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

25:09So the good news is your heart is gonna be fine, because your heart gets perfused above the aorta, your head is fine. Those are the two most important things. And what's gonna happen is your kidneys are gonna start dying. Everything below the body is gonna 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 gonna have to go and see where the clot was, and then they're gonna let the clamp off. See what comes. Re -clamp. Oh my god. Yeah, this was something we had to do all the time in trauma.

25:43And 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 got a clamp across the World. Well, 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.

26:22What time is it now it's late. Yeah, it's like nine o 'clock at night. Okay. So they sort of called him in from sort of dinner as it were from his home, Dr. Phil Dombrauski, who was sort of known in the hospital as the magician because he was like super super gritted to job. So, interventional radiology involves putting someone on a florescope, which is like a sort of video feed x -ray machine, and inserting catheters, rubber or wire, rubber tubes or wire into the vein of 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.

27:12I mean, I know you know all this, but it's fascinating. You know, a lot of people don't. I mean, you know, one interventional radiologist was like, even our spouses aren't entirely sure what we do. Like, it's a rather lesser known of the medical specialties, but absolutely crucial. And 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. And then you can look for, oh, where is it bleeding? Like where is it leaking out of this system here? So my wife finally got to the hospital and they stuck her in her basement.

27:41There'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 sort of stuck there at a 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. So they started trying to get the catheter from my right groin in through my vasculature to the pancreatic artery, and partly because of this strange anatomy that I have, the vasculature at my abdomen is very difficult to navigate, and they tried and tried, and over the course of some hours, I just kept failing to get there.

28:28Because I listened to your book on audio, I didn't actually check whether 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.

29:07It 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 arculate ligament.

29:38But the problem is it's coming down. So you describe this very well, but I think sometimes the picture says a thousand words is like, how are they going to get up 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. And then my vascular tour around the pecreus was very contorted and distorted by the ligament in the wrong place. So I'm in the IR suite and I'm conscious. I mean, they couldn't sedate me. They didn't sedate me. They gave me a little bit of fentanyl and versed. I'm conscious. I'm an enormous pain because all this blood is settled around my kidneys and my back.

30:22I'm back. My back was just an 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 with that kind of precision, but I was in and out of some minds. I was a lot more there than I wish 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, so you know, years earlier.

30:57But 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. Dombrausky said, maybe we can try one last thing which is going through his left wrist instead of his groin. And the other doctor, Dr. Gorin, said, I like the way you think. And that somehow allowed them an approach that ultimately worked. So they went through my left wrist and threw the celiac from above.

31:38And they had to get through the occlusion because the ligament is completely blocking the celiac and has been for my entire life. And 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 embolyze the rupture, they could block the rupture and pull their gear out and you know they're on their way to saving my life. But 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.

32:19I owe my life to many, many good people. But one of them is a German doctor and enforcement who invented the Vainis catheter. And he did it. It's kind of a funny story. It was almost exactly a hundred years ago. And he was a young guy, a young doctor and 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 from an artery or from an artery, right? So he He asked the director of the hospital for permission to do it on a patient and the director is like no We're here to heal them not to experiment on them like I think it was 1923 in Germany So he's like, okay, well how about a dying patient?

33:00He'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 gonna 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 entouagement, but she went for it, right? And so she laid down on the table. He had her lie down on the table and he strapped her arm down ready for the procedure. And after she was strapped down, he turned away and numbed his own arm and cut his arm open and threaded a catheter into his vein of system and his arm and pushed it through.

33:34He 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'd been cheated out of being like a medical first They walked down the hall to X -ray and he told it to audition the 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. It was actually a medical student. I think today it might not be something they would let medical students do.

34:09They might want to wait for you to be a little bit more senior, but it was a little looser 25, 30 years ago. And 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.

34:48And you think, boy, if you screw this up, this person will be dead in about a minute. it. 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. I mean, you have to absolutely know what you're doing. But 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.

35:28And again, it's you can't use too much force. You can't be a brute. It's a finesse thing. So I was at a reading a couple of weeks ago in Atlanta talking about my book and I was talking about putting the we didn't I didn't put the cordis in your neck yet. Right. Right. So 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 the 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 and is there a doctor in the audience?

