearly I'd got to

00:58:20.420 that point, but I didn't know it. So after coming back from the hospital, and I will get back to the

00:58:27.000 nurse because she's crucial here. But after coming back from the hospital, I was in the ICU for five

00:58:31.760 days. I recovered very, very quickly. And in the general floor population for a couple of days,

00:58:36.860 then they discharged me. I was out of there. And I got home. And I started researching NDEs,

00:58:42.120 near-death experiences, because I was really confused about seeing my father in the black pit and the rest of

00:58:47.540 it. So it turns out that I had a rather classic NDE. The NDE experiences, they're not infinite in

00:58:55.820 variety. There's an infinite number of hallucinations you might have on LSD. But the NDEs, they fall into

00:59:01.780 sort of like half a dozen basic sort of buckets. A black pit, a tunnel with a light at the end of it,

00:59:07.260 dead relatives showing up, hovering over your body. There's like a half a dozen sort of basic scenarios.

00:59:12.040 And what's interesting about this, sorry to interrupt, Sebastian, because again, I think it's

00:59:15.920 really fascinating. This is technology and culture agnostic. In other words, these stories that

00:59:26.840 you've researched, and others have as well, it doesn't seem to matter when. As far back as we

00:59:33.440 have record, it's the same thing. So it's not like this is just a result of the TV shows we watch.

00:59:40.440 And again, it's culturally agnostic, which is also-

00:59:43.200 It's odd. It's not like Christians have, you know, whatever, like the slight, slight variations

00:59:47.940 between cultures, but not enough to ascribe it to culture. It seems like a more universal experience.

00:59:53.660 So I'm researching this stuff. And one of the classic NDE experiences is hovering over your

01:00:00.100 family or over the sort of surgery bay where the doctors are losing you, unable to communicate,

01:00:05.400 and you're sort of above them. And you're getting tugged between this force that's pulling you

01:00:10.520 outwards into the beyond and these last ties to your earthly coil. And I had no interest in NDEs at

01:00:18.780 all. I didn't know anything about them. So I had these experiences with a rather clean slate. I'm not

01:00:24.400 culturally prepped for these experiences. I realized I had rather classic NDEs, both in the moment and also

01:00:31.340 in this weird dream. And this was the fear that I was seized with. And this is how paranoid and anxious I

01:00:36.680 was. I thought, Oh my God, obviously I died in my sleep. My dream was my experience of actually dying.

01:00:48.180 And my wife woke up to her dead husband in the bed. And I don't know it because I continued on under the

01:00:55.900 illusion that I went to the hospital, that I came back, that here I am holding my daughter in my lap,

01:01:02.020 like, and it's one long dying hallucination. And I'm not really here. I'm a ghost. I'm imagining all

01:01:09.940 this. It's laughable, except it's not disprovable.

01:01:13.720 Exactly. I was just about to say, that's the challenge.

01:01:16.480 Right? And if you're sufficiently traumatized, and I've been traumatized in combat,

01:01:20.580 I know there's a sort of bumpy road to recovery afterwards. I know it pretty well. It sort of fades

01:01:25.200 over time, like the grief when you lose a loved one and whatever. We're designed to adapt,

01:01:29.400 to survive, right? Humans were amazing. We're resilient. Unless you're particularly traumatized

01:01:34.260 when you're young, which makes resilience harder. So I know that terrain. This was completely eclipsed

01:01:40.560 anything from combat. And I was really traumatized by this because when you're a war reporter,

01:01:47.200 you're making a conscious choice to go to the poker table and bet your chips. All right,

01:01:51.600 I'm going to go to Bosnia. I'm going to go to Ukraine. I got some chips. I think I'm a good

01:01:55.760 poker player. I can wager my chips. Come back with more chips. Career, whatever, experience,

01:02:01.740 whatever it is. Maybe I'll get a book out of it. I'm going to come back with more chips before I

01:02:05.360 lose my shirt. I'm going to leave the poker table before I lose everything. And I'm going to come back

01:02:10.020 with these sort of riches, whatever they may be. Experiential riches, professional riches.

01:02:15.520 I stopped doing that. I was like, oh, Tim got killed. I'm going to get cleaned out the next time.

01:02:20.240 I'm leaving the poker table. And I had a family. And so what was so traumatizing was that I thought

01:02:26.040 I was safe. It's like owing the mafia money. There's nowhere you can go where you won't have

01:02:31.240 to pay this back. We will find you. You can go to Northern Canada. You can go to Calcutta.

01:02:35.600 We are coming after our 100K and you can't hide from us. And that basically is what the universe is

01:02:40.780 doing. It's like, look, we loaned you some carbon, right? To make your body out of. We will be reclaiming

01:02:45.480 that eventually, Mr. Younger. And I thought I could sort of delay that. And you can't,

01:02:51.780 you just don't know. None of us know that this isn't the last day of our life. I woke up that

01:02:56.520 morning with not a clue other than this crazy dream, not a clue that this was it, a beautiful

01:03:02.320 June day. And that's what was so incredibly disturbing. And it was what warped my mind

01:03:08.980 afterwards. And then I found out, and there was some consolation in this, that thinking that

01:03:13.940 you're not alive is a not uncommon delusion for people who almost died. It's a sort of

01:03:18.940 known thing. And likewise, the depression, the anxiety, I was doing something that many people

01:03:24.480 have almost died and particularly almost died for medical reasons have gone through. So

01:03:28.800 there was some comfort in that. But let me finally return to this amazing nurse. So I woke

01:03:35.160 up to the sound of the voice of a middle-aged woman with a heavy Boston accent, which makes sense

01:03:40.560 because I was in Hyannis, Massachusetts. She and the other nurse were discussing me.

01:03:45.400 And I woke up. Ah, good morning, Mr. Younger. Congratulations. You almost died last night.

01:03:51.160 Then they left to attend to other patients. I just sat there just thinking about this news. Like,

01:03:59.460 I almost died last night. Are you kidding? It was horrifying. It is not the sort of woohoo party,

01:04:08.060 like, wow, I almost died. Here I am. Let's celebrate. It was absolutely crushing. And I sat

01:04:14.700 there physically incredibly compromised and in a lot of pain and throwing up blood and thinking

01:04:19.460 about the fact that I'd almost, you know, as they say, I'd almost bought the farm and not known it.

01:04:25.740 And she came back like an hour later and said, how are you doing? How are you doing, Mr. Younger?

01:04:31.620 The accent. I said, um, well, I'm okay, but frankly, what you told me is terrifying and I can't stop

01:04:38.500 thinking about it. And she said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary,

01:04:46.640 try thinking about it like something sacred. And then she walked out. And so then I lay there thinking

01:04:54.700 about that. Now, I don't go to church. I don't believe in God. But the word sacred, I feel,

01:05:02.000 is one that us secular people have every right to use. And there's very, very fine secular meanings

01:05:07.020 that you can bring to it. And for me, something sacred, a sacred task is anything that allows

01:05:13.740 people to live with more dignity, more love, more freedom, less fear. Those are sacred things.

