Facing Mortality and Beyond: Peak Performance in the Most Crucial Moments | Sebastian Junger

29:12Very few of them are of dead people, right? I mean, I mean, you know, my memories include my family, you know, people that are far more important to me than my dead father, right? My memory includes the only one or two people who died are actually important to me. Three people are actually personally important to me in that in that sense. and so these aren't memories i didn't have a memory of my father right i wasn't like suddenly i was eight years old and we were camping right what i saw was my father floating above me in a form that i didn't understand communicating right now you can come with me that's not a memory i have right right and look you don't you understand what i'm saying this yeah so so they're slightly different and then the other the other aspect of it is that people in hospice i mean you ask hospice nurses about the process of dying.

30:04They'll say that very, very often in the final hours or sometimes day or so, the dying person will be actively conversing with a dead relative, a dead loved one who seems to be in the room, right? And so that's not the gamma waves triggered by the final moments of brain death. This is the brain of a person who is still very much alive, though on the way out and it's just it's it's a it's a rather odd thing and one of the very odd things about it and i know i'm sounding all woo woo and mystical and i don't mean to but it it it is a legitimate question that i have um that might have a totally scientific answer but we don't know what it is but so one of the odd things that's been documented is that when when the dying person sort of shows up in the hallucinations, um, that when the dead person shows up in the room of a dying person and their hallucinations, whatever you take that to be, sometimes the dead person isn't known to have died by the dying person because it happened very recently.

31:10And it's really quite a, that's really quite mysterious. And there's, there are many accounts of that. And again, it begs an explanation. Well, and there's two other things that actually were confounding. One is when your father died or when he was hit by an attack or whatever, it was 3.15 in the morning and you woke up experiencing your dad's pain essentially and he was experiencing this hundreds of miles away and you didn't know that at that point. And like that actually sort of defies explanation. This other experience you had when he died. Yeah, I mean, well, I'll explain it a little bit more precisely because it really is, was a puzzle to me.

31:55Again, a puzzle, it puzzled my rational mind, right? It challenged what I thought might be true about the world. So he was in Boston, he was in hospice care, and we knew he had some, you know, months left, right? It was not imminent. His death was not imminent, but it was inevitable. and I was living in New York and, you know, 250 miles away or whatever it is. And suddenly in the middle of the night, I was woken up by him screaming my name from the next room, like Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian. And I sat bolt upright. I mean, I was like, oh my God, what, what, you know, what's going on? And I realized it was just a dream.

32:33And I looked at the clock and it was 3.15. A few hours later, I thought, how weird. A few hours later, my mother called and said, get to Boston as fast as you can. The nurse says, told me that last night, your father woke up in a panic thrashing around and screaming. And often that's a sign that the person is in their last hours or maybe day, right? It's a sign of the next thing before the next thing that happens is that they die. And it's a very, very common sign. And I said, wow, ask her what time that was. And of course, the nurses have to write everything down. And it was 315, right? So we know at the sort of quantum level that entangled particles can communicate instantaneously faster than the speed of light across the entire universe.

33:22We know that quantum entanglement allows for that. So it does make one wonder, like, can the human mind, by some mechanism that we don't understand yet, can the human mind communicate with other minds instantaneously across distance? I have to say that it's possible not because there's a God or something, but because the physicists have not figured everything out yet. And how did you explain it at the time? Because this even seems like a more remarkable occurrence than – not to put down your seeing your dad as dying, but people have attempted to make scientific explanations of that. But I can't think of any real scientific explanation of what you just described.

34:03So how did you describe it at the time? I couldn't. Right. I mean, it had happened. Was it coincidence? Possibly, you know, but I don't have an explanation. As I say in the book, the problem with rational thought, which, of course, is a very powerful mode of thinking. Right. Like airplanes fly because of rational thought like medicine works, computers work. We're on a Zoom because very rational people figured some stuff out. Right. But the problem with rationality is that things keep happening in life that we can't explain. And we all know that experience. So I don't know. I don't have an answer.

