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

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter’s Weekly Newsletter Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This episode delves into Sebastian's profound near-death experience and how it became the catalyst for his exploration of mortality, the afterlife, and the mysteries of the universe. They discuss the secular meaning of what it means to be sacred, the intersection of physics and philosophy, and how our beliefs shape our approach to life and death. He also shares how this experience has profoundly changed him, giving him a renewed perspective on life—one filled with awe, gratitude, deeper emotional awareness, and a more engaged approach to living. We discuss: How Sebastian’s near-death experience shaped his thinking about mortality and gave him a reverence for life [3:00]; The aneurysm that led to Sebastian’s near-death experience [6:30]; Emergency room response, his subsequent reflections on the event, and the critical decisions made by the medical team [16:30]; Sebastian’s reaction to first learning he nearly died, and the extraordinary skill of the medical team that save his life [26:00]; Sebastian’s near-death experience [37:00]; The psychological impact of surviving against overwhelming odds [48:00]; Ignored warning signs: abdominal pain and a foreshadowing dream before the aneurysm rupture [54:30]; Sebastian's recovery, his exploration of near-death experiences, and the psychological turmoil he faced as he questioned the reality of his survival [58:15]; A transformative encounter with a nurse who encouraged Sebastian to view his near-death experience as sacred [1:03:30]; How Sebastian has changed: a journey toward emotional awareness and fully engaging with life [1:08:45]; The possibility of an afterlife, and how quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of existence [1:15:15]; Quantum paradoxes leading to philosophical questions about the nature of reality, existence after death, and whether complete knowledge could be destructive [1:26:00]; The sweet spot of uncertainty: exploring belief in God, post-death existence, and meaning in life [1:37:00]; The transformative power of experiencing life with awe and gratitude [1:53:00]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available

for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Sebastian Younger. Sebastian was a previous podcast guest back in February of 2022. I wanted to have him back on to discuss his recently published book, In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Sebastian is an award-winning

journalist, documentary filmmaker, and New York Times bestselling author. Some of his previous works include The Perfect Storm, Tribe, and Freedom, among others. I was compelled to have this conversation with Sebastian after reading or really devouring his book. I explained as much to him at the beginning of this podcast. It really is a special book and I don't think it's just because of the nature of what I focus on professionally. I think it really is the type of book that anybody would read and be moved by because I believe at the end of the day, we are all in some ways, a little bit afraid of our mortality and obviously curious about what it implies.

In this conversation, Sebastian shares his story of his near-death experience and really how that's the substrate and the launching pad, if you will, towards the investigation that leads to this book. We talk about how the universe works, what we understand about physics, what does it mean to be sacred beyond secular and discuss whether or not there may be an afterlife. Absent any sort of religious overtone, by the way, these two can be quite uncoupled. We discuss how our beliefs might impact how we live our lives and what shapes our value in our own experience. Again, I found this to be a very intriguing conversation and

one that is a bit more philosophical than perhaps our usual discussions on the drive. I think it offers a chance of course to reflect on the themes related to how we think about death, our spiritual beliefs and of course this idea of an afterlife. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, thanks so much for coming to Austin. It's great to finally meet you in person having spoken with you and emailed you many times over the past few years and spoken with you, obviously, on a previous podcast. This book is really a fantastic book. It's hard to describe the experience of reading it. I think it's so beautiful, it can almost bring you to tears in

certain sections because there are the stories within it that sort of tell us about our mortality. But I also think there's something so beautiful about it, which I'm curious if others have explained to you their reaction, which is you can feel so incredibly insignificant reading this, which is actually kind of a nice thing. It makes this whole thing seem a little less scary and by this whole thing, I mean death. Well, our insignificance in the cosmos does sort of take the pressure off. We don't mean anything and that's terrifying and kind of liberating. I mean, it's sort of both. And one of the things I talk about in the book is a kind of reverence for life. And I think it's quite hard to find one's way in the

busyness of daily life in our modern society. It's quite hard to find your way to that reverence, it was for me, without having been terrified. Once I was terrified by almost dying, the flip side of that terror was reverence. I found it quite easily after that. For me, one point after my near-death experience, I had a lot of psychological struggles. We can talk about that. At one point, my wife said to me, Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that you almost died? Not that you survived, of course you're lucky, but that it happened at all. If you could go back and push a button and have it not happen, would you push that button? I honestly did not answer. Was I blessed or cursed? The psychological

consequences of almost dying and what I saw on the threshold, what I remember from the threshold, they were frankly so devastating that I absolutely felt cursed. In struggling to answer, I tracked down the origin of the word blessing. Now, I'm an atheist, but I feel that there are secular meanings to words, beautiful words like blessing or sacred that we atheists are free to use. So, I tracked down the origin of the word blessing and it comes from the Anglo-Saxon blecian, which means blood. The idea being that there is no blessing without a wounding, without a sacrifice. Maybe there's no wounding without a blessing and that battlefields are sacred because blood has been shed.

Childbirth is sacred because blood has been shed. In pre-Christian Europe, often animals were sacrificed on holy days to bless fields, to bless buildings, to bless people. The twinning of blessing and wounding, they're aspects of the same thing. When I realized that, it allowed me to make this sort of psychological step, an important psychological step where I stopped feeling cursed by too much knowledge that I'd somehow gotten too much knowledge on the threshold of death and couldn't continue daily life with that knowledge. It was too burdensome. It was too scary. It was too true.

And once I read the origin of the word blessing, I was like, oh, I'm free. It's both. How wonderful. And that really did release me from this existential conundrum that I was in. I think it's probably worth telling listeners if they haven't already read the book or even heard you on another podcast where you've described the story of what happened in June of 2020. In fact, you and I actually discussed it a little bit, I believe, on our last podcast. But again, maybe just to make sure everybody knows what we're talking about vis-a-vis your experience. Do you want to recount the story in enough detail that people will understand the technical aspects of what happened and basically how much luck played

a role in you sitting here today? Yeah, I'm happy to. Last night at my book reading at Book People in Austin, yesterday was June 16. I was able to, because of the time difference, etc. with the East Coast, I was able to say to the audience, this moment, right now, this moment exactly four years ago, I started dying. It was exactly the time. It was during COVID. I was living with my family at the time, a three-year-old girl and a six-month-old girl, my little daughters and my wife Barbara. We were living in an old house in a remote part of Massachusetts at the end of a dead-end dirt road, deep in the woods, no cell phone service, landlines that would short out when it rained and often didn't work. In other

words, paradise. We were there during COVID. I was in my 50s, a lifelong athlete in extremely good health, strong, never thought twice about emergency transport to a hospital. Why would I? I'm not a walking heart attack. I don't have high cholesterol, et cetera. I know we all age and we can get cancer and things like that, but I didn't think I had anything that would drop a middle-aged man in his tracks and who knew? So, one afternoon some neighbors down the road called the family that we knew and the teenage girls offered to come over and babysit and that was a rare opportunity. So we jumped on it, the girls came over to babysit our little girls. My wife and I

went off to a cabin that's even deeper in the woods, an even more beautiful spot and completely cut off from everything and down a trail. We were able to spend a couple of hours there and thank God we did and that I didn't go running or something that would have put me even more off the grid because I would have died had that happened. We were in this cabin and in mid-sentence, in mid-sentence, I felt this sort of stab of pain in my abdomen. It wasn't unbearable, but really got my attention and it wouldn't go away. Unlike in some digestive pain, nothing would ease it. And I finally stood up to sort of walk it out and the floor went reeling away from me and I almost fell over and I sat back

down and I said words I never thought I'd have to say. I said, honey, I think I'm going to need help. I've never felt anything like this. She sort of half dragged me out of the cabin and down the trail and we made it to the dirt driveway and she put me in the passenger seat of the car and ran in to tell the babysitters, try to call the ambulance. Something's wrong with Sebastian. I'm sitting there in the car, and now I start going blind. The sky turns electric white. The electric white takes over the trees and the house and everything around me. I didn't know it, but I was in and out of consciousness. These were all the symptoms of catastrophic blood loss. What had happened was I had an aneurysm, an unnatural ballooning at one

spot in my pancreatic artery, which is this little artery that almost no one ever needs to think about. I had an aneurysm in this thing, which is really quite rare. It was the result of having a ligament in the wrong place in my abdomen that occluded my celiac artery. It's all rather complicated, but basically the celiac is this garden hose and when you've cut it off with this ligament in the wrong place, the blood has to flow somewhere else and it flows through these smaller arteries. If one of them has a weak spot or a vulnerability, that weak spot will balloon. The bubble will get bigger and bigger and the arterial wall will get thinner and thinner and

it can rupture. If it ruptures, you're now bleeding out into your own body, into your own abdomen. If someone would just had done you the favor of stabbing you in the stomach, when they got to the hospital, the doctors would know where to put their finger to stop the bleed. In some ways, it's an easier proposition, but with internal hemorrhage, it can be quite hard to find the location. I mean, to the layman, your abdomen is just a big bowl of spaghetti. Where do you even start looking and how do you get in there? So, I didn't know all of this. I had an undiagnosed aneurysm that had been growing probably for decades and it had finally ruptured in that moment. I was losing a pint of blood probably every 10 or 15 minutes into my abdomen and there's

10 units of blood in the human body thereabouts and you can lose maybe two-thirds of it before you sort of cross over to territory where it's really hard to come back from even if you're transfused. We lived on one hour drive from the nearest hospital. So, I was literally a human hourglass. Then the ambulance finally came, off we went and I had sort rebooted a bit. I went into compensatory shock which makes you feel a little bit better for a little while. An hour later, we pulled into the hospital and I went out of compensatory shock right then into end stage hemorrhagic shock, deeply hypothermic, not of right minds and actively dying and would probably have been dead in the next 10 or 15 minutes had I not been in an ER at that moment and they rushed me into the trauma bay and started trying to save my life.

I'll share an interesting anecdote from my days in the trauma center at Johns Hopkins, which is that time to hospital and more specifically time to either surgery or IR, interventional radiology, which is where your life was saved, is the single most important metric. There's an amazing guy named Eddie Corn your life was saved, is the single most important metric. There's an amazing guy named Eddie Cornwall, who was at the time, the chief of trauma surgery at Hopkins who wanted to test this because of an interesting observation he had made, which was when he was a trauma surgeon in Los Angeles, he noticed that the gang bangers who were brought in by their buddies were surviving at a slightly higher rate than those that were brought in by ambulance.

Now, this is very counterintuitive. This is all penetrating trauma. It's what we call the knife and gun club. And when a guy got shot or stabbed and his buddies drove him to the ER and dropped him off and took off because obviously everyone's in the wrong here. Those guys had a better chance of surviving than the guy who got brought in by the ambulance with the IV fluids running in him and brought in. What Eddie and his colleagues postulated was what could possibly be better about being thrown in the back of a truck than being in the ambulance. He realized, well, technically those guys are getting to us sooner because no one's putting an IV in them.