01:05:22.900 Religion can be sacred because it can achieve those things. It can really elevate human dignity

01:05:29.540 applied in the right ways. It can also obviously destroy it. Therapists can have it. School teachers,

01:05:36.080 even journalists, right? In my mind, I'm like, okay, what do we do on our best days? We go to

01:05:43.860 places that are at least difficult and hard and intimidating, if not downright dangerous. And

01:05:49.320 we try to come back with information that society, the human race, can make some use of

01:05:56.760 to chart a better course, to maybe protect human dignity in Ukraine a little bit better,

01:06:02.640 to help the human lot a little bit. And that is a sacred task by my own secular definition

01:06:09.600 of what sacred is. And I've done this my whole life. And it's a responsibility and frankly,

01:06:14.520 an honor that I take extremely seriously. And I'm very proud to be able to do and feel quite

01:06:18.960 humble about it. Like, wow, really me? I get to do this? It's one of the things that,

01:06:24.060 and being not just a father, but a good father and a good husband. So one of the things that I am

01:06:28.180 the most proud of in my life is that I was able to do this passing well for a number of years.

01:06:35.140 And so I thought, what about now? I stopped going to front lines, but then I went to the ultimate

01:06:40.300 front line, which is my own death, my own mortality, this thing we all face and that almost all of us

01:06:45.360 fear. I was allowed to go to the precipice, look over the edge, and then allowed to come back.

01:06:52.060 Did I come back with any sacred knowledge? In other words, any knowledge that will help me or

01:06:57.600 other people live with more dignity, less fear, more connection, more love, etc., etc. That's the task.

01:07:04.240 That's what this nurse has asked me to do. Now, she might have meant it in a completely Christian

01:07:10.780 sense. I have absolutely no idea. After I recovered and started thinking about writing a book,

01:07:16.900 of course I thought, because I interviewed everyone who I could at the hospital and elsewhere,

01:07:21.000 I thought, I got to talk to this lady, this amazing woman. What did she mean? I know what

01:07:25.800 use I made of it, but what did she mean? So I called the hospital, the media relations office,

01:07:33.160 and they weren't much help. And then I finally got a phone line into the ICU and asked the gal at the

01:07:39.380 desk, so a middle-aged lady, Boston accent, was working on June 17th. No, no one by that description

01:07:47.060 here. No, there's a young woman with a Boston accent, but no, no, she hasn't. She's been off

01:07:52.600 lately. And I kept calling and trying to, and I could not find her. And when I told the story at a

01:08:00.740 reading, one woman said, well, clearly she was your guardian angel. She appeared to help you in your

01:08:06.040 moment of need. Maybe. I mean, I don't know.

01:08:09.240 Or a traveling nurse that they forgot about or something.

01:08:11.380 Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or in just the hospital bureaucracy, they couldn't figure out

01:08:16.080 who she was, or she didn't want to talk to the press. She was like, no way, I'm not talking to

01:08:20.300 this guy. He saw his dead father. I have nothing to do with this. No idea. But because I had such

01:08:27.140 trouble figuring out what was reality and what wasn't, of course, it crossed my mind. I mean,

01:08:33.160 I saw my dead father. Maybe I imagined a nurse. Maybe I imagined a nurse who had exactly the

01:08:38.380 information, the idea, which of course is contained somewhere in me. I just didn't have access to it.

01:08:44.640 Who had the information that I needed at that moment? So who knows? And it doesn't really matter,

01:08:49.780 but it was an extraordinary experience for me.

01:08:53.180 You know, anybody who remembers our first discussion and who's familiar with your work

01:08:57.040 knows that no one's ever accused you of being disconnected. So it's not like prior to June 17th or

01:09:05.040 June 16th, 2020, you were a guy who was distracted. You were a guy who was numbing the pain of life

01:09:13.040 with hedonic pleasures and things of that nature. You are literally the only person I know who doesn't

01:09:19.320 have a smartphone, who lives as close to off the grid as possible. And all of that permits you to

01:09:25.040 have this remarkable connection with the people who matter most to you, most importantly, your family.

01:09:28.920 So it's almost a little ironic that if we consider this a gift, it was given to you. You almost think

01:09:36.520 that if anybody needs a gift like this, it's someone like me. It's a guy who's way more distracted

01:09:41.680 and way more frenetic. And maybe like most people listening could use the realignment of what is

01:09:48.960 sacred. So given all of that, I'm really curious what has changed in you?

01:09:55.400 So what I would say is, you know, as I sort of went into my midlife, I dropped a number of things

01:10:03.040 that made me feel very, very good when I was young. I really enjoyed alcohol, frankly. I never did any

01:10:09.080 drugs, but I really enjoyed alcohol. Nine years ago, I stopped drinking. I wasn't an alcoholic, but

01:10:13.620 it was playing a role in my life that I wasn't interested in continuing. And I stopped,

01:10:19.820 I was a totally obsessive athlete. I was a pretty good marathon runner and distance runner when I was

01:10:24.300 young. I ran 4.12 for the mile, which isn't world-class, but it's a decent time. I ran 2.21

01:10:29.760 for the marathon, 30 minutes for 10K. Decent times requiring an obsessive amount of effort and focus.

01:10:36.260 For people who don't run, those are exceptional times.

01:10:38.800 The effort consumed my life. I was running 100, 120 miles a week at six minute pace.

01:10:43.900 I was clearly avoiding something. I mean, and I look back, I was clearly avoiding a certain sort of

01:10:47.900 emotional experience that I didn't feel prepared for and probably wasn't mature enough for,

01:10:51.920 wasn't ready for yet. And it did all that quite well. And my father really was quite a brilliant

01:10:58.280 physicist in his specialty of acoustics. He was very, very clearly on the spectrum. Spectrum disorder

01:11:04.340 runs, disorder is a bad word because it has so many adaptive uses, but spectrum tendency

01:11:10.060 definitely runs through my family and I can see it in both directions, downstream and upstream from me.

01:11:16.160 And there is a certain sort of focus of mind that you're looking at the world through

01:11:22.600 a toilet paper tube. You're seeing the small circle of light and that's all you're seeing,

01:11:28.040 which means you can focus incredibly intensely on it. And you're pretty oblivious to everything else.

01:11:33.240 And what I watched my father do, and I have a watered down version of this, is this dogged pursuit

01:11:38.020 of some kind of penetrating insight, some kind of excellence, some kind of transcendent

01:11:43.980 accomplishment. Yeah, we get there. If I may say this about myself, I write good books that affect

01:11:50.660 people like I did it. I figured out how to do it. It requires a huge amount of concentration. My

01:11:54.840 father really advanced physics in interesting ways. A lot of his fellow physicists are exactly the same

01:12:00.120 way. Just ask their wives out to lunch most of the time. The cost of that is that you're not

01:12:05.940 experiencing your life in emotional terms. And when there are emotions in your life that are unpleasant

01:12:14.580 or even terrifying to deal with, you can actively turn on this obsessive focus in order to avoid

01:12:23.040 dealing with it. So there's a kind of passive, not notice, I don't notice, I don't notice. But then when a

01:12:28.280 threatening emotion comes along, like a painful breakup or whatever it may be, then you can really

01:12:33.680 turn on the jets and really blast off into whatever direction you're doing. For a while, it was 120

01:12:40.180 miles a week. Then later in my life, it was this pursuit of journalism, this maniacal focus that I'm

01:12:45.500 capable of. And once you get into that, once you get into that rhythm of being able to go through life,

01:12:52.900 you're richly rewarded for the accomplishments that come with that kind of focus. So society is around

01:12:57.700 and you say, well done, sir. Awesome. Amazing. Your book changed my life. You're blah, blah, blah,

01:13:02.720 whatever it may be. You might be a musician. You might be that comes in all flavors. And so you think

01:13:08.920 your life is a raging success, but actually you're not experiencing the actual feeling of being alive

01:13:17.620 all the time. And I remember at one point on my second marriage, my first marriage didn't work. I'm

01:13:24.800 still very good friends with my ex-wife, but the marriage didn't work. As my first wife and I exited

01:13:31.060 that marriage, any divorce is incredibly sad and painful, even if it's amicable, which ours, thank God,

01:13:37.780 was. And we're both good people and we loved each other and we did it really quite well. But I was

01:13:43.760 incredibly sad. You know, I was still going through this legal process of divorce and really very,

01:13:49.460 very sad and found myself in this wonderful new relationship that turned into my second

01:13:55.900 marriage and my family. It all ended quite well for both me and my former wife. So in this process,

01:14:02.300 because I'm not in touch with my feelings at all, unless absolutely necessary, I would go into these,

01:14:08.360 I would just drop into these pits of sadness and I didn't know what they were. And my wife,

01:14:14.400 Barbara, the woman I'm married to, and then one day she said, honey, you seem,

01:14:17.500 something seems up today. Are you all right? And I said, no, I'm not. I feel really strange. I don't

01:14:23.000 know what it is. She said, you're going through all this stuff. Maybe you're just really sad.