34:43If I did, I would have another book to write, but I don't have an answer for that question. The other thing you talk about is people with near-death experiences that actually experience things happening, let's say, in the other room. or they picture themselves above their bodies while they're being operated on, which that I could almost see being there's some scientific explanation. But you mentioned a couple of near-death experiences where the person experienced something they couldn't possibly have been aware of that was happening, let's say, behind closed doors in another room. Yeah, and again, you have to take these accounts.

35:18It's credible. If people are waking up and deciding to have some fun with the doctors and, you know, whatever. I mean, if you want to be like infinitely skeptical, you can say, look, these are unreliable reports from people that might have gotten information later and then filled in and come up with a story either that they convinced themselves of or they wanted to convince other people. Who knows, right? But the other explanation, if it is an explanation, but the other way of thinking is that some of the scientists who develop quantum theory, like Schrodinger and Heisenberg. Schrodinger, for example, his belief, he wasn't religious, his belief was that there was a universal consciousness that was part of the colossus of the universe, right?

36:09And consciousness was part of the physical nature of the universe in the same way that gravity is, right? As gravity is this force, we all understand it. You jump out a window, you're going to fall to the ground. No one can really explain it. Like, okay, I got it. I'll fall. But why? Like, what is this force, this invisible force that affects all things? Likewise, Schrodinger was of the position that there was a universal consciousness and that when we die, we return to it, which raises the possibility that if there's a universal consciousness, maybe the individual consciousness between human beings can be violated at times in very indirect ways.

36:48and you can, quote, read someone's mind, right, across a distance. You can dream. Your father can wake you up in his sort of paroxysms of fear and anguish before he dies all the way in New York City. And like with quantum entanglement, we just don't understand the physical process, but we're starting to get the sense that there's something real there that we need to explain. Yeah, like, you know, the idea of quantum mechanics is that these tiny, tiny particles, and I'm no expert, obviously, none of us are, but these tiny particles, tinier than atoms, are affected simply by observation. When you observe something, when you measure one of these quarks or whatever, they change because you're measuring them.

37:33That's right. You're not measuring them. They actually become measurable because you're measuring them. And so then it gets back to, well, before there was consciousness, let's say before there were any living beings, how did the universe even exist? Did the universe only really start to exist when there was consciousness to observe it? Yeah. And, you know, I would say, I mean, obviously I'm not an expert either. And I would say there are many physicists who would say that they're not experts either because it's a profound mystery that they, you know, that nobody understands. But the subatomic particles, not only does observation change their behavior, the subatomic particle is all things.

38:16It's in all positions. It has all values until it's observed, and then it has to pick one, right? So it's not just this one thing or another. It's all things, and then it's one thing, right? And that's what's extraordinary about it. And it's called a quantum waveform. And the waveform is is the range of all mathematical possibilities for that subatomic particle. And then once you observe it, all of a sudden, of course, it can't be all, you know, all things can pass through two slits. Like there's the famous double slit experiment. There's two slits and a steel plate. You fire a photon at them.

38:56Like as, you know, if there's two doorways, you can't walk through both at the same time, right? You have one body and you have to go through one or the other. Well, in the subatomic world, if you don't observe the photon, it will go through both slits simultaneously and leave a strike signature on a strike plate on the other side that's consistent with going through both slits, right? If you observe it, it's almost like it gets shy, right? It's like, oh, okay, well, I better abide by the sort of like norms that you humans are used to. And I'll just go through one slit since you're actually watching, right?

39:34And that's the sort of central mystery of quantum physics that we know that it exists because of these tests, these experiments, but they make no sense to us in our macroscopic human brains. Yeah. But the one thing I'll say though, is that quantum mechanics, of course, applies to these very small particles. No one's really said whether it applies to large aggregations of particles like objects or human beings or whatever. So like if a tree falls in the woods, whether we observe it or not, a tree probably is actually falling in the woods. But, you know, but you brought up this one guy, Robert Lanza, who wrote about biocentrism, this idea that consciousness actually created the universe.