No one's checking their vital signs. No one's doing anything else. They did an experiment, and it's kind of a crazy experiment, where depending on the day of the week, all ambulances were going to basically randomize the trauma victims to either business as usual, which means when a penetrating trauma victim is found, you do everything that you would normally do. You put the IVs in them, you stabilize them, you start running IV fluids and you go, or what they called scoop and run, which is the ambulance would get there and wouldn't do a thing. Would literally pick them up, throw them in the ambulance,

and get them into the hospital. So now you had a randomized experiment which can infer causality, and sure enough, wouldn't you know it, when you randomized to scoop and run, you did better. The first thing I thought about, because nobody would believe this and it seems so counterintuitive, had your wife been able to drive you right to

the hospital, which is the most counterintuitive thing, your odds are actually higher. Now it's fortunate that it all worked out. But again, when I was reading the story, that was my thought was Barbara, just take him right to the hospital now. Don't do anything. Don't call an ambulance. Don't do anything. Now of course the ambulance has some advantages. They have sirens. They can do all these other things. But the bottom line is your life could only be saved in an operating room or in an IR suite. Those are the only two places you're going to get saved. Right. And you can buy a little time with a blood transfusion.

Oh, you did need that as well, but you needed that as you were rolling into those places. Exactly. Right. And ambulances, it's changing a little bit now, but ambulances, you get IV fluid, you don't get blood. The truth was when the ambulance showed up, they came quickly, but they were at my place for probably 15 or 20 minutes. Well, that's the other thing about your story that's really remarkable is how you, being probably a normal dude, was like, yeah, I'm fine, I think I'm okay, I probably don't need to go in, and you almost talked them into it.

Yeah, yeah, right. This is the famous statistic that even flashed through my mind at the time, which was, married men live longer, and I watched it in action because my wife is like, 10 minutes ago, he was passing out and going blind, and I don't care if he seems a little better right now, he's going downtown, like, you're taking him right now. But they still took quite a while

and it really upset my wife. Did they take a blood pressure on you at that moment? Yeah. By the time they got there, I'd gone into compensatory shock and my blood pressure was sort of okay, I think. Because I know that your pulse was okay, which obviously is a compensation of being fit and healthy. But as I was reading it, of course, I'm thinking, your blood pressure was probably still 80 over 50. And that would have been compensated enough for you to be not passed out,

but that's not a normal blood pressure. Actually, I don't remember it, I'm not quite sure. But whatever it was, it did not trigger their alarm. And they suggested that I stay and drink some water and rehydrate in the shade, which would have killed me. But at any rate, we got to the ER and they rushed me into the trauma bay. The doctors knew immediately what was going on. I was pale as a sheet and I just had blood loss, you know, internal hemorrhage written all over me. And the doctor said, so this is of course, a semi sort of memoir type book. It's about my

own experience, which as a journalist, I haven't done much of that. I've in fact have been averse to it my entire life, making myself the topic. But because I'm also a journalist, I wrote a sort of first person account of something very intense and profound, but I interviewed everyone I could to sort of confirm to myself that my memories are roughly correct and to just do some reporting because that's what one does. And so I interviewed all the doctors who would talk to me. I even interviewed my wife. I interviewed the guy who was in the back of the ambulance. And you were able to read all of the medical records, which are very well documented, right? You timestamp every aspect of – you would have seen the moment you arrived in the ER,

how many units of fluid, how many units of fluid, how many units of blood, all that stuff is communicated clearly in the record. Yeah. Just as a writer, the language in these specialty fields is so fascinating. Even if you don't quite understand what's a French Omniflush, whatever. Just the language is cool. Sometimes I put the language in there just because it gives you the feeling of like, wow, we're in this world. And I've always done that in my work. But at any rate, I interviewed everyone I could afterwards and a couple of doctors didn't want to talk to me, I think just because they're skittish for legal reasons, even though the outcome was amazing. They rushed me into the trauma bay. And again,

these are my memories semi-confirmed by people who were there. The doctor asked, I had no idea I was dying, absolutely none. What did you think was happening at that moment when you were sitting in the ER? Not in the ER, in the trauma bay rather. So I sort of knew in my mind, it's not a heart attack. I don't have left side pain. I have a healthy heart. There's no reason to think it's a heart attack. Maybe a't have left side pain. I have a healthy heart. There's no reason things are heart attack. Maybe a stroke. Is that why I went blind for a while? I was trying to go through the possibilities as a non-doctor. How much pain did you still have in your abdomen when you arrived?

I had a lot of pain. I mean, it wasn't kidney stone pain, which is anyone who's had kidney stones. I mean, it's all but unbearable. I'm sure I was visibly in pain. I'm wincing and I'm like, sure it looked like, you know the pain of a broken leg, something like that. So what I thought as far as I could come to a rational thought was, you know what? Was your abdomen swelling at all? I don't know if it was. They might have- Nothing that you would have noticed. No.

Okay. There was abdominal guarding, which I guess is the muscles tensing in the abdomen to protect an injured area, but I didn't know that. I had the thought, the grim thought, you know what? You might have cancer or something. You might have a tumor in your abdomen that ruptured. I'm making this stuff up as I go along, but I was just like, maybe something like that happened and you're going to wake up in the morning with some pretty grim news about you got six months. I was vaguely aware of that possibility. I had absolutely no idea that,

hey man, you are dying right now. Did an aneurysm cross your mind? Your aneurysm is a very, very obscure one. But if you think of the two most common aneurysms in the abdomen, one would be an abdominal aortic aneurysm. The other would be a splenic artery aneurysm, which is not that far from where yours is, although the cause is hereditary. Yours is caused by the median arcuate ligament as you described. But I'm sure you've heard of somebody dying from an aneurysm before. I was just curious as to what was going through. Yeah. I have one of my best friends had an operation to replace his aorta. They had to open him up and fix his aorta because he had an aortic aneurysm. So, I knew about this but at one

point a nurse rushed in because they did a CAT scan on me. I think it was a CAT scan. They pushed me through the donut very quickly and I'm convulsing. I mean, I'm deep in shock and I've got a heated blanket on me and I was not doing well. But she came up to me and she said, you didn't hear it from me, but good news, it's not your aorta. And so in my civilian non-medical mind, I'm like, your aorta is part of your heart. My tummy hurts. Why are we even talking about the aorta? So no, the short answer is no. I just thought I might have terrible news tomorrow morning, but I had no idea that it was going down right now. I'm so glad I didn't because I would have been absolutely terrified. I would have been thinking about my family, my daughters,

the three-year-old and the six-month-old and my wife couldn't come with me. When you went back to interview your wife, what did she think as the ambulance was leaving? What was her level of concern? She was very, very worried because she'd seen me go in and out of consciousness and she just had this sense like at some point he's going to go out and not come back. She kept squeezing my hand saying, honey, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me. I'd wake up and babble and not make any sense and then go out again. she had to watch all that. Then the ER doctor called. She couldn't follow me in the ambulance because of COVID restrictions. Then the ER doctor called. It took him a while to get through to the phone because the phone lines weren't working and there

was no cell phone service. It was a nightmare. He finally got through and he said, I think you should come to the hospital as fast as possible. Don't drive 100 miles an hour, but if this were my wife, I would be heading to the hospital fast. She knew what that meant. She arranged for care for the children and jumped in the car and drove to the hospital the whole way knowing that I might not make it. Why else would the doctor say that? The doctor told the hospital to waive the COVID restrictions so that she could come in. She sort of knew, oh, this isn't good.

And I later looked up the odds for surviving what I had and they're pretty grim. And that's with a quick transport time. I mean, it took me an hour and a half. Yeah, it's just unbelievable. To get there from the onset, an hour and a half. Thank God I's just unbelievable. To get there from the onset, an hour and a half. Thank God I'm healthy. Cause I mean, if I'd had a bad heart or whatever. Well again, only because the actual artery that had the aneurysm is quite small. Right. Like had it been a splenic artery, if it was the abdominal aorta, you wouldn't have made it out of the cabin. Right. But a slightly larger artery, and I don't think you've survived given that you probably lost

60% of your blood volume into your abdomen. Is that? That's what they were guessing, something like that. Yeah. I'm just imagining how obscure this is. If I were in that situation, I would be assuming this was a gastric ulcer gone bad. Did they tell you what else they were assuming this was? Because it was pretty clear to them I would guess the second you arrived. Because not only do they see your vital signs, your clinical signs, at some point they've drawn blood and they've probably seen that your hemoglobin instead of being 14, which is what it should be, or your hematocrit in the mid 40s was probably

10 or less at this point. The doctor said he had almost never seen hemoglobin so low. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, but he was like it was the hemoglobin that really alarmed him. No, they didn't explain anything to me. Oh, I just wonder if after the fact they walked you through their thought process because they had a very difficult decision to make, which was to take you to the cath lab or take you to the OR. That's a very, very big decision. You do a great job in the book of explaining the pros and cons of each. They made the right choice. Yeah. Well, I stabilized on hemodynamically stable, I think is the term. I stabilized on three units of blood. Which is kind of amazing because that's a

fraction of the blood that you lost. you would have probably lost six or seven units. The detail of this, I think for the listener is interesting, right? So what has to have been happening is there has to have been some tympanade. Yes. There has to have been, you know, you lost, call it six, seven units of blood, but it must have created enough pressure around in what's called the retroperitoneum to create just enough to prevent more blood from going in so that when they gave you those three

units, those three units stayed in your vasculature as opposed to just continued to leak out. Right. The problem with going into the OR and opening you up is you lose that back pressure and your blood geysers out of there and they have to find the bleed before you bleed out and just sounds like a ghastly nightmare. Their only option honestly in that situation is to do what's called cross clamp the aorta. They actually have to take literally as ridiculous as that sounds. You take a big clamp and you go above the diaphragm, they might even open your chest and they put a clamp across the aorta. Good God. And what that does is it absolutely stops any blood flow below that point.

So the good news is your heart is going to be fine because your heart gets perfused above the aorta. Your head is fine. Those are the two most important things. And what's going to happen is your kidneys are going to start dying. Everything below the body is going to have no perfusion, but that buys them enough time to find what's wrong. Can they find it if it's not bleeding? Well, I mean, it's very difficult because they're going to have to go and see where

the clot was and then they're going to let the clamp off, see what comes, re-clamp. This was something we had to do all the time in trauma. Sometimes you would have to do this in the emergency room. Like a guy would come in and he'd have a gunshot wound or a stab wound to his aorta. And you have to literally open his chest without anesthetizing him because of course, he's already not responsive at this point. And put your hand in, move his lungs out of the way, get all the blood out of the way and get a clamp across the aorta. Good God.

Wow. And I'm sure when you were covering the wars, this is stuff that was being done in the field. Right. Some of it was developed in the field apparently. So they stabilized me with three units over the course of an hour and then sent me into the IR suite while they were trying to track down the interventional radiologist. What time is it now? It's late.

Yeah. It's like nine o'clock at night. They called him in from dinner as it were from his home, Dr. Phil Dombrowski, who was known in the hospital as the magician because he was super, super good at his job. Interventional radiology involves putting someone on a fluoroscope, which is like a video feed x-ray machine and inserting catheters or rubber or wire, rubber tubes or wire into the venous system, usually through the right groin into the femoral artery and then threading it around through your body, trying to get through the twists and turns of your vasculature, trying to get it to the site that needs work and your aorta or your pancreatic artery

or whatever it may be and that avoids having to open the person up because you can work from the inside out, from inside the vascular system. I mean, I know you knew all this, but it's fascinating. A lot of people don't. I mean, one interventional radiologist was like, even our spouses aren't entirely sure what we do. It's a rather lesser known of the medical specialties, but absolutely crucial. Then there's one other thing that they can do there, which I'm sure they explained was they can also, when they want to, inject contrast. They did that. Exactly.