01:14:29.400 I was like, oh my God, you're right. That feeling, that not feeling quite right, it's sadness.

01:14:35.120 Why are you so brilliant? Like, I'm sad. That's exactly what it is. I couldn't believe her insight.

01:14:40.840 And so I said to her, not tongue in cheek, not trying to be funny, before I could catch myself,

01:14:47.560 I said, in the future, if you could tell me how I'm feeling, it would be so helpful.

01:14:52.560 It's like, you're a freak, right? Like, what are you talking about? All that to say that you're

01:15:00.480 right. I'm not distracted. I'm tuned out. Yeah. Well, right. I'm out there. Not as bad as my father.

01:15:06.920 My father, this is real physicist territory, was like really, really out there. But I'm out there

01:15:13.080 enough, and there's enough problematic and painful emotional territory in my life that it was, I found

01:15:17.720 quite a good refuge in athletics. And then this incredible sort of professional endeavor that I

01:15:23.360 so completely fell in love with. Twice, you've alluded to the fact that you're an atheist. And yet,

01:15:30.800 I think that something that is worth pointing out here is that whether a person is an atheist or a

01:15:38.180 believer doesn't speak to another dimension, which is, is there or is there not an afterlife?

01:15:43.360 And those two do not require each other. In other words, there's really a two by two that we should

01:15:48.760 be considering here, which is, is there a God or a creator or is there not? And is there an afterlife

01:15:54.760 or is there not? There are four squares there. Yeah. I saw you draw four squares on your piece

01:16:00.040 of paper. I was like, oh, I think I know what's coming. Yes. And I've been thinking a lot about

01:16:04.180 this because the God problem is an enormous problem because on the one hand, I don't actually

01:16:13.380 understand how any of us exist in the sense that if you just think about it stochastically,

01:16:18.740 it doesn't make any sense. None of this makes sense. I can't, it does. There's no amount of

01:16:25.180 knowledge I have about biology, mathematics, and physics that explains why I'm sitting here

01:16:32.340 and why you're sitting here and why we're doing what we're doing right now. The 3 billion base

01:16:37.460 pairs that define you, the 3 billion base pairs that define me, each of those base pairs has four

01:16:44.100 possible DNA molecules that could define them. The numbers are so big, they don't add up.

01:16:51.120 None of this makes sense. So you can go down the path of, well, there must be a creator,

01:16:55.820 but then you're stuck with the who created the creator problem. And then you wrap yourself around

01:17:00.440 that axle. Let's not even interrogate that. Neither of us are equipped to, and it sounds like neither of

01:17:06.500 us are particularly predisposed to believe that anyway. But if we just focus on this afterlife

01:17:11.960 question, which again, doesn't require a God necessarily, it's hard to do it without talking

01:17:18.460 about physics. Ultimately, it's hard to talk about anything without talking about physics.

01:17:23.560 At the end of the day, that's what the world is, that's what reality is made up out of,

01:17:27.020 is particles and atoms and the laws of physics that govern them. So yes, I agree.

01:17:33.320 Now, one of the things you wrote about in your book that I couldn't believe was your relationship

01:17:39.420 to one of the greatest physicists of the last 100 plus years, which is Erwin Schrodinger.

01:17:46.760 Yeah.

01:17:46.920 Do you want to recount the story of how you find yourself within his sphere?

01:17:52.820 Yeah. So my father grew up in Europe. He was born in Dresden. His father was Jewish. His mother was

01:17:58.440 Austrian-Italian Catholic, which was an unheard of pairing back in the 1910s, 1920s. Your father's

01:18:06.920 born right after World War I. Yeah. He was born in 1923 in Dresden. 10 years later, the Reichstag

01:18:12.400 fire, Germany is, people know where this is headed, and they decamp for Spain. His dad, my dad's dad,

01:18:21.100 was Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish. So he spoke Spanish and Russian and German. So they went to Spain,

01:18:28.440 and three years there. My dad's 13 when the fascists come in under Franco. So now my father's

01:18:37.000 fluent German and fluent Spanish. They leave Spain for France. And he goes to French high school.

01:18:44.760 And then when he is 17, I think, the Germans come into France. They flee France, wind up in Portugal,

01:18:55.780 picks up Portuguese along the way, and then lands in America and learns English. So as I am fond of

01:19:01.820 saying, thanks to the fascists, my father spoke five languages fluently, right? Five European languages

01:19:07.960 fluently. So that's how he came to America. But his mother's side of his family was from Austria,

01:19:12.940 from Salzburg, their upper middle class. And my father's mother was born in 1900 and was this

01:19:21.020 great beauty. It was known as a great beauty in the small city of Salzburg, as were her twins,

01:19:27.440 Etienne Vitti, younger. And they were sort of renowned as teenage girls for being really beautiful.

01:19:33.140 And the family happened to know the Schrodingers. Schrodinger, this preeminent physicist,

01:19:39.960 Schrodinger's cat, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, et cetera, Nobel Prize.

01:19:45.980 And so Schrodinger was in his 40s and had a family and was a bit of a dog. I mean,

01:19:52.500 affairs all over the place, and as many people had then and still do, I suppose. So at one point,

01:19:59.260 these girls, the twins, they're failing math. They're failing high school math. They're 16.

01:20:06.900 They're failing high school math. And the mother has the great idea of calling Schrodinger's wife,

01:20:13.600 saying, I know your husband's a mathematician. My girls are failing math. Do you think they could

01:20:19.500 come visit for the summer in Germany where the Schrodingers were living? Come visit for the summer

01:20:23.820 and maybe he can tutor them in math. You just have to understand how completely ridiculous.

01:20:28.080 I mean, it's like Einstein, right? It's like they're failing sophomore math. Can Erwin help them?

01:20:34.540 So off the girls go for a summer in Germany. And Schrodinger falls in love with E.T.,

01:20:41.880 one of the twins. And he manages to get them through their math tests. The math is so simple

01:20:49.020 that he actually doesn't understand it very well because it's so simple. So he has to consult with

01:20:53.480 his wife's lover, who's a mathematician, not a physicist. I mean, there's just the sort of

01:21:00.280 romantic drama of these people is just extraordinary. And anyway, thank God the girls passed their exams.

01:21:05.500 And E.T. and Schrodinger, they tastefully wait until she's 18 and he's 45 or something. And they

01:21:13.260 have this passionate affair that lasts some years. Tragically, she got pregnant. The pregnancy was

01:21:17.940 aborted. And as a result, she was never able to have children. I knew her much later in her life

01:21:22.860 when I was a child. And she was married and a rather sad figure, frankly. Probably due to

01:21:30.580 what was really a tragedy in a young woman's life of losing the ability to have children.