40:18Can you describe his philosophy a little? Because I've read his stuff before. Yeah, he's a really fascinating guy. And he's not the only person to talk about this. There's another guy whose name I've just blanked on. But at any rate, Lanza is very readable and really brilliant and interesting, even if you wind up disagreeing with him. So it's called biocentrism. And the idea is that just as at the quantum level, if you observe a particle, it's forced to go from all possibilities to one. likewise the entire universe universe might be one massive range of possibilities of all possibilities right an infinite all virtually infinite range of possibilities until conscious life observes it and then it collapses into one form which is the universe that we know And that consciousness, as Schrodinger said, is universal and part of the very physical nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the way gravity is, and with the Higgs boson.

41:27and that we don't understand how, but that sort of X factor in the universe of consciousness is what creates the universe in the form that we know it to exist because we're in it, because we're creating it by observing it.

42:01And, you know, it's kind of funny that we really have no scientific theory of consciousness itself. Like we know, okay, if we stimulate different parts of the brain, that gives rise to these thoughts. And if we shut down these parts of the brain, then, oh, you can't remember anything or you remember something too well. But we don't really know what it means, actually, when we say something's alive and conscious. Science has never been able to approach that topic. But then you have guys like you mentioned in your book, Yogananda, but there's even more like recent guys like, I don't know, like Eckhart Tolle, for instance, who wrote The Power of No.

42:36Like there's people who seem to induce in themselves this feeling of universal consciousness. And what do you what did you think before of these guys? What do you what do you think now of these guys? Like, what's what's your thoughts on this? Well, you know, yeah, I mean, they're all they're all taking. taking shots at the great mystery and trying to understand it. And, you know, there's two different things. There's stories and there's explanations and religion, you know, stories help stories allow us to make sense of the world. Right. So when my best, my, one of my very best friends, Tim Hetherington and my colleague and my brother, the, the, the guy I made Restrepo with, I was in combat with him for a long time when he was killed in Libya in combat.

43:23The day before, I had a bike accident in New York where I'd almost died. I wasn't hurt at all, but I'd come within inches, like within inches of a car tire that would have crushed my skull. Right. I mean, it was extremely close. Right. And. But I didn't die and it felt like I was supposed to, but I somehow narrowly avoided it. And then the next day, Tim was killed. And I developed a story, right? I don't literally think the world works this way, but I developed a story that I dodged death and death had to take someone. So it took Tim. And I was crushed with guilt and shame that it was supposed to be me, but it was Tim.

44:01Now, I didn't literally think that, right? But it felt like the world worked that way. And it was part of my processing some very painful things in my life, including his loss. And so, you know, one of the things that goes on with people who come up with these really profound visions of a grand unity, I mean, of course, when people do certain kinds of drugs, many of them feel a universal connectedness. that the sort of standard shamanic journey is the shaman goes into the afterworld, right, into the land of the dead, into the universe, into the expansion of all things, and then back, back across the border to his little tribe that needs the information that he or she got out there.

44:46Like there are all, there are all these traditions in human society of exactly that. Like you leave the particulars of our puny little biological lives ourselves. And you step over the threshold into this sort of vast expansion where everyone is all things. And those stories are very powerful. There may be at the quantum level, an actual explanation, like an actual intellectual theory framework for those stories, right? They may not just be stories. They may be stories with the real explanation behind them. And I will say just along those lines, I read, after I finished the book, I read a fascinating story about Dostoevsky, who as a young man was a sort of political radical in the 1840s.