Then you can look for, oh, where is it bleeding? Where is it leaking out of this system here? My wife finally got to the hospital and they stuck her in her basement. There's no really waiting room because it's COVID, so she's by herself in this room. The janitor comes through once in a while, they get the mop or whatever, but she's sort of stuck there. At one point after hours, a doctor sprints through, shouting into his cell phone, it's the pancreas. It's the pancreas. She didn't know, but he was talking about me. They'd finally located the bleed in my pancreatic artery, one of the, I think, five that goes into the pancreas. They started trying to get the catheter from my right groin in through my vasculature to

the pancreatic artery. Partly because of this strange anatomy that I have, the vasculature in my abdomen is very difficult to navigate. They tried and tried. Over the course of some hours, I just kept failing to get there. Because I listened to your book on audio, I didn't actually check. Are there figures in the actual book? Did you have an anatomic diagram of what the celiac artery looks like coming off the aorta into its pancreatic tributaries? There's no diagrams. I think it would be really wonderful for people listening to us now to just go on

Google and go to Google images and look up celiac branch of the aorta or something like that with all of its tributaries. And I think what they'll appreciate, especially if they just look at the arterial system is you have to imagine what it's like to put a catheter in the femoral artery, which is in the groin. And then you have to snake it up the femoral artery, which is really easy. It becomes the aorta, no problem. And then you're going to pass some major branches.

So the first thing you're going to pass on the right and left will be the renal arteries, one going to each kidney. And then there's like these little vertebral arteries and things on the way. But the really big ones you're going to see will be two big ones that go to the gut. They're called mesenteric arteries. But then you get to the celiac and the problem with the celiac is, and this is not even before we're talking about yours, which is more problematic because it's compressed by the median arcuate ligament.

But the problem is it's coming down. So you described this very well, but I think sometimes the picture says a thousand words is like, how are they going to get the catheter to go up, then come down, then twist this way, then twist that way? That's the real challenge with that big 180 degree hairpin turn. Right. Then my vasculature around the pancreas was very contorted and distorted by the ligament in the wrong place. I'm in the IR suite and I'm conscious. They couldn't sedate me. They

didn't sedate me. They gave me a little bit of fentanyl and Versa. I'm conscious. I'm in enormous pain because all this blood has settled around my kidneys and my back. My back was just in agony. I think it was all the blood that settled around my kidneys and my back. My back was just in agony and I think it was all the blood that was around my organs. Are you conscious of time? No, I knew it had been forever. I'll put it that way. It seemed like a very long time. I didn't have a normal sense of, wow, it's probably been about three hours. I wasn't clocking it with that kind of precision, but I was in and out of some minds. I was a lot more there than I wished I'd been. At one point I started seeing terrifying faces in the machinery and the fluoroscope that was

above my head that was really terrifying and reminded me of a very scary incident in Africa that happened to me years earlier. But then I watched the doctors come to this moment and I watched one of them shrug his shoulders and basically was like, we tried. This isn't going to work. And the other one sort of nodded and I couldn't believe that I was sort of watching this. And then the first doctor who I think was Dr. Dombrowski said, maybe we can try one last thing which is going through his left wrist instead of his groin. The other doctor, Dr. Goran said, I like the way you think. That somehow allowed them an approach that ultimately worked. They went through my left wrist and through the celiac from above and they had to

get through the occlusion because the ligament is completely blocking the celiac and has been for my entire life. They inflated it, they were able to push it open and pass a catheter through that and eventually get it to the spot where they could embolize the rupture, they could block the rupture and pull their gear out and they're on their way to saving my life. I should just say just because medicine is so extraordinary and I'm alive because of any number of people, the team that was in the room but decades of doctors, researchers inventing this incredible technology and the 10 people who donated blood that they pumped into my veins to keep me alive. I owe my life to many, many good people. But one of them is a German doctor named Forsmann who invented the venous catheter and he did it. It's kind of a funny story.

It was almost exactly 100 years ago and he was a young guy, young doctor in a small German hospital. He just had this idea, why can't you push a catheter from a vein into your heart? Why can't you do that? Or from an artery. Or from an artery, right. He asked the director of the hospital for permission to do it on a patient and the director was like, no, we're here to heal them, not to experiment on them. I think it was 1923 in Germany. So, he's like, okay, well, how about a dying patient? He's like, no, we still can't do it. So, he snuck into the hospital. He had a confederate and a young nurse and he told her that he was going to do this procedure on her and she would be the first person to have a catheter inside her heart.

I think she was kind of sweet on him. It doesn't seem like much of an inducement, but she went for it. She laid down on the table. He had her lie down on the table and he strapped her arm down and get ready for the procedure. After she was strapped down, he turned away and num strapped her arm down ready for the procedure. After she was strapped down, he turned away and numbed his own arm and cut his arm open and threaded a catheter into his venous system and his arm and pushed it through. He had the tube marked off to where it would be just about in his heart and he pushed it to the marker and then he released her from the

table. She was absolutely furious apparently that she had been cheated out of being like a medical first. They walked down the hall to X-ray and he told the technician to take an X-ray and prove that 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 who got cheated. I remember the very first time I put a catheter into the heart. I was actually a medical student. I think today it might not be something they would let medical students do. They might want

to wait for you to be a little bit more senior, but it was a little looser 25, 30 years ago. Then of course it was under supervision, but to put what was called a Swan Gans catheter from the subclavian vein into the heart and then ultimately into the pulmonary arteries to measure the pressure of the pulmonary system. And you're sort of doing this and you can't believe that you can do this. You can't believe the human body, which on the one hand is so delicate and you've seen what these walls of veins look like. And that's even more scary than the walls of arteries because they're so thin.

And you think, boy, if you screw this up, this person will be dead in about a minute. And then you sort of fast forward to what you experienced and the level of skill that is required. I mean, to put a balloon catheter from the subclavian vein into the pulmonary artery, believe it or not, is not that difficult. You have to absolutely know what you're doing. What happened in your case is two orders of magnitude more skill required because they're

threading something very small from your radial artery all the way up into the subclavian, into the aorta, retrograde down, and then of course, they still have to do everything you just described. Again, you can't use too much force. You can't be a brute. It's a finesse thing. I was at a reading a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta talking about my book and I was talking about putting the – I didn't discuss this. Oh, you put the cordus in your neck. Yeah.

Right. I was talking about putting the line into my jugular and there was a guy in the audience who had needle phobia and I watched him just pass out in his seat while I'm talking about this like right in front of me. Eyes rolled back in his head, awful sort of strangling sounds coming out of his throat. I mean, just like I dropped him unintentionally and so I called for a doctor. Is there a doctor in the audience? I never thought I'd have to say that. This older guy, two guys came rushing forward, a younger guy who was a paramedic who wrote a wonderful book called A Thousand Naked Strangers, which is a book about working on an ambulance. Then another older guy came forward and they helped this guy. He just passed out. They helped him, he was fine, thank God. But the older guy who came forward had trained the guy who saved my life, Dr.

Dombrowski, that was his mentor. He said maybe 5% of interventional radiologists could have done what Dr. Dombrowski did. He said, you're really, really lucky, extraordinarily lucky. You really threaded the needle here medically. After many hours, they managed to embolize the rupture and then I think they just knocked me out and sent me up to the ICU. I briefly remember seeing my wife and holding her hand afterwards as I was getting rolled out. My back was still in agony and I sort of on the way through, I begged her for a quick back rub. The nurse was like, no, no, no, no back rubs. We're going to the ICU. I was just in agony. They knocked me out and I woke up to the sound of nurses voices in the

ICU the next morning and woke up completely, completely ignorant that I'd almost died. I had no idea. It was the ICU nurse that said, man, no one can believe you're alive. You made it. Now, was this the ICU nurse that you later spoke about? Yeah. Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about that discussion. So, as soon as she said, Mr. Younger, congratulations, good morning, you made it, it's a miracle. As soon as she said that, I was shocked, horrified and shocked. And then I had this memory from when I was on the threshold. It came back to me instantly, particularly for me as an atheist. This was the central mystery of my experience and whether it's brain chemistry or not,

this is the central mystery that I've grappled with. So when I was in the trauma bay, the doctor said to me, asked permission to put a line through my neck into my jugular, which didn't sound like a lot of fun. And I had no idea I was dying and I didn't know what all the fuss was about. So I said, is that really necessary? Why? I said, in case there's an emergency? He said, this is the emergency Mr. Younger. He was a young guy. He was probably 25. I'm like, kid, I'm three times your age. What's happening here? He started working on me and they use an ultrasound probe and result procedure that I think probably doesn't take particularly long. It felt like a long time

to me. While I'm lying there and I'm feeling this pressure on my neck while they're starting to prep the area and you're under a sheet. I'm under a sterile sheet, clear plastic sheet. Yes, if I'm claustrophobic and since being in combat, combat may be extremely claustrophobic for some reason that I don't understand. Apparently that's quite common. He said, are you claustrophobic? And I said, I am actually. And he said, well, that's too bad. And he put the sheet over me and I was like, oh, finally someone with a sense of humor. They're working on my neck. And to my shock, to my horror, suddenly beneath me into my left, I sense this black void open up, this abyss. It's like this infinitely dark pit without dimension and I'm getting pulled into it.

Again, I have no idea that I'm dying, but I was like a wounded animal. I just had this animal sense, like don't go into the pit because if you go into the pit, you're not coming back. Your eyes are open? Your eyes are closed? Well, I'm conversing with the doctor so I don't know if they're open or not. I mean, and I'm frankly not craning my neck to look down at the floor. So it's not like I visually saw it, but I felt it. Suddenly there was this pit. It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. You can kind of feel the void. I was like,

oh my God, I'm getting pulled into this hole. It was a completely new experience. I hadn't felt it before. It was there very suddenly and it was unopposable. I mean, it was just, this is what's happening. And I got very scared. And as I got scared, suddenly I, in quotation marks, saw my dead father above me. Now only am I an atheist, but my father was an atheist. He died eight years earlier. He was a physicist, a rationalist and trained me well in all those practices basically, that way of thinking about the world. My mother who was kind of been on the woo-woo side, he drove her crazy by sort of asking precise questions about her beliefs like, what do you mean bad energy? How does bad energy make you sick? He would ask things like that, which it's amazing they stayed married. But at any rate, suddenly my dead father was above me and to my left.

I was shocked to see him because I'm still talking to the doctors. It's not like I had cardiac arrest and I'm in some nether world. I'm still there and there he is above me in the room. And he communicated to me something along the lines of, it's okay, you don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. And I was absolutely horrified. I mean, it was almost grotesque. I was almost offended. Like, go with you. You're dead. Why would I go with you? I'm alive. We have nothing to talk about. I love my dad. I said, we have nothing to talk about. I'm not going anywhere with you. Why do you think you weren't comforted by him in some way? For example, you hadn't seen him in

eight years. It's clear from your book that you have an amazing affection for your father. It's not like this is a person you don't love or miss. I just find it interesting and there's no answer to this question, but your aversion to his presence, does it suggest to you that something about engaging with him in any way was tantamount to death for you?