36:08I never thought I'd have to say that and 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. And 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. Dumbrowski. That was his mentor. He said maybe 5 % of interventional radiologists could have done what Dr. Dumbrowski said. He said, you're really, really lucky, extraordinarily lucky.

36:40You really threaten the needle here medically. After many hours, they managed to You embellize 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 an 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 were going to the ICU. I was just an agony, and they knocked me out, and I woke up to the sound of nurse's voices in the ICU in the next morning and woke up completely, completely ignorant that I'd almost died.

37:16I had no idea. It was the ICU nurse that said, man, no one can believe you're alive. You made it. Now, is 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.

37:55So when I was in the trauma bay, the doctor said to me, as 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. And so I said, is that really necessary? Why? And I said, in case there's an emergency? And he said, this is the emergency, Mr. Younger. And he was a young guy. He was like probably 25. I'm like, kid, I'm three times your age. Like, what's happening here, right? So he started working on me and they use an ultrasound probe and result procedure that I think probably doesn't take particularly long.

38:29It 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, 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, I'll finally summon 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 sensed this black void open up this abyss and it's like this infinitely dark pit without dimension and I'm getting pulled into it.

39:13And 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 conversant 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. There'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. And it was a completely new experience.

39:46I 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. Not 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 has been on the woo woo side, he drove her crazy by sort of asking precise questions about her belief. beliefs like, what do you mean bad energy?

40:27How does bad energy make you sick? You know, like, I mean, 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, right? It's not like I had cardiac arrest and I'm in some other world. I'm still there and there he is above me in the room.

40:52And 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. And I love my dad. I said, we have nothing to talk about. You're not going anywhere with you. Why do you think you weren't comforted by him in some way? Wait, 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.

41:30I 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? you? He was clearly inviting me to join him, where he was, and I knew he was dead. I wasn't literally thinking 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, you know, 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.

42:15That'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.

42:57And 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. Like that was absolutely not the case for me. I was horrified. And I said to the doctor, because he just kept fumbling around him. What to me felt like fumbling around with my deck. I know that's not fair to him, but that's what it felt like. And I said, you got a 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. And he got the line in and they started transfusing me.

43:31So are you realizing this for the first time in the ICU the next day, or you just remembering it and now experiencing it sort of through your memory the second time. Well, in the ICU, I remembered experiencing it for the first time. It was an extremely powerful memory, and it was terrifying. You know, I just woke it up from whatever they put my 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. And as soon she said it, I remembered that I'd had this terrifying encounter, this horrifying encounter with my father and with the pit.

44:16And 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 like in that moment, I was thinking, oh my God, oh my God, I'm seeing my dead father. I wasn't, 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 like, it wasn't like that.

44:50But 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 unconsciously cooked all this up later. And so I asked my wife, like, when you came into the room, what happened? And she said, the first thing you said to me was, I almost died last night and it's all 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.

45:30But 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 rest, sloshing around in my abdomen. I got 10 people's blood inside me. Got tubes all over the place. I'm an incredible pain. I'm throwing up blood. Get 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 news that I almost died. It just seemed inconceivable. It would be as inconceivable as when you wake up in the morning, you know, 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 the first thing you hear is honey, you almost died last night.

46:19It 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 pictured it to feel a 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 in 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 are 10 pieces of Swiss cheese that were placed on top of each other, you happen to be one of those 10 stacks where a pencil still made it through.

47:05Did that occur to you yet? Because there was again, there's so much freakish luck. We could recount it all, but we don't need to. At this point, there are 10 things all of which had to happen for you to survive, right up into including having the right interventional radiologist there. Did that resonate yet? Not till later. And 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. Dumbraski is one of maybe maybe in the 5 % of all IR guys who could have saved your life.

47:48I felt my spirit just plummet. And 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?

48:21It'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 prevent 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 sort of like 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, both travel faster than sound.

49:10And the outpost would get attacked from about 500 meters out, which is quite a long shot for an AK -47 or a PKM and The bullets arrived way before the sound does so 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 that that that that that so that was the first burst of an hour long firefight and the bullets had to have hit with Mimi and inch or two from my forehead, right? 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.