01:21:35.880 He was really in love with her. So Schrodinger and the family, I mean, I have letters and poems

01:21:41.200 that he wrote her, handwritten. In fact, there's a biography of Schrodinger, a wonderful biography

01:21:46.320 that came out in the 80s or 90s. And the bookmark where my father had marked something, the bookmark

01:21:51.500 is a handwritten letter by Schrodinger to E.T. That's the bookmark in the biography that I found

01:21:57.280 on the shelf. That's our history with Schrodinger. So we talk about his cat. Many people probably

01:22:02.560 know the experiment. It's a thought experiment, a Gedanken experiment that's worth maybe explaining

01:22:07.680 because it really speaks to the challenge of, at least one of the challenges of understanding

01:22:11.720 quantum mechanics. Do you want to just briefly sort of explain this thought experiment and

01:22:16.060 what purpose it serves in understanding this? The central enigma and mystery of quantum physics

01:22:21.720 is the fact that if you don't observe what a subatomic particle is doing, and I'm speaking

01:22:27.620 as a civilian who tried to read and tried to understand physics, so I'm doing my best to

01:22:31.540 render it understandable, but I'm not a physicist. So the mystery is when you do not observe and

01:22:39.560 try to measure the momentum and position of a subatomic particle, that it appears to be

01:22:47.000 in all possible places. It's a waveform. And if you fire, say, a photon at a steel plate with two

01:22:53.880 slits in it, the photon, unobserved, the photon will go through both slits and leave a signature

01:23:01.600 of the strike plate on the other side that shows it simultaneously went through both slits. We can't

01:23:07.940 do that. We cannot walk through two doorways at the same time. In the macroscopic world, you're in

01:23:13.420 one place or the other. But unobserved, a subatomic particle appears to be able to go through two

01:23:20.760 slits at the same time. It's basically a huge potentiality that only collapses into one single

01:23:27.240 thing. It only goes through one slit if you actually observe it and measure it. And so unavoidably,

01:23:35.300 the thought arises, the thought arose to these early physicists, Heisenberg and Schrodinger and a number

01:23:42.140 of others, most of whom were from the German-speaking world for some reason, and Dirac from, of course,

01:23:48.180 from England. Unavoidably, the thought arose, is our conscious observation of subatomic reality

01:23:55.900 creating the thing that we observe? And if so, is our observation of the entire universe creating the

01:24:03.120 universe as observed? What exactly is happening? And are we creating what we see by seeing it?

01:24:11.020 Schrodinger came up with a sort of thought experiment, a Gedanken experiment, which is that

01:24:17.200 you have a cat. Why he picked a cat? I don't know. But he put a cat in a box with what he called,

01:24:22.840 I think the translator from the German is what he called a fiendish mechanism. And the fiendish

01:24:28.280 mechanism is an isotope that has exactly a 50-50 chance of decaying in the next hour. Now I'm a little

01:24:37.020 rough on the details. Yeah. And if it decays in a certain way, it will emit enough radiation to kill

01:24:43.900 the cat. And if it doesn't, the cat is fine. So basically it's just that there's a 50-50 chance

01:24:50.040 that this decaying isotope will kill the cat or not kill the cat.

01:24:54.100 I think actually what it is, is that the radiation triggers the release of a gas that instantly kills

01:25:01.040 the cat. So there's another step. It doesn't matter. The idea is exactly 50-50 and the cat's

01:25:07.520 in this enclosed box. And after an hour, there's a 100% chance that one thing or the other happened.

01:25:13.540 There's no third possibility where the cat's a little sick. It's one or the other. It's a complete

01:25:19.160 binary. And likewise at the subatomic level, particles are in one place or another. It's a

01:25:26.580 complete binary. There isn't, like in the macroscopic world, you know, a pendulum sort of swings and is

01:25:31.920 in, traverses through all the different spaces. At the quantum level, you're in one place or another.

01:25:38.540 Likewise, the cat is alive or dead. It's a massive waveform. And Schrodinger said the cat is, in quantum

01:25:48.020 terms, both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box and observe either a dead cat or a

01:25:58.320 living cat. That's Schrodinger's cat. There's a great description in the book of an experiment that

01:26:04.160 I actually wasn't aware of. This experiment that took place, I believe it was off the coast of Spain

01:26:08.760 in the Canary Islands, correct? Yeah. The experiment is very complicated, but it actually illustrates this

01:26:14.500 point with a little more nuance. Because, of course, a lay person listening to this is thinking,

01:26:21.200 what the hell are you two idiots talking about? This is a dumb story. But the point is, when you

01:26:27.480 look at the path of these electrons or particles unobserved, they are indeed behaving this way.

01:26:34.760 And this experiment, I don't know if you want to go into the experiment. I'll try. Yeah. It's just,

01:26:38.760 it's so mind-boggling. Yeah. Yeah. Give me a flashlight. We can go into the cave.

01:26:43.840 So it's called Delayed Choice Quantum Erasure. I include the technical description of the experiment

01:26:50.460 in the book because for the civilian, it's just absolute madness. I mean, the words make no sense.

01:26:58.960 It's describing the physical setup of the experiment with lasers and mirrors and telephone cable and

01:27:06.160 fiber optics cable. And it just as an example of like, this is how far out there these scientists

01:27:11.580 are getting that we don't even understand the language that they use to describe how they

01:27:16.180 understand the universe. So there are things called entangled particles. And entangled particles

01:27:22.920 are subatomic particles that affect each other instantaneously and have to do the same or

01:27:30.880 corresponding things. If you do something to one particle that's entangled with another particle,

01:27:36.700 the entangled particle reacts in the same or a complementary way instantly. And instantly means

01:27:45.500 faster than the speed of light. And information cannot travel faster than the speed of light.

01:27:50.780 It can't travel one foot faster than the speed of light, and it can't travel 50 billion light years

01:27:57.920 faster than the speed of light. And what they found is that entangled particles, even on opposite sides

01:28:05.220 of the universe, if you do something to one, the other entangled particle is affected instantaneously.

01:28:13.380 Those are entangled particles. That's how the universe works for some reason.

01:28:18.140 So they figured out a fiendish mechanism for sort of tricking the universe. And what they do is they

01:28:23.680 take entangled particles. And I have no idea how they do this. You'd have to go to the original

01:28:28.380 literature and you probably won't understand it because I sure didn't. But take it on faith from

01:28:32.740 the physicist. You take entangled particles and you fire one at a double slit in the classic double slit

01:28:39.960 experiment, unobserved. And we know for sure that it goes through both slits at the same time because

01:28:47.740 it's unobserved. We know that that's how it works. And then with a tiny delay, you send its entangled

01:28:54.560 twin through double slits and you observe it. And it's forced, because of observation, it's forced to

01:29:02.020 go through one slit. But now the universe has a problem because entangled particles have to do the same

01:29:10.040 thing. And we know that they've just done different things.

01:29:13.380 Just so people are following us, the reason the entangled particle has to pick a slit is because

01:29:19.540 it's being observed. It's now in the quote unquote physical world again. It's no longer a probability

01:29:25.480 distribution. It's going to behave like things that are observed behave.

01:29:29.520 Right. Pick a doorway, one or the other, but not both. Meanwhile, its twin that was fired off an

01:29:35.680 instant before was unobserved. And so it remains, as you say, a probability distribution and physically

01:29:43.200 goes through both slits at the same time and hits the strike plate on the other side with a classic

01:29:49.180 waveform signature that physicists well know means it passed through both slits. So when they observe

01:29:55.440 the second entangled particle going through one slit, as it has to because it's being observed,

01:30:00.480 and then they look at the results of the first particle that was unobserved and had to go through

01:30:07.140 both slits, when they look at the strike plate, it shows a signature of having only gone through one slit.