He was clearly inviting me to join him where he was and I knew he was dead. I wasn't literally thinking in my mind, I have two little girls, I'm married, I have a lot to live for, I'm only 58 for God's sake. I wasn't thinking those thoughts precisely, but there was this basic dichotomy. There's the black pit, there's my dead father and that's all death, that's nothingness. You're outbound on a journey, you're not coming back from into the nothing. That's what it felt like and he was part of that. And I was almost offended that he would imagine that I would prefer to go with him into that than to stay in my life. And I almost worried that it would hurt his feelings. And he was like on that level of, don't you want to spend time with your daddy? And I was like, no, you're dead. I want to spend

time here for the rest of my life. We'll talk later. It was a very, very visceral response and I really was horrified. And one of the theories about near-death experiences is that it's an adaptive sort of behavior that's a form of comforting. It's comforting to the dying person that they see beloved loved ones and, ah, I'm not just leaving this life. I'm sort of crossing over into this beautiful world of all these dead people that I miss and it's going to be fine. That was absolutely not the case for me. I was horrified. I said to the doctor, because he just kept fumbling around him. What to me felt like fumbling around with my neck. I know that's not fair to him, but that's what it felt like. I said, you got to hurry. I'm going. I didn't

know where I was going. I didn't know I was dying, but I knew I was going somewhere where I wasn't coming back. I knew that much. He got the line in and they started transfusing me. Are you realizing this for the first time in the ICU the next day or are you just remembering it and now experiencing it through your memory the second time? In the ICU, I remembered experiencing it for the first time. It was an extremely powerful memory and it was terrifying. I had just woken up from whatever they put me under with and I was woken up by the nurse talking over me, talking to the

other ICU nurse and I was woken up by voices. I opened my eyes. She said, good morning Mr. Younger. Congratulations. As soon as she said it, I remembered that I'd had this terrifying encounter, this horrifying encounter with my father and with the pit. And it was the next thing I thought. So, my brain was so confused. It was like I was extremely drunk or something like that. My brain was so confused in those moments. I was rational enough to speak to the doctor, but I was in a very strange state of mind. So it wasn't like in that moment, I was thinking, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, I'm seeing my dead father. I didn't have that kind of self-conscious awareness of the moment the way when we might now. I mean, if I saw my dead father above me right now, I'd be thinking, I'd be like, do you see that above us? Because he's right there. It wasn't like that. But it was the first thing

that came back to me when I woke up. And it was the first thing I asked my wife, because again, I'm a journalist and I'm a skeptic and I was just worried that I'd somehow unconsciously cooked all this up later. And So I asked my wife, when you came into the room, what happened? She said, the first thing you said to me was, I almost died last night and I saw my father. It was the first thing I told her. Whatever that means, I'm confident that I had some sort of experience in those moments and not one that was sort of like conjured later retroactively. I can't prove that of course, but that's my sense about it. So say more about this nurse. What else did she tell you?

She dropped that bomb on me and left to go attend to the other patients. I'm lying in the bed. I've got six units of blood and floating around sloshing around in my abdomen. I got 10 people's blood inside me. Got tubes all over the place. I'm in incredible pain. I'm throwing up blood because somehow the blood got into my digestive system as well. I was throwing up blood that whole morning. It was really unpleasant.

I'm trying to digest this noose that I almost died. It just seemed inconceivable. It would be as inconceivable as when you wake up in the morning, tomorrow morning when you wake up, instead of waking up in your bed at home with your wife, you wake up in a hospital and first thing you hear is, honey, you almost died last night. It was that inconceivable. Like what? Even though you remember the events of the day that led you there. You know, I didn't know anything about what dying feels like. And I've pictured it to feel way more catastrophic than what I experienced.

I was in compensatory shock the whole drive down there. And then I was in a very, very weird state and a lot of pain. And it just was inconceivable to me that this was it. This is the big deal, this is dying. It just seemed like there'd be more blood on the floor, there'd be something. I had belly pain, like it just didn't. But it didn't resonate to you yet

that if there were 10 pieces of Swiss cheese that were placed on top of each other, you happened to be one of those 10 stacks where a pencil still made it through. Did that occur to you yet? Cause there was, again, there's so much freakish luck we could recount it all, but we don't need to. At this point, there were 10 things, all of which had to happen for you to survive right up into including having the right interventional radiologists there. Did that resonate yet?

Not till later. When I found that out as I started to do the research, every time I encountered another facet of how unlikely it was, I would get incredibly depressed. It still depresses me. When I talked to the mentor of the guy who saved my life and he said, you know, Dr. Dombrowski is one of maybe in the 5% of all IR guys who could have saved your life. I felt my spirits just plummet. There wasn't any of this sort of like former athlete in me of like, yeah, I did something almost no one else can do. There wasn't any pride in there. Is there a sense of, I don't know what the right word is. It's not gratitude. That's a bit glib. Is there a sense of awe in that or is there a sense of do you believe there's meaning

in that or do you believe that there's no meaning in that and it's just as much luck as the world is full of bad luck? I'm much more familiar as I'm sure you and many people listening are. We're much more familiar with the opposite, right? It's like the person who did everything right and they just happened to get hit by some drunk idiot who ran a red light and there was virtually nothing they could have done to have prevented it.

It's purely a lightning strike. And how often does bad luck take a life just as remarkable luck saved a life? Do you process it like that at all? Yeah, I do. We all are sort of looking for meaning in the universe and there are no coincidences and everything happens for a reason and all those narratives that we put on, I think, a fairly random universe. I mean random, but for the laws of physics. But in terms of the events of our life, I was at an American outpost in Afghanistan and I was

shocked to feel some sand flicking to the side of my face. Bullets travel faster than sound. The outpost would get attacked from about 500 meters out, which is quite a long shot for an AK-47 or a PKM. The bullets arrive way before the sound does. Some sand flicked into the side of my face. I just had time to think, what was that? I was standing against some sandbags. What was that? And then I heard da-da-da-da-da. So, that was the first burst of an hour-long firefight and the bullets had to have hit with maybe an inch or two from my forehead, right? In my opinion, utterly random. I was blown up by an IED. It went off under the engine block instead of under us. The Taliban guy with the clacker and the ravine missed it by a second, a second. But the whole rest of my life unfolded. It's

contained in that second in some ways because we were spared. And so at one point I was at a reading early, early on. We were writing when the book came out and a guy raised his hand at the end, he was quite agitated and he said, I'm Christian and you're alive because of God's grace and you have to come to Jesus and understand that it was only God's grace that saved you. And I said to him, one of my best friends, my brother, my colleague, Tim Hetherington was killed in combat in Libya on an assignment I was supposed to be on. His death was what got me out of war reporting and then had a family family, etc. And he bled out also, I mean from a wound in his groin, but he was in a war zone and they couldn't save him. And so I said to the guy, I said,

you know, my problem with that way of thinking that there's some purpose here, some meaning here, is why me? Right? Like why me and not Tim? For that matter, why me and not some nine-year-old with cancer? I'm sorry. If God is running a random lottery for his grace, I don't want any part of it. I think that the universe, it unfolds in random ways and I just got super, super lucky. But the fact that I got that lucky makes me profoundly grateful and is also incredibly depressing to me for reasons that I can't quite understand. But I just sort of think about what was statistically supposed to happen by a factor of maybe 10 to 1 or something or more. Probably more.

Probably more. Have you spoken with others? I'm just very curious about that, Sebastian. The gratitude makes a lot of sense to me and I don't know how I would feel in your situation. This is curiosity and certainly not judgment. I'm curious though if you've spoken with others who have survived similar experiences. I think of my friend Rick Elias. I should introduce you guys. Rick was on that US Airways flight that had to emergency land in the Hudson. Again, you've got this guy, Captain Sullenberger who he's the one out of 50. The Dumb Frosty.

That's exactly right. He's the one out of 50 guys that could have actually make the right decision with enough time to spare and then carried it out. Again, he wasn't supposed to live. I've never asked him this question. This would be an interesting topic is how many other people on this planet who are alive only because of monumental luck? What is the balance between the gratitude and the heaviness of that that tips into dysthymia? Well, if I didn't have children, I think it would be psychologically a little easier. But what it would have left them with was such a legacy of pain and absence and my poor

wife that made it harder. The things that would have consoled me like holding my daughter, like I survived and here I'm holding my daughter in my lap. But I immediately think, oh, but this wasn't supposed to happen. She's supposed to be grieving me right now. By odds of a hundred to one, she should and it's a miracle. Then I would just spin out into what could have happened. I eventually talked to her shrink. I mean, my wife was like, honey, you're getting a little hard to live with. Can you seek help? It was a great thing to do and it really, really helped me. My therapist was

basically, she was like, listen, if you keep telling yourself this narrative that you almost died, you're never going to escape this incredible anxiety and panic disorder and depression that you've worked yourself into. You have to stop telling yourself this story. She was absolutely right. Apparently, this sort of negative storytelling is very, very common in people who almost died. And the sequence of really, really profound anxiety and fear, medical paranoia, it's going to happen again any moment, I'm going to bleed out again, that sort of paranoia. Then that finally eased off and I wound up in this unbelievable depression. I've never been depressed in my life. I'm not a particularly anxious person and I was amazed at how debilitating depression was. I finally got it

because I've had friends who have struggled with depression. I lost a friend to suicide and suddenly I was like, oh, this is what they're talking about. Why bother going through the rest of your life? That kind of thought, I had no idea. I really opened a door to like, oh, I had no idea. That's what when people say depression, this is what they're talking about. It was quite frightening. One of the problems, so I had trouble, I know we have to get back to the nurse, which is part of this problem, this reality problem that I had. I was having trouble understanding, being confident about what reality was and what it wasn't. Part of that stemmed from this somewhat clairvoyant dream that

I had. I just have to reiterate, I'm really not a spiritual, mystical or woo-woo person. I'm really not, which is why this stuff unsettled me so much. Much more your father than your mother. Much more, which is why this is unsettling to me. Thirty-six hours prior, the only symptoms I had that something was awry in my abdomen was sort of intermittent pain that would come and go. If I were more responsible, I would have gone to the doctor and they would have scanned me and they would have seen a big-ass aneurysm in my pancreatic artery and they would have fixed it without all the drama. But I didn't do that and it wasn't consistent enough to get me to the doctor. I just thought anything that's going to

kill me is going to be agonizing in a stupid way. I was like, if I can bear the pain, what could it do? So, I thought I had irritable bowel syndrome as I sort of cooked up for some internet Googling. What it probably was, was the aneurysm starting to dissect a little bit and leak a little bit of blood into my abdomen. That's the pain I was feeling. My body on some level, I think knew there's a five alarm fire coming. So, 36 hours prior to nearly dying, I was woken up at dawn. So my family, we co-sleep on a big pad on the floor. I was woken up at dawn by this horrific nightmare, a nightmare that I've never, of the sort I've never had, I've never even heard of. In the nightmare, I was already dead. It started with me already dead. I'm a ghost. I'm a spirit. I don't know that I'm dead.

My family is below me and they're grieving. I realize they're grieving me and I don't know I'm dead. I'm waving my arms and shouting, I'm over here. I'm right here. I'm right here. They can't hear me and they can't see me. Then I'm made to understand that it's too late. Because of my own stupidity, I didn't take my life seriously. I assume this to mean the intermittent pain in my abdomen because I didn't take things seriously.

I was cavalier about life, capital L life. I was cavalier about life and now it's too late. There's no going back. You're dead and you're outbound and you're not coming back. I was so frantic with terror and anguish and shame, incredible sense of shame. In the dream or when you woke up? In the dream. Just that I had somehow squandered this great treasure of life. I just hadn't taken something seriously and now there's no going back. There's no retrieving it. It woke me up and suddenly I'm in my bed. I'm like, oh, thank God I'm not dead because it had felt so real. I sort of clutched my little girl, woke up next to my eldest daughter and I clutched her like I've seen her clutch her stuffies, right? Just like, oh, thank God you're here. Like then I'm here. I mean, I was just overwhelmed with gratitude and fear. Were you in pain when you woke up?