49:47But 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 write 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 Heatherington, 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, et cetera.

50:26And 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 cancer? I'm sorry. And if God is running a random lottery for His grace, I don't want only 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.

51:07For 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. Or 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. So this is curiosity and not 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. So Rick was on that US Airways flight that had to emergency land in the Hudson.

51:43So again, you've got this guy, Captain Salenberger who he's the one out of, you know, Dr. Scott, 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. And 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 a 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.

52:33The things that would have consoled me like holding my daughter, like I survived and here I'm holding my daughter in my lap. I immediately think, oh, but this wasn't supposed to happen, right? She's supposed to be grieving right now. By odds of a hundred to one, she should, and it's a miracle and then I would just spin out into what could have happened. And I eventually talked to her shrink. I mean, my wife was like, you're getting a little hard to live with. Like, can you seek help? And it was a great thing to do. It would have really, really helped me. And my therapist was basically, she was like, listen, if you keep telling yourself this narrative, they almost died, you're never going to escape this incredible anxiety and panic disorder and depression that you've worked yourself into.

53:10You have to stop telling yourself this story. She was absolutely right. And 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, you know, like that sort of paranoia. And then that finally eased off and I wound up in this unbelievable depression and I've never depressed it my life. I'm not a particularly anxious person and I was amazed at how debilitating depression was and I finally got it because I've had friends who have struggled with depression.

53:44I 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? Like that kind of thought? I had no idea. I really opened a door to like, like, oh, I had no idea that's what, when people say depression, this is what they're talking about. And 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. And part of that stemmed from this somewhat clairvoyant dream that I had.

54:21So, and I just have to reiterate, I'm really not a spiritual, mystical, or woo -woo person. and I'm really not, which is why this stuff on Settle Me so much. Much more your father than your mother. Much more, right? Which is why this is unsettling to me. 36 hours prior, the only symptoms I had that something was a rye in my abdomen was sort of intermittent pain, they would come and go. And 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 and my macreatic artery, they would have fixed it without all the drama.

54:53But I didn't do that, and it wasn't consistent enough to like get me to the doctor and I just thought anything is going to kill me is going to be agonizing. I mean it's 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 was when I cooked up for some internet, Google it. And what it probably was was the aneurysm starting to dissect a little bit and leak a little bit of blood into my abdomen. And that's the pain I was feeling. And my body on some level, I think new, there's a five I have a lot of fire coming. So 36 hours prior to nearly dying, I was woken up at dawn.

55:30So 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. And in the nightmare, I was already dead. It started with me already dead. I'm a ghost, I'm a spirit, and I don't know that I'm dead. And my family is below me and they're grieving. And I realize they're grieving me. And I don't know I'm dead. So I'm like waving my arms and shouting, hey, I'm over here. I'm right here. And they can't hear me and they can't see me. And then I'm made to understand that it's too late.

56:11That because of my own stupidity, like I didn't take my life seriously. And 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 were coming? 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.

56:51There's no retrieving it. You know, 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 clustered like I've seen her clustered stuffies, right? Just like, oh, thank God you're here, like that 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 unrestakeable. How long had it been going on? About six months.

57:27Did the dream, because you had a full day after that dream before the day this all happened. 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 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 the dealing with fear and other things as a journalist, you need those compartments and you can't function.

58:04And I got extremely good at sort of like having these firewalls that separate me from emotions that are problematic and getting 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 I clearly had got to that point, but I didn't know it. So after coming back from the hospital, and I will get back to the and there's a species 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 days, then they just charged me, I was out of there.

58:38And I got home. And 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 in this 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 already interrupts a bastion, because again, I think it's really fascinating.

59:19This is technology and culture agnostic. Yeah. 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, you know, whatever. Like the slight slight variations between cultures, but not enough to describe 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.

1:00:04Unable 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 NDE's at all. I didn't know anything about them. So I had these experiences with their rather clean slate. I'm not culturally prepped for these experiences. I realized I had rather classic NDE's 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.

1:00:48And 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, like, and 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. It's just about to say that's the challenge. Right? And if you're sufficiently traumatized and I've been traumatized in combat, I know there's a sort of 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.