45:34And he, before he was a famous writer, and he and his buddies were kind of radical. They would sit around and talk about outrageous things like liberating the serfs, for example, right? And in Tsars, Russia, that kind of talk wasn't appreciated. And they were, the lot of them were rounded up by the police and thrown in jail for eight months. It wasn't a particularly serious crime, but eight months in prison, right? So eventually they were released. They were piled into a wagon. They just assumed they were going to be returned, you know, like delivered to the court and discharged, returned to their families.

46:05Great. Eight months. Like instead, the cart, the wagon turned into a city square and the men were told to get out and they were tied to posts. And there was a firing squad lined up in front of them. So these young men had to go from the joy of being released from prison to, oh my God, my life's going to end in a few minutes. They imagined the hallucinatory experience of suddenly standing facing these rifle barrels, waiting for the command to fire. And it was a setup. So the truth was that it was a mock execution at the last moment as they braced themselves for the command, right? To have their chest torn open by rifle balls.

46:53A rider galloped into the square and said, the czar forgives them, right? But in those moments, we get, because of Dostoevsky, we get to know what those moments are like for a person, right? And they're exactly this. He looked and he saw sunlight glinting off the church steeple. and he thought, well, in moments, I'm going to become part of the sunlight. I'm going to become part of all things, right? And if I should survive this somehow, I'm going to turn every moment, every remaining moment of my life into an infinity. That is exactly the kind of hallucination that people have on ayahuasca, that dying people have.

47:35Like, it's just interesting. My book is divided into two parts, what and if. What is what happened to me? If is a thought experiment. What if there were something more? How would it conceivably work, right? And where I land, like Schrodinger, so I feel like I'm in good company, is some idea around sort of the mysteries of the quantum world and what is consciousness and does it pervade everything? And is that the explanation for all this just frankly weird shit that keeps happening in all of our lives? It's funny, you know, I, you know, in the very beginning of this podcast, you said you're a committed, not just an atheist, you're a committed atheist.

48:16Like you really wanted to emphasize that this is almost your religion is atheism. And for your almost, not quite explanation, but the closest thing you're coming to it, you're taking the most extreme scientific theory and applying it to this. When, like you also said, there could just be many things we just simply don't understand. And, you know, religion is maybe this storytelling from thousands of years ago and quantum mechanics, maybe this obscure scientific theory, but maybe there's something in the middle that is able to explain universal consciousness somehow. And it's probably not religion, but maybe it's related to quantum mechanics.

48:56And what does it mean committed atheism? Do you still feel as committed as an atheist as you were? Well, there's two separate issues. Yes, I'm an atheist. I mean, belief in God. What does that mean? So you don't believe in, okay, the Bible or Vishnu or whatever, but what does religion really mean? Do you believe in some things that we don't understand, like some higher consciousness that's in the universe? Well, you could believe in God and not be religious, not have a practice of religion, right? Or you could go to church every Sunday and practice religion and not actually think that there's a God.

49:34Like I went to church once and it was in a very poor part of Baltimore and it was a black revivalist church. And the experience was totally transcendent, right? The singing, the fraternity, the community going on in that place, the power of the pastor who was speaking, I mean, his sort of vision, totally transcendent, affected me enormously, and nothing, none of it had anything to do with God. I mean, he threw the word God in there once in a while, but it was completely unnecessary for a profound human experience in that building, right? And so, for me, I'm an atheist because I don't, God is not part of my daily practice.

50:16It's not part of how I understand existence and my life, right? It's not part of how I understand the universe to work. And, you know, you could have a creator God. I mean, believers often say, well, listen, the universe is vast. It's complex. Nothing like that could happen without a creator, a watchmaker, as it were, who designed it, right? Which that argument actually has some flaws, but just take it as a given. Like, all right, say there's a creator God that created the universe. It's a current tally, 93 billion light years wide, right? So across. So 14 billion years old, but it was okay. That was created by God.