01:30:13.200 Because entangled particles have to do the same thing. But what this means

01:30:18.000 is that not only do they infect each other instantaneously, but effectively speaking,

01:30:25.220 the mechanism reached back in time and changed the outcome of the first entangled particle.

01:30:32.180 It's delayed choice quantum erasure. And what I say in the book is that if there is,

01:30:39.720 I prefer the phrase post-death existence for the individual rather than afterlife is too imbued with

01:30:46.140 a kind of hopeful vision of us in a hammock with a daiquiri forever. There's something a little too

01:30:51.100 pleasant about that. Post-death existence for the individual, if there's anything to that,

01:30:56.100 if there's anything to that idea, I simply say in the book, it would have to work on a level of just

01:31:02.500 sheer weirdness that delayed choice quantum erasure exists. Physicists don't understand why the world...

01:31:08.520 I mean, is there a chance that there is... If you go back to Newton, think about Newtonian physics,

01:31:15.940 which explains everything we see. We see airplanes fly. That doesn't make a lot of sense, right? If you

01:31:22.820 were... One of our ancestors saw that, they wouldn't understand it. But we can understand how an airplane

01:31:28.460 flies. That's Newtonian physics. And of course, what happened with the quantum revolution in the,

01:31:35.200 I guess, the early part of the 20th century is physicists realize that Newtonian physics breaks

01:31:42.260 down at the atomic level and you need new physics to explain what's happening there. Do physicists

01:31:49.800 believe that what you're describing is to quantum theory what quantum theory was to Newtonian mechanics?

01:31:57.500 In other words, is there now a third layer of physics that is set free from what we understand

01:32:05.000 today and is yet to be described potentially? Honestly, I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised.

01:32:10.180 I mean, the physicists themselves and the fathers of all, the grandfathers of all this, like Schrodinger

01:32:14.500 and Einstein, were on to some degree or other, many of them were sort of unnerved by this.

01:32:20.840 The results just didn't make sense. Because there's this other experiment, right? Where

01:32:24.800 Einstein basically comes to the conclusion that one of two things has to be true. Either

01:32:30.160 particles are moving faster than the speed of light or they are containing within them deciding

01:32:37.320 information. Neither could be true. He sets out to prove it. And the only way he can prove it is to

01:32:45.520 violate something withheld in quantum theory itself. I believe it was through the photoelectric

01:32:51.160 effect. Yeah, yeah. This is why, by the way, there is a fork in the road I had to choose between

01:32:55.420 mathematics and physics and I chose math. At some point I was like, I'm actually not smart enough

01:33:00.260 to do quantum theory. Yeah. And I mean, I found it a little unsettling, a little scary. And I almost

01:33:05.240 had this thought, whoa, careful what we try to find out. Is it possible, I mean, this is like a

01:33:11.540 hopelessly sort of ignorant metaphor in some ways. But as you approach the speed of light,

01:33:16.320 mass gets infinitely heavy and you can never get to the speed of light as you approach infinitely.

01:33:20.140 Mass becomes infinite. Right. Exactly. So you can't get there. And I sort of had this thought,

01:33:24.480 this sort of pedestrian thought, as we approach complete knowledge, does the experimentation and

01:33:30.580 the theories, do they get increasingly inaccurate and misleading so that we never quite get there?

01:33:37.440 Because if we get there, if we have complete knowledge of everything, does that destroy

01:33:42.460 everything? I mean, is there an element of consciousness can't fully understand consciousness

01:33:47.560 or if it does, it cannot sustain itself? This just thought experiment, wordplay. But it did sort of

01:33:53.780 make me, on a human level, just be a little queasy. Like, do we really want to interrogate God about how

01:33:59.880 all this stuff works? Are you sure you want to know this? Are you sure you want to understand

01:34:04.540 the late choice quantum erasure? I mean, I think there's two ways to think about this.

01:34:09.040 The first is, would knowing this help us live better lives on this planet? The answer is probably

01:34:15.360 no. But again, you could leave that to the choice of the individual. For me personally, I think the

01:34:20.800 answer is no. I'm really happy as a simpleton. On the relative basis, pretty dumb. I function in form

01:34:27.720 of pleasure and love and relationships and all those things. But where it becomes really unsettling

01:34:33.860 is when you contemplate life or existence or nature, matter, whatever, post-life. So that to me is the

01:34:44.360 part where it's very difficult to let this go, which is if my belief is that once I experience death

01:34:52.700 as defined very clearly and very medically, there is no existence. Versus, no, there might be something

01:35:00.160 there, even though we can't imagine what it is. I don't know. You could argue maybe knowing that does

01:35:05.780 make it easier to live today. This is where I just get wrapped up and usually end up putting my head

01:35:11.920 in the sand after an hour of thinking about it and just go back to watching F1 videos on YouTube.

01:35:18.580 Listen, the sand isn't a bad place. I mean, Jerry's a physicist named Sir Arthur, I think,

01:35:23.280 Arthur Eddington.

01:35:24.260 Yeah, the one who observed the photoelectric effect.

01:35:26.160 He basically validated Einstein's prediction.

01:35:29.460 That's right. So he said about all these great mysteries, which were unsettling and perplexing

01:35:34.800 all the physicists of the era around 100 years ago and into the 30s and 40s. He said,

01:35:41.940 I'm paraphrasing here, it was something like, something we don't understand is doing we know

01:35:48.000 not what. That was his ultimate evaluation of what's going on in the universe.

01:35:53.000 I misspoke, by the way. I said photoelectric effect. It was general relativity that he observed

01:35:57.200 in South Africa, I think, seeing the eclipse, right?

01:35:59.340 With the eclipse, exactly. And it bent the rays of light, as Einstein predicted. And Einstein was

01:36:03.400 great. I mean, he said, look, if you want to propose a theory, what you must offer the scientific

01:36:09.100 community are the ways to disprove it. If I'm wrong, these will be the numbers. So investigate.

01:36:16.240 And if these are the numbers, I'm wrong. I'm going to tell you how to defeat my argument. I'm going to tell you

01:36:20.600 how to do it. And if you fail, then maybe my theory is right. And so that's what he did with

01:36:25.560 the eclipse. And he predicted where the star would be as it passed. I can't remember exactly. Whatever

01:36:30.460 it was, it was the bending of light during an eclipse.

01:36:33.540 Which could only be seen because it was a complete solar eclipse.

01:36:36.280 Right. So a star that should be in one position should be in another position because of the

01:36:40.760 bending of light. And in fact, if it's not in that position, I'm wrong, said Einstein, right? So

01:36:45.020 Eddington was one of the people that helped him confirm that.

01:36:47.860 By the way, it's a nice little tie into everything. Do you know how Einstein died?

01:36:52.280 Yes, an abdominal aneurysm. That's right. And he refused treatment. He was in his 70s.

01:36:57.360 He's like, no, I'm good. Yeah. I think to sort of answer your question about, is this good for us

01:37:03.400 or not? Other than the completely abstract and terrifying, maybe we don't want to know everything

01:37:08.180 because the universe will collapse into a space-time of zero radius or whatever the phrase is.