1:01:28We're designed to adapt to survive, right? Humans are 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. And 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 gonna go to Bosnia, I'm gonna 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.

1:02:03I'm gonna come back with more chips before I lose my shirt. I'm gonna leave the poker table before I lose everything and I'm gonna come back with these sort of riches whatever they may be experiential riches professional riches. I stopped doing that. I was like Tim got killed I'm gonna get cleaned out the next time I'm leaving the poker table and I had a family and so what was so traumatizing Was that I thought I was safe. It's like owing them off you 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 hundred K and you can't hide from us and that basically is what the universe is doing I look we loaned you some carbon right to make your body out of we will be reclaiming that eventually Mr.

1:02:46Yager and I thought I could sort of delay that and 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. And that's what was so incredibly disturbing and it was what warped my mind afterwards. And 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. And likewise, the depression, the anxiety, I was doing something that many people have almost died and particularly almost died for medical reasons have gone through.

1:03:28So there was some comfort in that. But let me finally return to this amazing nurse. So 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 high -annice Massachusetts. She and the other nurse were discussing me and 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. And he's not the sort of woohoo party like, wow, I almost died. Here I am.

1:04:09Let's celebrate. It was absolutely crushing. And I sat there physically incredibly compromised and in a lot of pain and throwing blood and thinking about the fact that I'd almost, you know, as they say, it almost bought the farm and not known it. And she came back like an hour later and said, how are you doing? How are you doing, Mr. Yager? The accent. I said, um, well, I'm okay, but frankly, what you told me is terrifying. And I can't stop thinking about it. And she said, try this instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And then she walked out.

1:04:53And 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 a secular people have every right to use. And there's very, very fine secular meanings that you can bring to it. And 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.

1:05:39I'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. And that is a sacred task by my own secular definition of what sacred is. And 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.

1:06:22It'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.

1:07:02That's the task. That's what this nurse has asked me to do. Now, she might have mentioned 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 and the media relations office and they weren't much help and then I finally got a phone I didn't see you and asked the gal at the desk so the middle age lady Boston accent was working on June 17th No, no one by that description here.

1:07:47No, 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 herself. Or a traveling nurse, 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.

1:08:23No idea, but because I had such trouble figuring out what was reality and what wasn't, of course across 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 has 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 it familiar with your work knows that no one's ever accused you of being disconnected.

1:09:01So it's not like prior to June 17 or June 16, 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 close to off the grid as possible. And 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.

1:09:43And maybe, like most people listening, could use the realignment of what is sacred. So given all of that, But 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. And I stopped and I was a totally obsessive athlete. I was a pretty good marathon runner and distance runner when I was young.

1:10:24I 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 to go around 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 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. And it did all that quite well. And my father really was quite a brilliant physicist in his specialty of acoustics.

1:11:01He was very, very clearly on the spectrum. Spectrum disorder runs disorders 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. And 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. And you're pretty oblivious to everything else. And 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 excellent, some kind of transcendent accomplishment.

1:11:45Yeah, 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 that 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 can 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.

1:12:27But 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 as 120 miles a week. Then later in my life, it was this pursuit of journalism and 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, your blah blah blah, whatever it may be, you might be a musician, you might be that comes in all flavors.

1:13:07And 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, 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 love 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.

1:13:56So I 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 go into these, I would just drop into these pits of sadness and I didn't know what they were. And my wife, Barbara, the woman I married to, and on one day she said, honey, you seem, 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.

1:14:35Why are you so brilliant? Like, I'm sad. That's exactly what it is. I couldn't believe her insight. And 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? Like, what are you talking about? All that to say that you're right, I'm not distracted, I'm tuned out. Yeah, well. Right, I'm out there, not as bad as my father. My father, this is real physicist territory, was like really, really out there. But I'm out there enough, and there's enough problematic and painful emotional territory in my life that it was, I found quite a good refuge in athletics.

1:15:19And then this incredible sort of 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, 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.

1:15:58Yeah, I saw you draw four squares and I've been thinking a lot about this because the God problem is an enormous problem because on the one hand, And 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. 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.

1:16:48The numbers are so big they don't add up. None of this makes sense. So 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.