50:55All right. If you want to call it that, we'll go with that. You could have that kind of God who decided, look, this universe is going to have biological beings that walk and talk and think, can think about themselves. We're going to have turtles. We're going to have kangaroos. We're going to have worms. We're going to have humans. What aren't we going to have? Like we're going to have all, and when those things die, they're biological beings. They decay, they go back to the earth and they no longer exist in any form, right? That God could have decided that there was no afterlife, right? Quote, afterlife.

51:24You could also have a universe that was started by a massive quantum fluctuation, as some physicists propose, that requires no God, right? Started completely by physical means initially at the quantum level. But in this universe, in this completely materialistic, rule-driven universe, there is, at the quantum level, some kind of post-death existence that we do not understand that involves something called consciousness, which like gravity is sort of everywhere and nowhere at the same time and is crucial to the physical existence of the universe. Without it, the universe wouldn't exist. You can imagine that.

52:02You don't need a God for that to happen. So you could have a God and no afterlife. You could have an afterlife and no God. You could have neither or you could have both. So I'm an atheist because I've never seen any evidence of God. It's an open question for me if there's a post-death existence because I did actually see my father, you know, I remember seeing my dead father above me in the trauma bay. Had I seen God above me, like, trust me, had I seen God above me at that moment, I would have thought probably a hallucination, but maybe not. Like, maybe I've been wrong my whole life, and there is a God, but that's not what I saw, right?

52:39I saw my dad. And now going forward, like, how has your, like Dostoevsky said, his daily practice would change. His view of his relationship with himself and the universe has changed from that moment. What do you think you've changed from that moment? Yeah, I changed enormously. I mean, initially the change was incredibly negative, right? I mean, I was incredibly neurotic and fearful and paranoid and anxious, which is very - What were you fearful about? What were you anxious about? I was afraid I could die at any moment. And, you know, I knew that had I been on an airplane flight or in a traffic jam or camping with my family in the woods when the aneurysm ruptured, it ruptured at a completely random moment, right?

53:23Then I would have died. Absolutely. Right. And, you know, that afternoon I was going to go running and, you know, I run on these game trails in a kind of trackless, like a piece of woods that like nobody goes back there. Had I gone running instead of spending an hour, a couple hours with my wife, because we managed to get a a little babysitting time, I would have died crawling around in the woods. So my paranoia took the form of I couldn't be alone. I had to always be near a phone where I could call the ambulance. It was unbelievably neurotic, like Woody Allen levels of medical neurosis. And then eventually it settled into a more troubling phase where, and again, this is very common for people that almost died.

54:05I started to worry that maybe I had died and that the return from the hospital and everything that followed was actually a dying hallucination. And that I'm a spirit and that my children, my family can't see me. They don't know I'm here. And I know it sounds like a just weird, you know, sort of silly thought experiment. But I can't tell you how real it felt and how palpable the fear was that I was misunderstanding everything. You know, after I saw my father, I started to doubt everything. Like, how do I know? You know, I was blown up by an IED in Afghanistan in 2008. Like, maybe I died then. And the whole rest of it has been a dream.

54:48Like, you know, I started to doubt everything. And that was the beginning of a kind of descent into madness that, like, took quite a while to recover from. How did you recover? um i eventually got a therapist and i did research about ndes and some of the con so i was so i realized i'm in good company like a lot of people turn extremely neurotic and have all the same fears that i have so like that reassured me that if it you know of course i could have been imagining all that of course i mean you can never at one point i went to my wife and i was like just tell me i'm really here like i survived i'm here just tell me right and she said yes you're really here.

55:28And in my mind, I'm like, that's exactly what a hallucination would say. Like, damn it. Right. Yeah. There's no way to convince you. There is no way. But what basically what I had, I had a panic disorder. I basically had an anxiety disorder. They're very common. And I did some pretty good work with this shrink and the passage of time helped. And, you know, finally, I was able to turn to the book as an intellectual endeavor. And when I write, I have to abstract things to write about them, right? And in the process of abstracting this experience, I basically was able to sort of like preserve it in amber, right?