01:37:13.900 For me, I mean, I'm still an atheist. God is not part of my daily practice. It's not how I

01:37:19.240 understand reality. God does not guide my decisions and my values. I'm a moral person in my own right,

01:37:26.100 and I do fine with it. So I am an atheist. I don't really particularly like the term agnostic,

01:37:31.180 which I'm happy to talk about if you want.

01:37:33.100 Meaning you feel you need to either shit or get off the pot with your thinking?

01:37:36.960 Put it in more human terms. So if you're in a happy marriage and you have no suspicions that

01:37:45.000 anything is going on that would upset you about your spouse at all, and someone said,

01:37:51.640 is your wife cheating on you? And you said, I'm agnostic on that. I don't know.

01:37:56.320 You wouldn't say that. I mean, unless you actually had some reason to doubt. So when you say I'm

01:38:01.460 agnostic about God, what troubles me about that is that there's absolutely no evidence that your

01:38:07.180 wife's cheating on you, right? There's absolutely no evidence that God exists. So if that's the case,

01:38:12.140 if there is some evidence, she said she was going to the movies and she didn't go to the movies,

01:38:15.960 now I can say I'm agnostic. But until then, until I've seen some evidence that God exists,

01:38:23.040 if I saw a little bit of evidence that God exists, if I saw overwhelming proof,

01:38:26.860 I would be a believer. If I saw some evidence that God exists, I would be agnostic. They're like,

01:38:31.820 well, I'm on the jury and I don't know. Okay. So you're not opposed to the term agnostic.

01:38:35.440 You're just saying you're not. I think it's inaccurate for the way most people know it.

01:38:39.380 You think most people are in one camp or the other and they're just not willing to admit it.

01:38:41.960 Yeah. Right. And I think it's the sort of cheating spouse analogy. Like,

01:38:45.000 unless you have some reason to doubt your spouse, you say, no, she's not cheating on me. I have no

01:38:49.540 reason to think that. No, I don't believe in God. I have no reason to think there is a God. I've never

01:38:53.580 seen evidence to the effect that there's a God. And if there was a little bit of evidence, I'd be

01:38:57.820 like hung jury. Like maybe there is, maybe there, maybe she's cheating on me. Maybe she's not. Maybe

01:39:01.380 there's a God. Maybe there isn't a God. That's truly agnostic. I just don't know what would be

01:39:04.480 the basis for that ambiguity. Well, I think the challenge with the terminology is maybe that we

01:39:11.200 don't have a clear definition of God and that, for example, many different religions will have many

01:39:15.400 different versions of what a God is. And then there are probably some people who wouldn't subscribe to

01:39:20.980 anything within an organized religion, but would describe themselves still as spiritual and might

01:39:26.980 still argue that there is a God, but not the God kind of thing. It gets so complicated. But again,

01:39:34.360 that's why I wanted to separate it away from that, because there is a really clear situation of none of

01:39:41.040 that matters. And we're still wrestling with the question at hand, which is what does it mean to die on

01:39:48.760 this planet? What does it mean to die in this physical body that stops respiring to which we

01:39:56.360 are rushing towards entropy? Right. And so for me, without the help or baggage of God, however you

01:40:04.340 want to think about it, I was faced after this near-death experience with some very, very puzzling,

01:40:10.520 very, very puzzling memories, specifically seeing my dead father in some form above me. And is it just

01:40:16.880 neurochemistry? Yeah, possibly. Is there, and again, it would have to be at some quantum level,

01:40:22.620 some post-death existence that we just don't understand. For the first time in my life,

01:40:27.340 I would honestly say, yeah, possibly. I'm agnostic on it. Agnostic for specific reasons. I actually

01:40:33.280 have evidence. There's evidence on both sides. It's a hung jury. I don't know. I don't know beyond a

01:40:39.000 reasonable doubt. But the idea has been open to me that the suspect is possibly innocent for the

01:40:44.820 court analogy. Like, maybe there is something. And so my book is divided into two sections. What

01:40:50.640 and if. What happened to me? And what if there were some post-death existence? Just theoretically,

01:40:56.920 as a thought experiment, how would it work? There's almost certainly not. I say in the book,

01:41:00.640 there's almost certainly not. But if there were, how would it work? And that's where I sort of wound up in

01:41:05.400 quantum physics. I had a hilarious conversation with some colleagues of my father, who I sort of

01:41:11.060 tracked down after my near-death experience, guys who were very fond of my father. And sort of half

01:41:18.400 a generation younger than him, half a generation older than me, really, really sweet guys. And we

01:41:23.920 had lunch. And I said, guys, this is what happened to me. My dead father appeared above me. And you know,

01:41:29.820 Miguel, what do you think he would think of this? The conversation went on. First of all,

01:41:35.140 just so you understand how unclear many physicists are with the idea of what something romantic is.

01:41:43.180 Rudolph, Rudolpho said to me, well, your father was a hopeless romantic. I was like, really? That

01:41:51.480 would be news for my mother. They eloped to San Francisco to get married. He timed it to coincide

01:41:57.680 with the weekend of the annual meeting of the American Acoustical Society in San Francisco.

01:42:03.100 I was like, really? What makes you say that? There's something called the Helmholtz resonator

01:42:08.080 in acoustics. So Rudolph said, well, he was deeply in love with the Helmholtz resonator and talked

01:42:14.680 about it constantly. Oh, got it. Okay. All right. Yes. Hopeless romantic. So, and at one point,

01:42:24.460 right after my parents were married, and then these are the brains that come up with this kind of thing.

01:42:28.420 Right after my parents were married, she was cooking dinner and he was in an armchair,

01:42:33.060 this sort of late 1950s marital idol. He's in the armchair in front of the fire reading.

01:42:39.960 She's cooking dinner and he's muttering to himself, oh my God, that is so beautiful.

01:42:45.080 That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. That's just absolutely gorgeous. And of course,

01:42:49.200 she's like, what has gotten my new husband's attention in this way? Like, what exactly is he

01:42:54.160 looking at? So she tiptoes over, I think probably fearing the worst. And he has a book open. Both

01:43:01.240 pages are covered with numbers and equations and symbols. That's what's so beautiful to him.

01:43:07.260 That was his brain. So these are the gentlemen, it's his ilk that I have lunch with and his former

01:43:14.440 colleagues. And I said, okay, guys, what are the odds? And I thought it was a rhetorical question

01:43:21.060 because I'm not a physicist. So I assume this is a rhetorical question. I was like, really,

01:43:24.500 what are the odds that my dead father could appear above me in some form while I'm dying?

01:43:29.540 What are the odds? And to my amazement, Rudolph, the Helmholtz resonator guy, looks up and he

01:43:37.560 strokes his chin and he's sort of like running the numbers. I was like, oh my God, is he actually

01:43:42.180 calculating this? Is that something you can calculate? He said, it's around, and I'm going from

01:43:47.820 memory from my book. He said, I think 10 to the minus 60, something like that. So one chance

01:43:53.800 in a number that has 60 zeros after it. I was like, what? There's a number for this? Like,

01:44:00.260 what are you talking about? He said, well, it's roughly the chance that all of the oxygen

01:44:05.740 molecules in the air of this room would just randomly, through statistical mechanics, would

01:44:12.800 just randomly collect in one corner of the room and asphyxiate us? Almost impossible, but it's

01:44:19.380 theoretically possible. Well, likewise, there's probably the odds of your father rematerializing

01:44:24.580 above you roughly on that order of unlikely. I was like, oh my God, that's what we're dealing with.

01:44:31.000 But then it turns out, if you look at the odds of the universe existing, it's way, way more unlikely.