1:17:23At the end of the day, that's what the world is, that's what reality is made up out of, as particles and atoms and the laws of physics, they 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 Schrodinger. You want to recount the story of how you find yourself within his sphere? Yeah, so 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 1920s.

1:18:06Your father's born right after World War I. Yeah, born in 1923 in Dresden. Ten years later, the Reichstag fire, Germany is people know where this is headed and they decap 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 Francho. So now my father's fluent German and fluent Spanish. They leave Spain for France and 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.

1:19:00So as I am fond of, say, thanks to the fascists, my father spoke five languages fluently, right? Five European languages fluently. So that's how he came to America, but his mother's side of his family was from Austria, from Salzburgs, or Upper Middle class, and 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, ET and VT, younger. And they were sort of renowned as teenage girls for being really beautiful. And the family happened to know the Shrodinger's. Shrodinger, this preeminent physicist, Shrodinger's cat, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, etc.

1:19:45Nobel Prize. So Shrodinger 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 done 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. And 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 Schrodinger's were living? Come visit for the summer. And maybe he can tutor them in math.

1:20:26You just have to understand how it would completely ridiculous. I mean, it's like Einstein, right? It's like they're failing soft -more math can Erwin help them. So off the girls go for a summer in Germany. And Schrodinger falls in love with ET, 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. And anyway, thank God the girls passed their exams and ET and Schrodinger, they tastefully wait until she's 18 and he's 45 or something and they have this passionate affair the last some years.

1:21:15Traditionally, 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 her rather sad figure, frankly. Probably due to what was really a tragedy in 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've 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 ET.

1:21:55That's the bookmark in the biography that I found in the shelf. That's our history was Schrodinger. So we talk about his cat. Many people probably know the experiment. It's a thought experiment, a good -down -can -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.

1:22:34So 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 of 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.

1:23:21It'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, Izeenberg and Troy Dinger 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?

1:24:07And are we creating what we see by seeing it? Shrodinger came up with a sort of thought experiment, a Gaduncan experiment, which is that you have a cat, why you picked a cat? I don't know. What do you put a cat in a box with the, what do you call, I think that translated from the German is what do you call, they fiendish mechanism. And 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. And 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.

1:24:47So 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. Okay. So there's another step that doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea is exactly 50 -50 and the cats in this enclosed box. And after an hour, there's a hundred percent chance that one thing or the other happened. There's no third possibility where the cats a little sick. It's one or the other to complete binary. And likewise at the subatomic level, particles are in one place or another.

1:25:26It's a complete binary. There isn't like in the macroscopic world, you know, a pendulum sort of swings and isn't 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. And 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 off the coast of Spain and the Canary Islands, correct?

1:26:10Yeah. 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 just, 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.

1:26:56I mean, the words make no sense. It's describing the physical setup of the experiment with lasers and mirrors and telephone cable at fiber optics cable. And it just as an example of 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. So there are things called entangled particles. And 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 a complementary way instantly.

1:27:44And 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. So they figured out a fiendish mechanism for sort of tricking the universe. And what they do is they take entangled particles And I have no idea how they do this.

1:28:27You'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. And 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. and 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.

1:29:13Just 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 things that are observed behave. Right. Pick a doorway. One of 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 hissed a strike played on the other side with a classic waveform signature that physicists well know means it has to both slits.

1:29:54So 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. It's delayed choice quantum erasure.

1:30:34And 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 and a hammock with a decorate 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 where racial exists. Because it's just don't understand why the world... I mean, is there a chance that there is...

1:31:11If 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. And 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?

1:31:57In 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 sub -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 where 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.

1:32:38Neither could be true. He sets out to prove it, and the only way he can prove it is to violate something with held in quantum theory itself. I believe it was through the photoelectric effect. Yeah, yeah. 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. And 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, I'm hopelessly sort of ignorant metaphor in some ways.

1:33:14But as you approach the speed of light, mask gets infinitely heavy and you can never get to the speed of light as you approach it. It's because infinite. Right. And I sort of had this thought, this sort of 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? I mean, is there an element of consciousness can't fully understand consciousness? this, or if it does, it cannot sustain itself.