56:08It'd been sort of involved and it no longer had the emotional resonance that it did immediately afterwards. But I got to say, it was completely eclipsed the trauma of combat, right? I mean, the trauma of this like completely eclipsed anything I experienced in combat. It was completely debilitating. And I finally understood when people say that they're, that they're bipolar or that they're, um, that they have PTSD or that, you know, like, like I finally understood the, um, how debilitating mental illness can be. I did not get it until I experienced, and how debilitating depression can be. Cause I got, eventually got extremely depressed to the point where I was actually worried about myself.

56:51And that was when I went to talk to a shrink. And so now, you know, after that, and after writing the book, how do you feel this experience has changed your life going forward? I mean, I know it's a sort of trite bit of wisdom, but I absolutely am more appreciative of life and not just life as experienced, but the fact that anything exists at all. And I do mean that like in the largest possible sense, like that there's a universe that's 93 billion years across that I'm in it, that I have children, that I'm capable of love, right? That I'm like, like all of that, that when my, when my daughter is upset and, and sort of losing control of her emotions, that I can pick her up and comfort her.

57:36And, and she clutches me like a little animal, Right. And I'm like that I can do that and it works. And I've calmed her down this little creature that I love, you know, like that I can do. You know, all of it is suddenly like, you know, frankly, not to sound sort of a little bit religious, but it's kind of a miracle. And and that, you know, that it's taken me, you know, into my 50s. I was 58 when this happened to me. It took having children very late in life and then almost losing everything to realize like, wow, just be thankful. and um i'm yeah do you think losing every like so yes you had uh your daughter was three years old when this happened or two years old when this happened and you were and and so you're you're kind of in between you were in between this darkness this dark void with your father and and the and the surgeons that were about to to work on you do you think if you didn't have anything i mean this is a big what if there's really no answer but if you didn't if you think if you didn't have your daughter, your wife, these things that kind of compelled you back, would it have been tempting to follow your father into the darkness?

58:45You know, I don't know. And it's a good question. So what I would say, you know, I didn't know I was dying, but on some level, my body, I think, kind of knew, right? Whatever, knew in quotes, right? Like I was in a lot of pain. And had I not met my wife and had a family, some other version of my life, I think it would have been filled with sadness and regret that those things didn't happen. And I think I would have been a very unhappy 58 year old in a huge amount of pain. And I think that person and with no one to sort of live for. Right. And I think that person would have shed this or this sort of earthly existence more easily as it was.

59:27I'm living for these people, for my two daughters and my wife. I'm living for them. That's why I'm alive. And so in a very, very conscious and deliberate sense, every day, right? That's my daily practice. It's not God. It's like, I'm here for them. That's what I am right now. And it's a profound way to live, right? That I don't think I was nearly mature enough to do 30 years ago. Thank God I didn't have kids then. But finally, I crossed the finish line. Like men mature late, but eventually they get there, right? And so I think it's very possible without that, the sad, unfulfilled life I would have been possibly living would have been much easier to leave, and I might have done.

1:00:13Well, I mean, your book is such a really engaging exploration of this whole event and what it means and what you've learned and studied. And again, like you said it's divided into two books there's the story of what happened and there's kind of where you go from here where you go from you had this experience what does it mean to you what does it mean to to life what does it mean to everybody and uh and you know you particularly in the beginning you intersperse the stories of what happened to yourself with these experiences of death that you'd encountered up close in war zones and as your career as a journalist which you've written many excellent books on.

1:00:52I actually have, unrelated to the topic completely, I do have, I have a writing question for you based on how you wrote this. And you're always a great writer. I always learn from your writing. There's very few books where I feel like, oh, this is not just an interesting story. Like my own ability as a writer is changing because I'm reading this person and you're one of those writers. So that's why I want to use this opportunity to ask this question. So you basically, the prologue begins, it's titled, We've Been Expecting You. And it starts off, I had an Almeric tri-fin and a brand new five millimeter winter suit.