Was the abdominal pain present? No, it wasn't. It was just a dream. Pain was very, very rare and intermittent, but sort of unmistakable. How long had it been going on? About six months. Did the dream, because you had a full day after that dream before the day this all happened. That's right. In that one lucid day, did it cross your mind? I talked to my wife about it. And I'm an older dad. I had my first child at 55, and I sort of ascribed it to just sort of mortality, anxiety about'm an older dad. I had my first child at 55 and I ascribed it to just mortality,

anxiety about being an older dad. How long am I going to live into their lives, into their hopefully adult lives? I didn't really think about it and lots of compartments in my head. But I put things places where I can't reach them. Dealing with fear and other things as a journalist, you need those compartments and you can't function. I got extremely good at having these firewalls that separate me from emotions that are problematic and get in the way of what I'm trying to do. To some degree, it's adaptive and helpful in our lives and after a certain point, it's maladaptive and clearly I'd got to that point, but I didn't know it.

After coming back from the hospital, and I will get back to the nurse because she's crucial here, but after coming back from the hospital, I was in the ICU for five days. I recovered very, very quickly and in the general floor population for a couple of days, then they discharged me. I was out of there and I got home. I started researching NDEs, near-death experiences, because I was really confused about seeing my father and the black pit and the rest of it. So it turns out that I had a rather classic NDE. The NDE experiences, they're not infinite in variety. There's an infinite number of hallucinations you might have on LSD, but the NDEs, they

fall into sort of like half a dozen basic sort of buckets. A black pit, a tunnel with a light at the end of it, dead relatives showing up, hovering over your body. There's like half a dozen sort of basic scenarios. And what's interesting about this, sorry to interrupt Sebastian, because again, I think it's really fascinating. This is technology and culture agnostic. Yeah. technology and culture agnostic? In other words, these stories that you've researched and others have as well, it doesn't seem to matter when. As far back as we have record, it's the same thing. So it's not like this is just a result of the TV shows we watch. And again,

it's culturally agnostic, which is also… It's odd. It's not like Christians have whatever, like the slight, slight variations between cultures but not enough to ascribe it to culture. It seems like a more universal experience. So I'm researching this stuff and one of the classic NDE experiences is hovering over your family or over this sort of surgery bay where the doctors are losing you. Unable to communicate and you're sort of above bay where the doctors are losing you. Unable to communicate and you're sort of above them and you're getting tugged between this force that's pulling you outwards into the beyond and these last ties to your earthly coil. And I had no interest in NDEs

at all. I didn't know anything about them. So I had these experiences with a rather clean slate. I'm not culturally prepped for these experiences. I realized I had rather classic NDEs both in the moment and also in this weird dream. And this was the fear that I was seized with. And this is how paranoid and anxious I was. I thought, oh my God, obviously I died in my sleep. My dream was my experience of actually dying. My wife woke up to her dead husband in the bed and I don't know it because I continued on under the illusion that I went to the hospital, that I came back, that here I am holding my daughter in my lap. It's one long dying hallucination and I'm not really

here. I'm a ghost. I'm imagining all this. It's laughable except it's not disprovable. Exactly. I was just about to say that's the challenge. If you're sufficiently traumatized and I've been traumatized in combat, I know there's a bumpy road to recovery afterwards. I know it pretty well. It sort of fades over time like the grief when you lose a loved one and whatever. We're designed to adapt to survive, right? Humans were amazing. We're resilient unless you're particularly traumatized when you're young, which makes resilience harder. So, I know that terrain, this was completely eclipsed anything from combat. I was really traumatized by this because when you're a war reporter, you're making a conscious choice to go to the poker table and bet your chips.

All right, I'm going to go to Bosnia. I'm going to go to Ukraine. I got some chips. I think I'm a good enough poker player. I can wager my chips, come back with more chips, career, whatever experience, whatever it is. Maybe I'll get a book out of it. I'm going to come back with more chips before I lose my shirt. I'm going to leave the poker table before I lose everything and I'm going to come back with these riches, whatever they may be, experiential riches, professional riches. I stopped doing that. I was like, Tim got killed. I'm going to get cleaned out the next time I'm leaving the poker table. I had a family and so what was so traumatizing was that I thought I

was safe. It's like owing the mafia money. There's nowhere you can go where you won't have to pay this back. We will find you. You can go to Northern Canada. You can go to Calcutta. We are coming after our 100K and you can't hide from us. That basically is what the universe is doing. It's like, look, we loaned you some carbon to make your body out of. We will be reclaiming that eventually, Mr. Younger. I thought I could delay that. You can't. You just don't know. None of us know that this isn't the last day of our life. I woke up that morning with not a clue other than this crazy dream, not a clue that this was it, a beautiful June day. That's what was so incredibly disturbing and it was what warped my mind afterwards.

Then I found out, and there was some consolation in this, that thinking that you're not alive is a not uncommon delusion for people who almost died. It's a sort of known thing. Likewise, the depression, the anxiety, I was doing something that many people have almost died and particularly almost died and particularly almost died for medical reasons have gone through. There was some comfort in that. But let me finally return to this amazing nurse. I woke up to the sound of the voice of a middle-aged woman with a heavy Boston accent, which makes sense because I was in Hyannis, Massachusetts.

She and the other nurse were discussing me. I woke up, ah, good morning Mr. Younger. Congratulations. You almost died last night. Then they left to attend to other patients. I just sat there just thinking about this news like, I almost died last night? Are you kidding? It was horrifying. It is not the sort of woohoo party like, wow, I almost died, here I am, let's celebrate. It was absolutely crushing.

I sat there physically incredibly compromised and in a lot of pain and throwing up blood and thinking about the fact that I'd almost, as they say, had almost bought the farm and not known it. She came back an hour later and said, how are you doing, Mr. Younger? The accent. I said, well, I'm okay, but frankly, what you told me is terrifying and I can't stop thinking about it. She said, try this, instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And then she walked out. And so then I lay there thinking about that. Now I don't go to church, I don't believe in God.

But the word sacred I feel is one that us secular people have every right to use and there's very, very fine secular meanings that you can bring to it. For me, something sacred, a sacred task is anything that allows people to live with more dignity, more love, more freedom, less fear. Those are sacred things. Religion can be sacred because it can achieve those things. It can really elevate human dignity applied in the right ways. It can also obviously destroy it. Therapists can have it. School teachers, even journalists, right in my mind, I'm like, okay, what do we do on our best days? We go to places that are at least difficult and hard and intimidating,

if not downright dangerous. And we try to come back with information that society, the human race can make some use of to chart a better course, to maybe protect human dignity in Ukraine a little bit better, to help the human lot a little bit. That is a sacred task in by my own secular definition of what sacred is. I've done this my whole life and it's a responsibility and frankly an honor that I take extremely seriously and I'm very proud to be able to do and feel quite humble about it. Like, wow, really me? I get to do this? It's one of the things that in being not just a father but a good father and a do this? It's one of the things that and being not just a father, but a good father and a good husband.

So one of the things that I am the most proud of in my life is that I was able to do this passing well for a number of years. And so I thought, what about now? I stopped going to front lines, but then I went to the ultimate front line, which is my own death, my own mortality, this thing we all face and that almost all of us fear. I was allowed to go to the precipice, look over the edge and then allowed to come back. Did I come back with any sacred knowledge? In other words, any knowledge that will help me or other people live with more dignity,

less fear, more connection, more love, et cetera, et cetera. That's the task. That's what this nurse has asked me to do. Now, she might have meant it in a completely Christian sense. I have absolutely no idea. After I recovered and started thinking about writing a book, of course, I thought because I interviewed everyone who I could at the hospital and elsewhere, I thought, I got to talk to this lady, this amazing woman. What did she mean? I know what use I made of it, but what did she mean? So I called the hospital, the media relations

office and they weren't much help. And then I finally got a phone line into the ICU and asked the gal at the desk, so a middle-aged lady, Boston accent was working on June 17th. No, no one by that description here. No, there's a young woman with a Boston accent, but no, no, she hasn't. She's been off lately. And I kept calling and trying to, and I could not find her. And when I told the story to reading, one woman said, well, clearly she was your guardian angel.

She appeared to help you in your moment of need. Maybe, I mean, I don't know. Or a traveling nurse that they forgot about or something. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or in just a hospital bureaucracy, they couldn't figure out who she was or she didn't want to talk to the press. She was like, no way, I'm not talking to this guy. He saw his dead father. I have nothing to do with this. No idea. But because I had such trouble figuring out what was reality and what wasn't, of course it crossed my mind. I mean, I saw my dead father. Maybe I imagined a nurse. Maybe I imagined a nurse who had exactly the information, the idea, which of course is contained somewhere

in me. I just didn't have access to it, who had the information that I needed at that moment. So who knows? And it doesn't really matter, but it was an extraordinary experience for me. You know, anybody who remembers our first discussion and who's familiar with your work knows that no one's ever accused you of being disconnected. So it's not like prior to June 17th or June 16th, 2020, you were a guy who was distracted. You were a guy who was numbing the pain of life with hedonic pleasures and things of that nature. You are literally the only person I know who doesn't have a smartphone, who lives as close to off the grid as possible. All of that permits you to have this remarkable connection with the people who matter most to you,

most importantly, your family. So it's almost a little ironic that if we consider this a gift it was given to you, you almost think that if anybody needs a gift like this, it's someone like me. It's a guy who's way more distracted and way more frenetic. And maybe like most people listening could use the realignment of what is sacred. So given all of that, I'm really curious what has changed in you.

So what I would say is, you know, as I sort of went into my midlife, I dropped a number of things that made me feel very, very good when I was young. I really enjoyed alcohol, frankly. I never did any drugs, but I really enjoyed alcohol. Nine years ago, I stopped drinking. I wasn't an alcoholic, but it was playing a role in my life that I wasn't interested in continuing. I was a totally obsessive athlete. I was a pretty good marathon runner and distance runner when I was young. I ran 412 for the mile, which isn't world-class, but it's a decent time. I ran 221 for the marathon, 30 minutes for 10K. Decent times requiring an obsessive amount of effort. For people who don't run, those are exceptional times.

The effort consumed my life. I was running 120 miles a week at six-minute pace. I was clearly avoiding something. I mean, I look back, I was clearly 100, 120 miles a week at six-minute pace. I was clearly avoiding something. I mean, I look back, I was clearly avoiding a certain sort of emotional experience that I didn't feel prepared for and probably wasn't mature enough for, wasn't ready for yet. It did all that quite well. My father really was quite a brilliant physicist in his specialty of acoustics. He was very, very clearly on the spectrum. Spectrum disorder runs – disorder is a bad word because it has so many adaptive uses, but spectrum tendency definitely runs through my family and I can see it in both directions, downstream and upstream from me. There is a

certain sort of focus of mind that you're looking at the world through a toilet paper tube. You're seeing the small circle of light and that's all you're seeing, which means you can focus incredibly intensely on it. You're pretty oblivious to everything else. What I watch my father do, and I have a watered down version of this, is this dogged pursuit of some kind of penetrating insight, some kind of excellence, some kind of transcendent accomplishment. Yeah, we get there. If I may say this about myself, I write good books that affect people like I did it. I figured out how to do it. It requires a huge amount of concentration. My father really advanced physics in interesting ways. A lot of his fellow physicists are exactly

the same way, just ask their wives out to lunch most of the time. The cost of that is you're not experiencing your life in emotional terms. And when there are emotions in your life that are unpleasant or even terrifying to deal with, you could actively turn on this obsessive focus in order to avoid dealing with it. So there's a kind of passive not notice, I don't notice, I don't notice. But then when a threatening emotion comes along, like a painful breakup or whatever it may be, then you can really turn on the jets and really blast off into whatever direction you're doing for a while is 120 miles a week. Then later in my life, it was this pursuit of journalism, this maniacal focus that I'm capable of.