01:44:36.520 It's 10 to the minus 230. So one chance in a number that has 230 zeros after it. It's millions

01:44:44.660 and millions of times less likely than finding one specific grain of sand in all the sand on the

01:44:51.720 earth on the first try. Something like 30 parameters have to be in very precise places

01:44:57.380 for a physical universe to exist, the force of gravity, all these arcane things that most humans

01:45:03.660 don't know about. And then for conscious life to develop, it's almost infinitely unlikely.

01:45:09.020 It's actually way more unlikely, at least according to Rudolph, it's way more unlikely that the

01:45:13.200 universe exists in the first place, and we know that it does because we're here, than my father

01:45:17.300 appearing above me. That's actually in the realm of chance, like way more likely than the universe

01:45:22.640 existing in the first place, which we know it does. So in my book, one of the things I say is,

01:45:28.440 look, my dead father, once you get past the stunt of the universe going from absolutely nothing

01:45:34.880 to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time that's too small to measure,

01:45:42.240 once you've pulled off that party trick, the dead appearing above us in some quantum form

01:45:47.860 while we're passing through into their realm, yeah, we don't understand it, but I can imagine

01:45:54.700 that it's possible. Yeah. I think that's unfortunately where I find myself, Sebastian,

01:46:00.380 is because I at least have enough facility with numbers. When I go through the exercise,

01:46:07.100 everything you just did, coupled with even simpler things, like just the existence of us,

01:46:12.500 let's just limit it to organic material. And I can't, then I just have to accept the flaws in my

01:46:21.060 own cerebral machinery, which is, I'm not smart enough to understand this stuff. And I never will

01:46:28.060 be like, I don't understand consciousness. I can't explain consciousness. And I look at my dog

01:46:33.900 and I think, well, he's conscious. There is a feeling of being a dog. He knows what it's like to

01:46:41.680 exist. And then I look at a little roly poly and I think he's probably not conscious. There probably

01:46:47.580 isn't being a roly poly the way there's being a dog or being me, but outside of those really,

01:46:54.160 really broad corner edge cases, I can't explain it. Not at all. It doesn't matter how much I read.

01:47:02.640 Right. It's possible that we understand reality as well as a dog understands a television screen.

01:47:10.220 Just no concept of the wider mechanics, the wider reality, the wider context that produces the flickering

01:47:16.920 images that the dog sees on the screen that we see in reality. And there's a much vaster colossus

01:47:22.300 around that, that produces what we see. And we just don't have the equipment to understand it.

01:47:28.640 Schrodinger, Schrodinger's opinion was that there was a universal consciousness and it was a sort of

01:47:34.320 vaguely Buddhist idea. He felt that we as individuals are part of that universal consciousness and sort

01:47:41.320 of reunited with it when we die. And his theory wasn't very articulated, but that was his sort of general belief.

01:47:46.920 As was my father's. And there's a theory called biocentrism, which is unprovable and

01:47:53.340 undisprovable, which basically holds that if it's true that consciousness, conscious observation

01:47:57.900 creates the reality that it observes, then the entire universe might've collapsed into its specific

01:48:04.700 form from one enormous possibility, one enormous spectrum of possibility with the arrival of

01:48:12.780 conscious thought. And that creates the universe that we're in, in this sort of snake eating its

01:48:18.020 own tail way. And that consciousness is part of the physical makeup of the universe at the quantum

01:48:24.860 level, the way gravity is. In ways that I don't quite understand this, something called the Higgs

01:48:29.640 boson, which is what manifests gravity in matter. And that there might be something akin to that,

01:48:36.200 that is connected to consciousness, which gives rise to the physical universe that in turn allows for

01:48:42.420 consciousness. It's hopelessly circular.

01:48:44.780 And the Higgs boson has been observed, I mean, relatively recently.

01:48:48.320 That's right.

01:48:48.520 This is in the last decade, maybe, maybe the last 15 years.

01:48:51.540 Yep, that's right.

01:48:52.120 It's been the first observation of this.

01:48:54.400 Right. This force that's throughout the universe, that is one of the basic reasons the universe can exist.

01:49:00.500 It is there because there's a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson, though maybe there's an equivalent

01:49:07.120 for consciousness. This is all theorizing, and biocentrism sort of focuses on that, and that if that's true,

01:49:13.200 then our individual consciousness, mine, yours, all of ours, is actually part of this sort of colossus

01:49:20.240 of matter and consciousness, which is the universe. Not provable, not disprovable, but there is,

01:49:27.000 on the sort of human level, which is important not to leave behind, for me, something close to

01:49:34.280 a comforting thought in that. I mean, the idea of being conscious, like we are now, for eternity,

01:49:42.160 like you die, and then the real thing starts, that lasts forever, and there's no exit. You can't kill

01:49:49.300 yourself to get out of this deal. You are going to be conscious, whatever that experience is,

01:49:53.420 and it may be horrific. For eternity, thank you, no. I'll take my long nap. Thank you. I don't need

01:50:00.900 that. So an afterlife, an eternal afterlife, isn't frankly that appealing, but the annihilation of

01:50:07.460 death is also quite terrifying. And the idea that we're actually, there's some sort of ill-defined

01:50:12.280 consciousness that we return to and can manifest itself at these sort of threshold moments of life

01:50:17.460 and death, where the dead are maybe in some way, quote, there with us, that to me is this sort of

01:50:24.660 sweet spot. And just comforting enough to allow us to face death, but without this sort of, in my

01:50:31.540 opinion, implausible fantasy that we're in a hammock with a daiquiri for eternity, basically, like this

01:50:37.940 sort of, oh, how lovely, the afterlife. It's just one big, long vacation. That sounds hellish also.

01:50:43.040 If you think about it like this, if we knew for sure, if we could prove, if there was actual

01:50:50.860 proof and evidence that there was an afterlife, like somehow we proved it, and it went on forever,

01:50:58.160 that you're alive for these troubled 70, 80 years, and then whatever happens, your afterlife starts,

01:51:05.920 and you're just cruising for eternity. It strips all of the meaning, all the dignity, all the struggle,

01:51:12.000 all of the victory, out of those 70 years of struggle, and joy, and pain, and sorrow, and everything else.

01:51:19.440 It's like, don't worry about it. It's just 70 years in an eternity. Like, don't worry about it.

01:51:23.560 Eternity is going to start soon enough. There's an afterlife. It really strips from us the value of the one

01:51:28.840 thing we do know exists, which is our own experience right now, in this moment, this continuity of moments.

01:51:35.040 That would be a pity to have that stripped away from us. As hard as we work in this place, like,

01:51:40.320 really? Don't do that. This is all we know we get. But on the other hand, if we could prove that there

01:51:46.500 was no afterlife, we're completely biological beings. God or no God, you could have a creator God. There's

01:51:52.620 like, you know what? We're going to have kangaroos, and turtles, and worms, and humans, and everything

01:51:55.820 else. But they're biological. When they die, that's it. There's no afterlife. There's no soul. There's

01:52:01.220 no nothing. You're dead. It's just carbon transfer. Right. Exactly. So with or without a God, if there

01:52:07.160 was a God that decided that, totally plausible. If we could prove that, you would know absolutely that

01:52:12.940 when you die, you are over. Not only that, it's as if you never happened. It's zero. It's nothing.