1:01:33And I squatted on the beach, waxing my board and watching heavy January surf, pound the outer bar. So you're about to tell an experience of kind of coming close to death in surfing. And this begins a kind of set of experiences, whether it's other kind of experiences that maybe were too close to death for your tastes. And then the next chapter is called What? And you start off, the pain in my abdomen arrived without fanfare one September morning when my eldest girl was two and a half and the household was, and on and on. And you start to tell about your actual direct experience. I'm curious why that wasn't, and I'm not questioning it one way or the other.

1:02:12I'm curious about your thought process. Why was that the second chapter? And I know it's technically the first, the other one's a prologue, but why did you write that as the put that as the second chapter that seems like a great first chapter well i don't know yeah understand that there's chapters that really actually sections so the book has two chapters in it and the prologue so just so people are clear that's not a lot of chapters just two it's like what and if so the prologue i did that because first of all movies do this all the time they they they'll have like a little sideshow drama that sets the tone sets the mood, right?

1:02:48Like the couple's having dinner and they get into an argument, you know, hard cut to, you know, whatever he's in his job and he's, you know, whatever. I mean, it's like, it's just a little, it's a little, so it's just the tone, like, just so that, you know, this is the kind of territory we're going to be exploring. So it was the first time that I'd almost died. And it allowed me to do all the biographical backstory that I felt like the reader would need to know about me since they're going to be like inside my abdomen for the next hundred pages. Like you might want to know whose abdomen it is.

1:03:21Right. So I was like, all right, I'm going to get I'm going to the surfing story where I almost drowned in January off the coast of Cape Cod. That will be a way, a vehicle for slipping in just sort of minimal biographical details that you'll need to know so that when I say the pain announced itself suddenly one Saturday morning, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, that you'll know the thumbnail sketch of the life history of the person that that's happening to. And otherwise, I'm having to do that work during the headlong rush of the medical drama. I wanted the medical drama to be as propulsive as possible.

1:04:00And if I have to sort of stop and fill in some backstory about how I went to Bosnia at night, whatever, that just slows it down. So it was a way to keep the actual story going full tilt once it started. I see. And I guess also it's a way to foreshadow that death is going to be a topic. So that when you say the pain in my abdomen arrived without fanfare, we could start to guess, oh, this pain is going to lead to potential death. Exactly. I mean, the last sentence of the prologue is, you know, this dream I had of the crew of the Andrea Gale, which is a boat that sank that I wrote about. And I researched these men, although I didn't know them.

1:04:38and I had a dream where I worried that the dead men were angry at me for invading their privacy and I counted them on the beach and instead of getting mad at me they waved me over and it was as if they were saying it's okay you can come we've been expecting you and that's the last thing you read before the pain announced itself like of course the dead are expecting us right they're dead they know how this works you know like you'll get here eventually we've been expecting you and And so that was just a sort of ominous little beginning. I was teeing up the story with this sort of ominous passage.

1:05:14Yeah, because you have the what and the if in that prologue. You have the what, which is the potential surfing disaster. But then you have the if. What if there is a potential afterlife where there's sort of rules to it or a story to it or whatever. And that's what we're going to explore for the next 100 pages. All right, well, thank you. I did have that question when I was reading this. Thank you so much. So in my time of dying, how I came face-to-face with the idea of an afterlife. Sebastian, you say it younger, junger? How do you say it? Younger, J-U-N-G-E-R, but it's younger. Well, thanks so much.

1:05:51I really wanted you on my podcast years ago when Tribe came out, such a wonderful book. And now I'm so glad you came on the podcast now. I really appreciate it. And a great book. I was riveted. I read it in one setting. and sitting and then went over it again, you know, in preparation for this, but beautiful book and, and such intriguing and interesting topics we all have to face. So thank you again for coming on. Thank you. It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed the conversation.

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