And once you get into that, once you get into that rhythm of being able to go through life, you're richly rewarded for the accomplishments that come with that kind of focus. So society is around you saying, well done, sir. Awesome. Amazing. Your book changed my life. You're blah, blah, blah. Whatever it may be, you might be a musician, you might be that comes in all flavors. And so, you think your life is a raging success,

but actually you're not experiencing the actual feeling of being alive all the time. And I remember at one point, on my second marriage, my first marriage didn't work. I'm still very good friends with my ex-wife, but the marriage didn't work. As my first wife and I exited that marriage, any divorce is incredibly sad and painful even if it's amicable, which ours thank God was. And we're both good people and we loved each other and we did it really quite well, but I was incredibly sad. I was still going through this legal process of divorce and really very, very sad and found myself in this wonderful new relationship that turned into my second marriage and my family. It all ended quite well for both me and my former wife. So,

in this process, because I'm not in touch with my feelings at all, unless absolutely necessary, I would just drop into these pits of sadness. And I didn't know what they were. And my wife, Barbara, the woman I'm married to, and then one day she said, honey, something seems up today. Are you all right? And I said, no, I'm not. I feel really strange. I don't know what it is. She said, you're going through all this stuff. Maybe you're just really sad. I was like, oh my God, you're right. That feeling, that not feeling quite right, it's sadness.

Why are you so brilliant? I'm sad. That's exactly what it is. I couldn't believe her insight. So I said to her, not tongue in cheek, not trying to be funny, before I could catch myself, I said, in the future, if you could tell me how I'm feeling, it would be so helpful. It's like, you're a freak, right? What are you talking about? All that to say that you're right, I'm not distracted, I'm tuned out. I'm out there, not as bad as my father. My father,

this is real physicist territory, was really, really out there. But I'm out there enough and there's enough problematic and painful emotional territory in my life that I found quite a good refuge in athletics and then this incredible professional endeavor that I so completely fell in love with. Twice you've alluded to the fact that you're an atheist and yet I think that something that is worth pointing out here is that whether a person is an atheist or a believer doesn't speak to another dimension which is, is there or is there not an afterlife? And those two do not require each other. In other words, there's really a two by two

that we should be considering here, which is, is there a God or a creator or is there not? And is there an afterlife or is there not? There are four squares there. Yeah, I saw you draw four squares on your piece of paper. I was like, oh, I think I know what's coming. Yes, and I've been thinking a lot about this because the God problem is an enormous problem

because on the one hand, I don't actually understand how any of us exist in the sense that if you just think about it stochastically, it doesn't make any sense. None of this makes sense. I can't. There's no amount of knowledge I have about biology, mathematics, and physics that explains why I'm sitting here and why you're sitting here and why we're doing what we're doing right now. The three billion base pairs that define you, the three billion base pairs that define me, each of those base pairs has four possible DNA molecules that could define them.

The numbers are so big, they don't add up. None of this makes sense. You can go down the path of, well, there must be a creator, but then you're stuck with the who created the creator problem and then you wrap yourself around that axle. Let's not even interrogate that. Neither of us are equipped to and it sounds like neither of us are particularly predisposed to believe that anyway. But if we just focus on this afterlife question, which again, doesn't require a God necessarily, it's hard to do it without

talking about physics. Ultimately, it's hard to talk about anything without talking about physics. At the end of the day, that's what the world is – that's what reality is made up out of is particles and atoms and the laws of physics that govern them. So yes, I agree. Now, one of the things you wrote about in your book that I couldn't believe was your relationship to one of the greatest physicists of the last 100 plus years, which is Erwin Schrödinger. Yeah. You want to recount the story of how you find yourself within his sphere? Yeah. My father grew up in Europe. He was born in Dresden. His father was Jewish. His mother was

Austrian Italian Catholic, which was an unheard of pairing back in the 19 teens, 1920s. Your father was born right after World War I. Yeah, he was born in 1923 in Dresden. Ten years later, the Reichstag fire, Germany is – people know where this is headed and they decamp for Spain. His dad, my dad's dad was Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish, so he spoke Spanish and Russian and German. So, they went to Spain and three years there, my dad's 13 when the fascists come in under Franco. So, now my father's fluent German and fluent Spanish, they leave Spain for France. He goes to French high school and then when he is 17, I think the Germans come into France. They flee France, wind up in Portugal, picks up Portuguese along the way,

and then lands in America and learns English. So as I am fond of saying, thanks to the fascists, my father spoke five languages fluently, five European languages fluently. So that's how he came to America, but his mother's side of his family was from Austria, from Salzburg, her upper middle class. My father's mother was born in 1900 and was this great beauty. It was known as a great beauty in the small city of Salzburg, as were her twins, Iti and Viti, Junger. They were sort of renowned as teenage girls for being really beautiful. The family happened to know the Schreudingers. Schreudinger, this preeminent physicist, Schreudinger's cat, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, etc., Nobel Prize.

So Schrodinger was in his 40s and had a family and was a bit of a dog. I mean affairs all over the place and as many people had then and still do, I suppose. So at one point these girls, the twins, they're failing math. They're failing high school math. They're 16. They're failing high school math. The mother has the great idea of calling Schrodinger's wife saying, I know your husband's a mathematician. My girls are failing math. Do you think they could come visit for the summer in Germany where the Schrodingers were living? Come visit for the summer and maybe he can tutor them in math. You just have to understand how completely ridiculous. I mean,

it's like Einstein, right? It's like they're failing sophomore math. Can Erwin help them? So off the girls go for a summer in Germany and Schrodinger falls in love with Iti, one of the twins. And he manages to get them through their math tests. The math is so simple that he actually doesn't understand it very well because it's so simple. So he has to consult with his wife's lover who's a mathematician, not a physicist. I mean, there's just the sort of romantic drama of these people was just extraordinary. Anyway, thank God the girls passed their exams and E.T. and Schrodinger, they tastefully wait until she's 18 and he's 45 or something and they have this passionate affair that lasts some years. Tragically, she got pregnant, the pregnancy was aborted and as a result, she was never able to have children. I knew her much

later in her life when I was a child and she was married and a rather sad figure, frankly, probably due to what was really a tragedy in a young woman's life of losing the ability to have children. He was really in love with her. So, Schrodinger and the family, I mean, I have letters and poems that he wrote her, handwritten. In fact, there's a biography of Schrodinger, a wonderful biography that came out in the 80s or 90s and the bookmark where my father had marked something. The bookmark is a handwritten letter by Schrodinger to E.T. That's the bookmark in the biography that I found on the shelf. That's our history with Schrodinger.

So, we talk about his cat. Many people probably know the experiment. It's a thought experiment, a Gdankin experiment that's worth maybe explaining because it really speaks to the challenge of, at least one of the challenges of understanding quantum mechanics. Do you want to just briefly sort of explain this thought experiment and what purpose it serves in understanding this? The central enigma and mystery of quantum physics is the fact that if you don't observe what a subatomic particle is doing, and I'm speaking as a civilian who tried to read and tried to understand physics, so I'm doing my best to render it understandable, but I'm not a physicist. So, the mystery is when you do not observe and try to measure the momentum and position of a subatomic particle that it appears to be in all possible

places. It's a waveform and if you fire say a photon at a steel plate with two slits in it, the photon unobserved, the photon will go through both slits and leave a signature on the strike plate on the other side that shows it simultaneously went through both slits. We can't do that. We cannot walk through two doorways at the same time. In the macroscopic world, you're in one place or the other. But unobserved, a subatomic particle appears to be able to go through two slits at the same time. It's basically a huge potentiality that only collapses into one single thing. It only goes through one slit if you actually observe it and measure it. And so unavoidably, the thought arises, the thought arose to these early physicists,

Heisenberg and Schrodinger and a number of others, most of whom were from the German speaking world for some reason and Dirac from of course from England. Unavoidably the thought arose is our conscious observation of subatomic reality creating the thing that we observe and if so, is our observation of the entire universe creating the universe as observed. What exactly is happening and are we creating what we see by seeing it? Schrodinger came up with a sort of thought experiment, a Gdankin experiment, which is that you have a cat. Why he picked a cat? I don't know. When he put a cat in a box with what he called, I think the translated from the German is what he called a fiendish mechanism. The fiendish mechanism is an isotope that has exactly a 50-50 chance of

decaying in the next hour. Now, I'm a little rough on the details. Yeah. If it decays in a certain way, it will emit enough radiation to kill the cat and if it doesn't, the cat is fine. So basically it's just that there's a 50-50 chance that this decaying isotope will kill the cat or not kill the cat. I think actually what it is, is that the radiation triggers the release of a gas that instantly kills the cat. Oh, okay. Okay. So there's another step. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't matter. The idea is exactly 50-50,

and the cat's in this enclosed box, and after an hour, there's a 100% chance that one thing or the other happened. There's no third possibility where the cat's a little sick. It's one or the other. It's a complete binary. And likewise, at the subatomic level, particles are in one place or another. It's a complete binary.

There isn't like in the macroscopic world, a pendulum swings and traverses through all the different spaces. At the quantum level, you're in one place or another. Likewise, the cat is alive or dead. It's a massive waveform. Schrodinger said the cat is in quantum terms both alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box and observe either a dead cat or a living cat. That's Schrodinger's cat. There's a great description in the book of an experiment that I actually wasn't aware of. This experiment that took place, I believe it was in the book of an experiment that I actually wasn't aware of,

this experiment that took place, I believe it was off the coast of Spain in the Canary Islands, correct? The experiment is very complicated, but it actually illustrates this point with a little more nuance because of course, a lay person listening to this is thinking, what the hell are you two idiots talking about? This is a dumb story. But the point is when you look at the path of these electrons or particles unobserved, they are indeed behaving this way. And this experiment, I don't know if you want to go into the experiment. I'll try. It's so mind boggling. Yeah. Give me a flashlight. We can go into the cave. So it's called Delayed Choice Quantum Erasure.

I include the technical description of the experiment in the book because for the civilian, it's just absolute madness. I mean, the words make no sense. It's describing the physical setup of the experiment with lasers and mirrors and telephone cable and fiber optics cable. Just as an example, this is how far out there these scientists are getting that we don't even understand the language that they use to describe how they understand

the universe. There are things called entangled particles. Entangled particles are subatomic particles that affect each other instantaneously and have to do the same or corresponding things. If you do something to one particle that's entangled with another particle, the entangled particle reacts in the same or complementary way instantly. Inst instantly means faster than the speed of light. And information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. It can't travel one foot faster than the speed of light and it can't travel 50 billion light years faster than the speed of light. And what they found is that entangled particles even on opposite sides of the universe, if you do something to one, the other entangled particle is affected instantaneously. Those are entangled particles.