1:33:50This just thought experiment, wordplay. But it did sort of make me, on a human level, just be a little queasy. Like, 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 the late choice quantum ratio? I mean, I think there's two ways to think about this. The first is, with knowing this, help us live better lives on this planet, the answer is probably know, 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.

1:34:26I 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 I, this is, 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.

1:35:18Listen, the sand isn't a bad place. I mean, Jerry's a physicist named Sir Arthur, I think Arthur Eddington. Yeah, the one who observed the photoelectric effect. We 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, is something like 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 photoelectricity was general relativity that he observed in South Africa, I think seeing the eclipse, right?

1:35:59With the eclipse exactly, and it bent the rays of light as Einstein predicted, and Einstein was great. I mean, 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. And if these are the numbers, I'm wrong. I'm going to tell you how to defeat my argument. I'm going to tell you how to do it. And if you fail, then maybe my theory is right. And so 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.

1:36:36Right. So a star that should be in one position, should be in another position because of the bending of light. And in fact, if it's not in that position, I'm wrong," said Einstein. Right? So Eddington was one of the people that helped him confirm that. By the way, it's a nice little tie -in to everything. Do you know how Einstein died? Yes, an abdominal aneurysm. Yeah. That's right. And he refused treatment. He was in the 70s. Yeah, means I know I'm good. Yeah. I think to sort of 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.

1:37:14For me, I mean, 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 should or get off the pot, whether you're thinking. You're 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?

1:37:53And 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 Ignostic about God, what troubles me about that is that there's absolutely no evidence that your wife's cheating on you. Right? 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 could say I'm Ignostic. 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 overwhelming proof, I would be a believer.

1:38:28If I saw some evidence that God exists, I would be agnostic. I'd be like, well, I'm in the jury. 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. Yeah. Right. And any sort of cheating spouse analogy, like unless you have some reason to doubt your spouse, you say, no, she's not cheating. I mean, I have no reason to think that. No, I don't believe in God. I have no reason to think I think there is a God. I've never seen evidence to the effect that there's a God.

1:38:56And if there was a little bit of evidence, I'd be like, hung jury. Like, maybe there is, maybe there is. 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.

1:39:32It 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 aspiring to which we are rushing towards entropy? Right. And so 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.

1:40:16And is it just neurochemistry? Yeah, possibly. Is there, and again, it would have to be at some quantum level, some post -ethnic 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, like maybe there is something. And so my book is divided into two sections. What an if, what happened to me, and what if there were some post death existence just theoretically as a thought experiment, how would it work?

1:40:58There's almost certainly not, I say in the book, there's almost certainly not, but if there were, how would it work? And that's where I sort of wound up in quantum physics. I had a hilarious conversation with some colleagues of my father who I sort of track down after my near -death experience, guys who were very fond of my father. And so half a generation younger than him, half a generation older than me, really, really sweet guys. And we had lunch and I said, guys, this is what happened to me. My dead father appeared above me. And 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.

1:41:42Rudolph, Rudolphful said to me, well your father was a hopeless romantic. That's like really? That would be news for my mother. They alloped 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. I got it. Okay. All right. Yes. Hopeless romantic. So in one point, right after my parents were married, and then these are the brains that come up with this kind of thing.

1:42:29Right after my parents were married, she was cooking dinner and he was in an armchair, the 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 see, tiptoes over, I think probably fearing the worst. And he has a book open. Both pages are covered with numbers and equations and symbols.

1:43:05That'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 or I assume there's a rhetorical question. I was 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? And to my like, 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?

1:43:43Is that something you can calculate? He said it's around, and I'm going from memory from my book. 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 it's fixiatus? Almost impossible, but it's theoretically possible. Well likewise, it's probably the Aussie of your father rematerializing above you roughly on that order of unlikely.

1:44:27I 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. And then for conscious life to develop, it's almost infinitely unlikely.

1:45:09And it's actually way more unlikely, these 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. Then my father appearing above me. That's actually in the realm of chance, like 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, yeah, we don't understand it, but I can imagine that it's possible.

1:45:56Yeah, 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 like, I don't understand and consciousness. I can't explain consciousness. And I look at my dog and I think, well, he's conscious. There is a feeling of being a dog.