01:52:20.620 The infinite black pit. That might be so psychologically troubling that we actually

01:52:26.600 have trouble living those 70 years with dignity. Where we're at is this ambiguity. We can't prove

01:52:32.920 there is or isn't an afterlife. There might be. There's some reason to hope, so we don't have to

01:52:37.520 be too scared. But there's also some reason to think there might not be, so make the most of today,

01:52:42.060 because that's all we know we'll get. This sweet spot of ambiguity is actually perfectly attuned

01:52:46.820 to making this life both psychologically survivable and meaningful. To me, that is like,

01:52:56.160 to borrow a Christian word, another of the sort of miracles of all this. Like, wow, you really

01:53:00.500 landed it, God, if you're out there. You really landed us in just the right spot to absolutely

01:53:06.640 maximize the meaningfulness of the thing we do have, which is life.

01:53:12.200 Yeah. He wrote something so beautiful near the end of the book. Without death,

01:53:16.820 life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt

01:53:24.020 that won't stop.

01:53:25.600 Right. Which is a terrifying idea in its own right. Anything that won't stop is a terrifying idea,

01:53:31.520 basically. So after I finished the book, I read this extraordinary story about Dostoevsky,

01:53:37.820 the great Russian writer. And had I read it when I was doing the book, I probably would have put it

01:53:43.640 in there. But it gives me a chance to tell a nice story during conversations like this. So when he was

01:53:48.540 in his 20s, he was a bit of a political radical, and he had a bunch of radical friends. And they would

01:53:52.500 sit around. They had like a circle, an intellectual circle. They would sit around, and they'd talk about

01:53:57.340 stuff. And they'd talk about, for example, freeing the serfs. Outrages ideas like that. This is in the

01:54:03.160 1840s. And basically, the same conversation was happening in the United States about the slaves,

01:54:09.040 about slavery. So the Tsar Nicholas I, I think it was, was not particularly pleased by this talk.

01:54:15.520 And his police rounded these boys up and threw them in jail. And they spent eight months in jail.

01:54:22.480 And it wasn't a particularly serious crime. So they were getting their wrists slapped,

01:54:26.220 but no one was particularly worried about anything. And then finally, after eight months,

01:54:30.680 they were shown to the door of the prison and loaded onto a carriage. And, you know,

01:54:34.720 they just assumed they were going to be driven to the court and discharged and released to their

01:54:38.080 families, and the nightmare is over. And so they're bouncing along through the streets.

01:54:42.600 And instead of going to the court, they're driven to a city square, and they're tied to posts.

01:54:49.900 And a firing squad is lined up in front of them. They've had to make the transition psychologically

01:54:56.480 from going home to my family to, I'm going to die in a few minutes. Right? They had to make that

01:55:02.740 transition almost instantaneously. So they're tied to posts, and the order is given for the soldiers to

01:55:09.400 charge their weapons and level them and aim. And Dostoevsky and his buddies are waiting for the command fire

01:55:17.060 when their chests will be torn open by musket balls. And so what happened was this was theater. It was

01:55:25.900 sadistic, cruel theater. It was a mock execution just to scare them. And a rider galloped into the

01:55:32.120 square just in time and said, the czar forgives them. And they were untied and sent to a penal colony

01:55:39.840 in Siberia for a while. But they survived. Two of the men who went through this, of the six men or so,

01:55:46.900 went through this, were insane for the rest of their lives. They could not take, that's what I

01:55:52.140 was saying about the truth. No afterlife? I can't bear that thought. The unfiltered vision of infinity

01:55:59.240 starting 30 seconds from now, without any warmup, without any time to adjust, you have cancer,

01:56:04.740 you're going to die in a year, nothing, just from life to death in some minutes, was so psychologically

01:56:11.880 traumatizing that they were deranged for the rest of their lives. They never psychologically

01:56:17.440 recovered. Dostoevsky did. And he took that experience and put it into some of his amazing

01:56:22.400 work. What we know because of him, we know what the nearly hallucinatory quality that reality takes on

01:56:30.720 when you do this transition abruptly from, I'm alive, yay, to, oh my God, I'm going to be dead in a

01:56:37.620 minute. What does the world look like through the eyes of someone who's experiencing that?

01:56:42.940 And this is what he said. He said he looked out and he saw sunlight glinting off the roof,

01:56:52.100 the steeple of a church. And he thought to himself, in moments, I'll be part of the sunlight.

01:57:00.160 I'm going to become part of all things. And if I somehow survive this, I'll live the rest of my

01:57:09.440 life turning every moment into an infinity. And he did survive it. And he took the wisdom of that

01:57:17.540 vision, which of course, if we just stopped, erased the busy slates of our brains and just stopped and

01:57:24.700 looked around. It's just the insane, surreal miracle that anything is, the New York City subway, a tree,

01:57:33.060 the ocean, your foot, whatever. I mean, just look at any of it. You're like, oh my God, that exists?

01:57:40.160 And I'm here to see it? Are you kidding? That was what he got. And if you can't live like that,

01:57:45.980 but if you can incorporate a little bit of that, the strangeness of that vision allows for awe and

01:57:52.120 gratitude. And when that vision becomes, when you become accustomed to it, when it becomes an

01:57:57.700 everyday thing, I mean, there's a problem with long marriage sometimes, right? You're just like,

01:58:00.660 oh yeah, you fall in love. This person's amazing. And then you adjust and they're just another person

01:58:04.800 and you love them or whatever. But that sort of awe that this person is with you, if you can keep

01:58:09.940 that in your marriage, you have a good marriage. If you can keep that in your life, you have a good

01:58:14.320 life. And that was the blessing that came with the curse of what Dostoevsky went through. And I've

01:58:19.760 gotten a little bit of that in my life and it changed my life in a way that religion often

01:58:25.160 changes people's lives. I'm not religious. It's changed it in an equivalent way, like a profound

01:58:29.980 gratitude, not just for my life as I am living it, but the fact that I have a life at all and that

01:58:37.420 any of us do. So does that mean now the answer to the question that your wife posed for you is that

01:58:44.840 indeed you would go through all of this again?

01:58:49.440 Yes, I would. As painful as it is to say. And I wonder if Dostoevsky would. I'm guessing he would.

01:58:58.160 And those poor guys who never recovered, they wouldn't. I had access to a really good shrink,

01:59:03.300 a very loving family. It was touch and go for a while. You know, I still have a sort of weird

01:59:08.280 panic to the anxiety disorder around health issues. And I'm prone to the imagining that like

01:59:12.680 something's catastrophically wrong with me in a kind of paranoid Woody Allen kind of way.

01:59:17.020 Oh my God, I'm sure I've got cancer. Everyone does that a little bit, I think, but it really

01:59:21.060 opened up the gateway for me. It's extremely unpleasant. And I know that paranoid feeling

01:59:25.580 comes flooding into me and it's a direct result of almost dying on a beautiful June day.

01:59:30.920 So it's not without its costs, but because I'm blessed to have some incredibly wonderful,

01:59:37.980 beautiful things going for me in my life, like I was able to sort of pull it off.

01:59:41.280 Sebastian, thank you very much. Again, the book is really, really special,

01:59:48.280 not just as a story, but if you're willing as the reader, I think to let yourself really

01:59:54.800 contemplate and imagine what's being described and accept the impossibility of being able to

02:00:01.620 understand it and being able to resolve it and being able to find a proof. It certainly offers

02:00:06.660 more questions than answers, but that's what makes it worth living, right?

02:00:09.740 Thank you. I'm so glad that you read it and enjoyed it so much and that you invited me on.

02:00:14.580 What a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it.

02:00:17.060 Thank you, Sebastian.

02:00:18.120 Thank you.

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The Peter Attia Drive - August 26, 2024

#315 ‒ Life after near-death： a new perspective on living, dying, and the afterlife ｜ Sebastian Junger

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