That's how the universe works for some reason. They figured out a fiendish mechanism for tricking the universe. What they do is they take entangled particles and I have no idea how they do this. You'd have to go to the original literature and you probably won't understand it because I sure didn't. But take it on faith from the physicist. You take entangled particles and you fire one at a double slit in the classic double slit experiment, unobserved. We know for sure that it goes through both slits at the same time because it's unobserved. We know that that's how it works. Then with a tiny delay, you send its entangled twin through double slits and you observe it and it's forced because of observation, it's forced to go through one slit. But now the universe has a problem because

entangled particles have to do the same thing and we know that they've just done different things. Just so people are following us, the reason the entangled particle has to pick a slit is because it's being observed. It's now in the quote unquote physical world again. It's no longer a probability distribution. It's going to behave like unquote physical world again. It's no longer a probability distribution. It's going to behave like things that are observed behave. Right. Pick a doorway, one or the other but not both. Meanwhile, it's twin that was fired off an instant before was unobserved and so it remains, as you say, a probability distribution and physically goes through both slits at the same time and hits the strike plate on the other side with a classic waveform signature

that physicists well know means it passed through both slits. So, when they observe the second entangled particle going through one slit as it has to because it's being observed, and then they look at the results of the first particle that was unobserved and had to go through both slits. When they look at the strike plate, it shows a signature of having only gone through one slit because entangled particles have to do the same thing. But what this means is that not only do they infect each other instantaneously, but effectively speaking, the mechanism reached back in time and changed the outcome of the first entangled particle, its delayed choice quantum erasure.

What I say in the book is that if there is, I prefer the phrase post-death existence for the individual rather than afterlife is too imbued with a kind of hopeful vision of us in a hammock with a daiquiri forever. There's something a little too pleasant about that. Post-death existence for the individual, if there's anything to that, if there's anything to that idea, I simply say in the book, it would have to work on a level of just sheer weirdness that delayed choice quantum erasure exists.

Physicists don't understand why the world… I mean, is there a chance that there is…if you go back to Newton, think about Newtonian physics which explains everything we see. We see airplanes fly. That doesn't make a lot of sense, right? If you were one of our ancestors saw that, they wouldn't understand it. But we can understand how an airplane flies. That's Newtonian physics. Of course, what happened with the quantum revolution in the, I guess, the early part of the 20th century is physicists realize that Newtonian physics breaks down at the atomic level and you need new physics to

explain what's happening there. Do physicists believe that what you're describing is to quantum theory, what quantum theory was to Newtonian mechanics? In other words, is there now a third layer of physics that is set free from what we understand today and is yet to be described potentially? Honestly, I'm not sure. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean the physicists themselves and the fathers of all the grandfathers of all this like Schrodinger and Einstein were on to some degree or other, many of them were sort of unnerved by this. The results just didn't make sense. Because there's this other experiment, right Einstein basically comes to the conclusion that one of two things has to be true. Either particles are moving faster than the speed of light or they are containing within them

deciding information. Neither could be true. He sets out to prove it and the only way he can prove it is to violate something withheld in quantum theory itself. I believe it was through the photoelectric effect. This is why, by the way, there is a fork in the road I had to choose between mathematics and physics and I chose math. At some point I was like, I'm actually not smart enough to do quantum theory. Yeah. I mean, I found it a little unsettling, a little scary. And I almost had this thought, whoa, careful what we try to find out. Is it possible? I mean, this is like a hopelessly sort of ignorant metaphor in some ways. But as you approach the speed of light, mass gets infinitely heavy,

and you can never get to the speed of light as you approach infinitely. Mass becomes infinite. Right. Exactly. So you can't get there. And I sort of had this thought, this pedestrian thought. As we approach complete knowledge, does the experimentation and the theories, do they get increasingly inaccurate and misleading so that we never quite get there? Because if we get there, if we have complete knowledge of everything,

does that destroy everything? Is there an element of consciousness can't fully understand consciousness or if it does, it cannot sustain itself? This just thought experiment wordplay. But it did sort of make me on a human level just be a little queasy. Do we really want to interrogate God about how all this stuff works? Are you sure you want to know this? Are you sure you want to understand delayed choice quantum erasure? I mean, I think there's two ways to think about this. The first is, would knowing

this help us live better lives on this planet? The answer is probably no. But again, you could leave that to the choice of the individual. For me personally, I think the answer is no. I'm really happy as a simpleton on the relative basis, pretty dumb. I function in form of pleasure and love and relationships and all those things. But where it becomes really unsettling is when you contemplate life or existence or nature, matter, whatever, host life. So that to me is the part where it's very difficult to let this go, which is if my belief is that once I experience death as defined very clearly and very medically,

there is no existence versus no, there might be something there even though we can't imagine what it is. I don't know, you could argue maybe knowing that does make it easier to live today. This is where I just get wrapped up and usually end up putting my head in the sand after an hour of thinking about it and just go back to watching F1 videos on YouTube. Listen, the sand isn't a bad place. I mean, Jerry's physicist is named Sir Arthur, I think Arthur Eddington. Yeah, the one who observed the photoelectric effect. He basically validated Einstein's prediction. That's right. So, he said about all these great mysteries, which were unsettling and

perplexing all the physicists of the era around 100 years ago and into the 30s and 40s. He said, I'm paraphrasing here, something we don't understand is doing we know not what. That was his ultimate evaluation of what's going on in the universe. I misspoke by the way. I said photoelectrification. It was general relativity that he observed in South Africa I think seeing the eclipse, right? With the eclipse, exactly. It bent the rays of light as Einstein predicted. Einstein was great. He said, look, if you want to propose a theory, what you must offer the scientific community are the ways to disprove it. If I'm wrong,

these will be the numbers. So, investigate. 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 how to do it. If you fail, then maybe my theory is right. That's what he did with the eclipse and he predicted where the star would be as it passed, I can't remember exactly, whatever it was, it was the bending of light during an eclipse. Which could only be seen because it was a complete solar eclipse. Right. A star that should be in one position should be in another position because of the bending of light.

In fact, if it's not in that position, I'm wrong, said Einstein. So, Eddington was one of the people that helped him confirm that. By the way, it's a nice little tie into everything. Do you know how Einstein died? Yes, an abdominal aneurysm. That's right. And he refused treatment. He was in the 70s. Yeah. He's like, no, I'm good. Yeah. I think to answer your question about is this good for us or not, other than the completely abstract and terrifying, maybe we don't want to know everything because the universe will collapse into a space-time of zero radius or whatever the phrase is. For me, I'm still an

atheist. God is not part of my daily practice. It's not how I understand reality. God does not guide my decisions and my values. I'm a moral person in my own right and I do fine with it. So I am an atheist. I don't really particularly like the term agnostic, which I'm happy to talk about if you want. Meaning you feel you need to either shit or get off the pot whether you're thinking? Sort of. Put it in more human terms. So if you're in a happy marriage and you have no suspicions that anything is going on that would upset you about your spouse at all and someone said, is your wife cheating on you? And you said, I'm agnostic on that. I don't know. You wouldn't say that. I mean, unless you actually had some reason to doubt. So when you say I'm agnostic about God, what troubles me about that is that

there's absolutely no evidence that your wife's cheating on you. There's absolutely no evidence that God exists. So if that's the case, if there is some evidence, she said she was going to the movies and she didn't go to the movies, now I can say I'm agnostic. But until then, until I've seen some evidence that God exists, if I saw a little bit of evidence that God exists, if I saw a little bit of evidence that God exists, if I saw overwhelming proof, I would be a believer.

If I saw some evidence that God exists, I would be agnostic. I'd be like, well, I'm in the jury and I don't know. Okay, so you're not opposed to the term agnostic. You're just saying you're not. I think it's inaccurate for the way most people know it. You think most people are in one camp or the other and they're just not willing to admit. Yeah, right.

And anything that's sort of cheating spouse analogy, like unless you have some reason to doubt your spouse, you say, no, she's not cheating on me. I have no reason to think that. No, I don't believe in God. I have no reason to think there is a God. I've never seen evidence to the effect that there's a God. And if there was a little bit of evidence, I'd be like hung jury.

Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Maybe she's cheating on me, maybe she's not. Maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't a God. That's truly agnostic. I just don't know what would be the basis for that ambiguity. Well, I think the challenge with the terminology is maybe that we don't have a clear definition of God and that, for example, many different religions will have many different versions of what a God is.

And then there are probably some people who wouldn't subscribe to anything within an organized religion but would describe themselves still as spiritual and might still argue that there is a God, but not the God kind of thing. It gets so complicated. But again, that's why I wanted to separate it away from that because there is a really clear situation of none of that matters.

And we're still wrestling with the question at hand which is what does it mean to die on this planet? What does it mean to die in this physical body that stops respiring to which we are rushing towards entropy? Right. For me, without the help or baggage of God, however you want to think about it, I was faced after this near-death experience with some very, very puzzling memories, specifically seeing my dead father in some form above me. Is it just neurochemistry? Yeah, possibly. Is there – and again, it would have to be at some quantum level, some post-death existence that we just don't understand. For the first time in my life, I would honestly say, yeah, possibly.

I'm agnostic on it, agnostic for specific reasons. I actually have evidence. There's evidence on both sides. It's a hung jury. I don't know. I don't know beyond a reasonable doubt, but the idea has been open to me that the suspect is possibly innocent for the court analogy. Maybe there is something.

My book is divided into two sections, what and if. What happened to me and what if there were some post-death existence just theoretically as a thought experiment, how would it work? There's almost certainly not, I say in the book there's almost certainly not, but if there were, how would it work? That's where I wound up in quantum physics. I had a hilarious conversation with some colleagues of my father who I tracked down after my near-death experience, guys who were very fond of my father, and half a generation younger than him, half a generation older than me, really, really sweet

guys. We had lunch and I said, guys, this is what happened to me. My dead father appeared above me, really, really sweet guys. We had lunch and I said, guys, this is what happened to me. My dead father appeared above me. You know Miguel, what do you think he would think of this? The conversation went on, first of all, just so you understand how unclear many physicists are with the idea of what something romantic is. Rudolph, Rudolpho said to me, well, your father was a hopeless romantic. I was like, really? That would be news for my mother. They eloped to San Francisco to get married. He timed it to coincide with the weekend of the annual meeting of the American Acoustical Society in San Francisco. I was like, really? What makes you say that? There's something called the Helmholtz resonator in acoustics. So, Rudolph said,

well, he was deeply in love with the Helmholtz resonator and talked about it constantly. Oh, got it. Okay. All right. Yes. Hopeless romantic. So, and at one point, right after my parents were married, and then these are the brains that come up with this kind of thing. Right after my parents were married, she was cooking dinner and he was in an armchair, this sort of late 1950s marital idol. He's in the armchair in front of the fire reading, she's cooking dinner and he's muttering to himself, oh my God, that is so beautiful. That's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

That's just absolutely gorgeous. And of course she's like, what has gotten my new husband's attention in this way? Like what exactly is he looking at? So she tiptoes over, I think probably fearing the worst. And he has a book open, both pages are covered with numbers and equations and symbols. That's what's so beautiful

to him. That was his brain. So these are the gentlemen, it's his ilk that I have lunch with and his former colleagues and I said, okay, guys, what are the odds? And I thought it was a rhetorical question because I'm not a physicist. So I assume this is a rhetorical question. It's like, really, what are the odds that my dead father could appear above me in some form while I'm dying? What are the odds? To my amazement, Rudolph, the Helmholtz resonator guy, looks up and he strokes his chin and he's sort of like running the numbers.

I was like, oh my God, is he actually calculating this? Is that something you can calculate? He said it's around, and I'm going from memory from my book, he said, I think 10 to the minus 60, something like that. So one chance in a number that has 60 zeros after it. I was like, what? There's a number for this? What are you talking about?