1:46:39He knows what it's like to exist. And 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 understand to 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.

1:47:24And we just don't have the equipment to understand that Shreidinger, Shreidinger'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 reunite it with it when we die. And his theory wasn't very articulated, but that was his sort of general belief, as was my father's. and there's a theory called biosentrism, 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.

1:48:19And that consciousness is part of the physical makeup of the universe at the quantum level the way gravity is. In the ways that I don't quite understand this 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 is hopelessly circular. And the Higgs boson has been observed relatively recently. That's right. This is in the last decade, maybe the last 15 years. Yep, that's right. It's been the first observation of this.

1:48:54Right. 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, no, maybe there's an equivalent for consciousness. This is all theorizing, and biosensitism focuses on that, and that if that's true, then our individual consciousness, mind, 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 sort of human level, which is important not to leave behind. And for me, something close to a comforting thought in that, that I mean, the idea of being conscious like we are now for eternity, like you die.

1:49:43And then the real thing starts that glass 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. 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 sort of threshold moments of life and death where the dead are maybe in some way, quote, So there with us, that to me is this sort of sweet spot.

1:50:25And 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 daquery for eternity, basically, like this sort of, oh, lovely, the afterlife. It's just 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, like somehow we proved it, and it went on forever, that you were alive for these troubled 70, 80 years. And then whatever happened, your afterlife starts and you're just cruising for eternity.

1:51:08It strips all of the meaning, all the dignity, all the struggle, all of the victory out of those 70 years of struggle. Enjoy and pain and sorrow and everything. I was like, don't worry about it. It's just 70 years in an eternity. Like, 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.

1:51:44But 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 whether 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.

1:52:19It'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 will get This sweet spot of ambiguity is actually perfectly attuned to making this life both psychologically survivable and Meaningful to me that is like the borrow 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.

1:53:12Yeah, he 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, Yeah, basically. So after I finished the book, I read this extraordinary story about Dusty Hemsky, the great Russian writer. And 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. So 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, and they would sit around and they'd talk about stuff, and they talk about, for example, freeing the serfs, outrageous ideas like that.

1:54:02It's in the 1840s. And basically the same conversation was happening in the United States about the slaves, much slavery. So, this is our Nicholas I think it was, was not particularly pleased by this talk and his police routed these boys up and threw them in jail. And they spent eight months in jail. And it wasn't a particularly serious crime. So they were getting their wrists slapped, but no one was particularly worried about anything. And then finally, after eight months, they were shown to the door of the prison and loaded onto a carriage. And you know, they just assumed they were going to be driven to the court and discharged and released to their families, and the nightmares over.

1:54:39And so they're bouncing along through the streets. And 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 with my family to I'm going to die in a few minutes Right, 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 And Dusty Eveski and his buddies are waiting for the command fire When their chest will be torn open by muskipals And so what happened was this was theater.

1:55:25It 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 who went through this, were insane for the rest of their lives. They could not take what I was saying about the truth. No, after life, I can't bear that thought. The unfiltered vision of infinity starting 30 seconds from now, without any warm up, without any time to adjust. You have cancer, you're going to die in a year.

1:56:06Nothing 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 Amalive, yay, to, oh my God, I'm gonna 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.

1:56:54And he thought to himself, in moments, I'll be part of the sunlight, I'm going to become part of all things. And if I somehow survive this, they'll live the rest of my life turning every moment into an infinity. And 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?

1:57:42That 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. And when that vision becomes, when you become accustomed to it, when it becomes an everyday thing, it means a problem with long marriage, sometimes, right? 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 and whatever, but this 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.

1:58:14And that was the blessing that came with the curse of what Dostoyevsky went through, and I've gotten a little bit of that in my life. And 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. So 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 Dusty Fsky would, I'm guessing he would.

1:58:58And 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 I like something's catastrophically wrong with me and I 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's extremely unpleasant. And I know that paranoid feeling comes flooding into me and it's a direct result of almost dying on a beautiful June day.

1:59:30So they start without its costs, but because I'm blessed, blessed to have some incredibly wonderful, beautiful things going for me in my life like I was able to sort of 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 and answers, but that's so it makes it worth living, right?

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