He said, well, it's roughly the chance that all of the oxygen molecules in the air of this room would just randomly through statistical mechanics would just randomly collect in one corner of the room and asphyxiate us. Almost impossible, but it's theoretically possible. Well, likewise, it's probably the odds of your father rematerializing above you roughly on that order of unlikely. I was like, oh my God, that's what we're dealing with. But then it turns out if you look at the odds of the universe existing, it's way, way more

unlikely. It's 10 to the minus 230. So one chance in a number that has 230 zeros after it. It's millions and millions of times less likely than finding one specific grain of sand and all the sand on the earth on the first try. Something like 30 parameters have to be in very precise places for a physical universe to exist, the force of gravity, all these arcane things that most humans don't know about. Then for conscious life to develop, it's almost infinitely unlikely. It's actually way more unlikely, at least according to Rudolph, it's way more unlikely

that the universe exists in the first place and we know that it does because we're here than my father appearing above me. That's actually in the realm of chance, way more likely than the universe existing in the first place, which we know it does. So in my book, one of the things I say is, look, my dead father, once you get past the stunt of the universe going from absolutely nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time that's too small to measure, once you've pulled off that party trick, the dead appearing above us in some quantum form while we're passing through into their realm, we don't understand it, but I can imagine that it's possible. Yeah. I think that's unfortunately where

I find myself, Sebastian, is because I at least have enough facility with numbers, when I go through the exercise, everything you just did coupled with even simpler things like just the existence of us, let's just limit it to organic material and I can't, then I just have to accept the flaws in my own cerebral machinery, which is I'm not smart enough to understand this stuff and I never will be. I don't understand consciousness. I can't explain consciousness. I look at my dog and I think, well, he's conscious.

There is a feeling of being a dog. He knows what it's like to exist. Then I look at a little roly poly and I think he's probably not conscious. There probably isn't being a roly poly the way there's being a dog or being me. But outside of those really, really broad corner edge cases, I can't explain it. Not at all. It doesn't matter how much I read. Right. It's possible that we understand reality as well as a dog understands a television screen. Just no concept of the wider mechanics, the wider reality, the wider context that produces the flickering images that the

dog sees on the screen that we see in reality. There's a much vaster colossus around that, that produces what we see and we just don't have the equipment to understand it. Schrodinger's opinion was that there was a universal consciousness and it was a sort of vaguely Buddhist idea. He felt that we as individuals are part of that universal consciousness and sort of reunited with it when we die. His theory wasn't very articulated, but that was his sort of general belief as was my father's. There's a theory called biocentrism, which is unprovable and undisprovable, which basically holds that if it's true that consciousness, conscious observation creates the reality that it observes, then the entire

universe might have collapsed into its specific form from one enormous possibility, one enormous spectrum of possibility with the arrival of conscious thought and that creates the universe that we're in, in this sort of snake eating its own tail way. That consciousness is part of the physical makeup of the universe at the quantum level the way gravity is. In ways that I don't quite understand is something called the Higgs boson which is what manifests gravity in matter and that there might be something akin to that that is connected to consciousness which gives rise to the physical universe that in turn allows for consciousness. It's hopelessly circular. The Higgs boson has been observed. I mean, relatively recently.

That's right. This is in the last decade maybe, maybe the last 15 years. Yep, that's right. It's been the first observation of this. Right. This force that's throughout the universe that is one of the basic reasons the universe can exist, it is there because there's a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. Maybe there's an equivalent for consciousness. This is all theorizing and biocentrism sort of focuses on that and that if that's true, then our individual consciousness, mine, yours, all of ours, is actually part of

this sort of colossus of matter and consciousness, which is the universe. Not provable, not disprovable, but there is on the human level, which is important not to leave behind, for me, something close to a comforting thought in that. The idea of being conscious like we are now for eternity, like you die and then the real thing starts that lasts forever and there's no exit. You can't kill yourself to get out of this deal. You are going to be conscious, whatever that experience is, and it may be horrific, for eternity, thank you, no.

I'll take my long nap. Thank you. I don't need that. So, an afterlife, an eternal afterlife isn't frankly that appealing, but the annihilation of death is also quite terrifying. The idea that we're actually, there's some sort of ill-defined consciousness that we return to and can manifest itself at these threshold moments of life and death where the dead are maybe in some way, there with us. That to me is this sweet spot and just comforting enough

to allow us to face death but without this sort of, in my opinion, implausible fantasy that we're in a hammock with a daiquiri for eternity basically like this sort of, oh, how lovely, the afterlife. It's just one big long vacation. That sounds hellish also. one big long vacation. That sounds hellish also. If you think about it like this, if we knew for sure, if we could prove, if there was actual proof and evidence that there was an afterlife, somehow we proved it and it went on forever, that you're alive for these troubled 70, 80 years. And then whatever happens, your afterlife starts and you're just cruising for eternity. It strips all of the meaning, all the dignity, all the struggle, all of the victory out of those 70 years of struggle and joy and pain and sorrow and everything. It's like,

don't worry about it. It's just 70 years in an eternity. Don't worry about it. Eternity is going to start soon enough. There's an afterlife. It really strips from us the value of the one thing we do know exists, which is our own experience right now in this moment, this continuity of moments. That would be a pity to have that stripped away from us. As hard as we work in this place, like really don't do that. This is all we know we get.

But on the other hand, if we could prove that there was no afterlife, we're completely biological beings. God or no God, you could have a creator God. There's like, you know what, we're going to have kangaroos and turtles and worms and humans and everything else, but they're biological. When they die, that's it. There's no afterlife. There's no soul. There's no nothing. You're dead. It's just carbon transfer, right? Exactly. So with or without a God if there was a God that decided that totally plausible if we could prove that you would know Absolutely that when you die you are over Not only that it's as if you never happened. It's zero. It's nothing the infinite black pit

That might be so psychologically troubling that we actually have trouble living those 70 years with dignity. Where we're at is this ambiguity. We can't prove there is or isn't an afterlife. There might be. There's some reason to hope so we don't have to be too scared, but there's also some reason to think there might not be. So make the most of today because that's all we know we'll get. This sweet spot of ambiguity is actually perfectly attuned to making this life both psychologically survivable

and meaningful. To me, that is like, to borrow a Christian word, another of the sort of miracles of all this. Like, wow, you really landed it, God, if you're out there. You really landed us in just the right spot to absolutely maximize the meaningfulness of this thing we do have, which is life. Yeah. You wrote something so beautiful near the end of the book. Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won't stop. Right. which is a terrifying idea in its own right. Anything that won't stop is a terrifying idea basically. After I finished the book, I read this extraordinary story about Dostoevsky, the great Russian writer. Had I read it when I was doing the book, I probably would have put

it in there, but it gives me a chance to tell a nice story during conversations like this. When he was in his 20s, he was a bit of a political radical and he had a bunch of radical friends and they would sit around. They had like a circle, an intellectual circle. They would sit around and they'd talk about stuff and they'd talk about, for example, freeing the serfs, outrageous ideas like that. This is the 1840s. Basically, the same conversation was happening in the United States about the slaves, about slavery. The Tsar Nicholas I, I think it was,

was not particularly pleased by this talk. His police rounded these boys up and threw them in jail. They spent eight months in jail. It wasn't a particularly serious crime. They were getting their wrists slapped, but no one was particularly worried about anything. Then finally after eight months, they were shown to the door of the prison and loaded onto a carriage. They just assumed they were going to be driven to the court and discharged and released to their families and the nightmare is over. They're bouncing along through the streets.

Instead of going to the court, they're driven to a city square and they're tied to posts and a firing squad is lined up in front of them. They've had to make the transition psychologically from going home to my family to I'm going to die in a few minutes. They had to make that transition almost instantaneously. So, they're tied to posts and the order is given for the soldiers to charge their weapons and level them and aim. Dostoevsky and his buddies are waiting for the command fire when their chest will be torn open by musket balls. And so, what happened was this was a theater. It was sadistic, cruel theater.

It was a mock execution just to scare them. And a rider galloped into the square just in time and said, the Tsar forgives them. And they were untied and sent to a penal colony in Siberia for a while, but they survived. Two of the men who went through this, of the six men or so who went through this were insane for the rest of their lives. They could not take, that's what I was saying about the truth. No afterlife? I can't bear that thought. The unfiltered vision of infinity starting 30 seconds from now without any warmup, without any time to adjust, you have cancer, you're going to die in a year, nothing just from life to death in some minutes was so psychologically traumatizing

that they were deranged for the rest of their lives. They never psychologically recovered. Dostoevsky did and he took that experience and put it into some of his amazing work. What we know because of him, we know what the nearly hallucinatory quality that reality takes on when you do this transition abruptly from I'm alive, yay, to oh my God, I'm going to be dead in a minute. What does the world look like through the eyes of someone who's experiencing that? And this is what he said. He said he looked out and he saw sunlight glinting off the roof, the steeple of a church. He thought to himself, in moments I'll be part of the sunlight. I'm going to become part of all things. If I somehow survive this, I'll live the rest of my life turning every moment into an infinity."

He did survive it, and he took the wisdom of that vision, which of course, if we just stopped, erased the busy slates of our brains and just stopped and looked around. It's just the insane surreal miracle that anything is, the New York City subway, a tree, the ocean, your foot, whatever. I mean, just look at any of it. You're like, oh my God, that exists and I'm here to see it? Are you kidding? That was what he got.

And if you can't live like that, but if you can incorporate a little bit of that, the strangeness of that vision allows for awe and gratitude. When that vision becomes, when you become accustomed to it, when it becomes an everyday thing, it's a problem with long marriage sometimes. You're just like, oh yeah, you fall in love, this person's amazing, and then you adjust, and they're just another person, and you love them or whatever, but the sort of awe that this person is with you, if you can keep that in your marriage, you have a good marriage. If you can keep that in your life, you have a good life. That was the blessing that came with the curse of what Dostoevsky went through. I've gotten a little bit of that in my life.

It changed my life in a way that religion often changes people's lives. I'm not religious. It's changed it in an equivalent way, like a profound gratitude, not just for my life as I am living it, but the fact that I have a life at all and that any of us do. Does that mean now the answer to the question that your wife posed for you is that indeed you would go through all of this again? Yes, I would. As painful as it is to say, and I wonder if Dostoevsky would. I'm guessing he would.

Those poor guys who never recovered, they wouldn't. I had access to a really good shrink, a very loving family. It was touch and go for a while. I still have a sort of weird panic to the anxiety disorder around health issues and I'm prone to the imagining that something's catastrophically wrong with me in a kind of paranoid Woody Allen kind of way. Oh my God, I'm sure I've got cancer. Everyone does that a little bit I think, but it really opened up the gateway for me. It was extremely unpleasant. I know that paranoid feeling comes flooding into me and it's a direct result of almost dying on a beautiful June day. It's not without its costs, but because I'm blessed to have some incredibly wonderful,

beautiful things going for me in my life, like I was able to pull it off. Sebastian, thank you very much. Again, the book is really, really special, not just as a story, but if you're willing as the reader, I think, to let yourself really contemplate and imagine what's being described and accept the impossibility of being able to understand it and being able to resolve it and being able to find a proof, it certainly offers more questions than answers, but that's what makes it worth living, right? Thank you. I'm so glad that you read it and enjoyed it so much and that you invited me on. What a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you, Sebastian. Thank you.

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