Sebastian Junger on Ukraine, Netanyahu Charges, and his NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE

Summary

Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels: Episode Summary Featuring Sebastian Junger

Release Date: November 27, 2024

In this compelling episode of "Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels," host Jillian Michaels engages in a profound and multifaceted conversation with renowned author, journalist, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger. The discussion delves deep into international politics, personal transformation through near-death experiences (NDEs), and the intricate balance of societal roles. Below is a detailed summary capturing the essence of their dialogue.

---

1. Introduction to Sebastian Junger

[02:44] Jillian Michaels:
Jillian introduces Sebastian Junger, highlighting his acclaimed works such as "The Perfect Storm," "Tribe," and "War." She emphasizes his frontline experiences in conflict zones, notably through his documentaries Restrepo and Korngal, which provide raw and unfiltered insights into the human cost of war.

Notable Quote:
[02:58] Sebastian Junger:
"The long range missiles that we allowed them to use inside Russia, that is dangerous, but doing nothing could also be dangerous."

---

2. Political Landscape: Ukraine and Netanyahu Charges

The conversation shifts to the current geopolitical tensions surrounding Ukraine, the involvement of North Korean troops in Russia, and the implications of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu facing war crime charges.

[07:03] Jillian Michaels:
Jillian questions the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, likening it to World War II and expressing concern over President Biden's role in the ongoing situation.

[12:07] Sebastian Junger:
Junger provides a nuanced perspective on Putin's aggression, acknowledging both the provocations and the dire consequences of inaction. He elaborates on the complexities of geopolitical strategies and the precarious balance required to prevent further escalation.

Notable Quote:
[13:58] Sebastian Junger:
"You need those people to keep society at least somewhat fair. And the liberals need the conservatives to keep society at least somewhat safe."

---

3. Sebastian Junger’s Near-Death Experience

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Sebastian Junger recounting his near-death experience, which profoundly transformed his outlook on life and death.

[42:48] Sebastian Junger:
Junger narrates the harrowing incident where he nearly died from an undiagnosed aneurysm. He describes the physical agony, the critical moments leading to his hospitalization, and the intense emotional turmoil he faced.

[51:15] Sebastian Junger:
He shares his encounter with what he perceives as a spectral presence of his deceased father during his NDE, highlighting the profound psychological and existential questions it raised.

Notable Quote:
[52:19] Sebastian Junger:
"I finally got it. Like, I might die. They might not have an answer. Whatever this is, they might not have an answer for it."

---

4. Impact on Personal Life and Philosophy

Junger discusses how the near-death experience reshaped his personal life, emphasizing the newfound appreciation for his family and a deeper understanding of life's fragility.

[85:33] Jillian Michaels:
Jillian reflects on her own loss and connections to NDEs, paralleling Junger’s experience with her personal encounters, thereby deepening the conversation's emotional resonance.

[86:57] Jillian Michaels:
She underscores the emotional impact of Junger’s story, noting how it highlights the universal quest for meaning amidst suffering and loss.

Notable Quote:
[82:24] Sebastian Junger:
"What I've learned to do is to love the Traffic on the 405 because it exists and because I exist and all of this exists."

---

5. Exploring Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and Consciousness

The dialogue intensifies as both delve into the scientific and philosophical dimensions of NDEs, consciousness, and the mysteries surrounding them.

[61:19] Sebastian Junger:
Junger critiques the rationalist explanations of NDEs, arguing that the consistent phenomenon of seeing deceased loved ones challenges purely neurochemical explanations.

[68:24] Jillian Michaels:
She shares her fascination with NDEs, relating them to her personal experiences and the broader human inclination to seek meaning beyond the tangible.

Notable Quote:
[64:03] Sebastian Junger:
"The consistency is remarkable. And so what I don't understand, I understand urologists say, 'Oh, we know why dying people hallucinate,' but how do they all see the dead?"

---

6. Societal Roles and Gender Dynamics

Junger and Michaels explore societal expectations of men, the concept of "man up," and the inherent needs for both risk-taking and caution within societal structures.

[20:47] Sebastian Junger:
He elaborates on the societal pressures placed on men to exhibit courage and altruism, linking it to evolutionary roles and survival.

[23:32] Jillian Michaels:
Jillian contrasts her role as a mother with Junger’s adventurous persona, highlighting the delicate balance required in parenting to foster both safety and resilience.

Notable Quote:
[24:14] Sebastian Junger:
"My daughter says, 'Daddies are for adventure and mommies are for staying alive.'"

---

7. Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Universal Connectivity

The conversation ventures into the realms of quantum physics and consciousness, pondering the nature of existence and the possibility of universal consciousness.

[77:22] Sebastian Junger:
He discusses Schrödinger's views on universal consciousness, debating its implications and his own stance on divine explanations.

[78:24] Jillian Michaels:
Jillian connects quantum phenomena like superposition to human experiences, suggesting a deeper, interconnected reality.

Notable Quote:
[76:36] Jillian Michaels:
"This little particle was in superposition. It was everywhere, all at the same time until we observed it and it collapsed into one reality. And that's proven right."

---

8. Conclusion and Future Endeavors

As the episode wraps up, Junger reflects on how his experiences have reshaped his appreciation for life and his ongoing journey of understanding consciousness and existence.

[87:13] Sebastian Junger:
Junger hints at future projects while emphasizing his commitment to family and personal growth post his near-death experience.

Notable Quote:
[80:37] Sebastian Junger:
"If you think in terms of dying, you're dying for your child and their generation and for the future of the earth."

---

Key Takeaways

• Geopolitical Insights: Understanding the complexities of international conflicts requires acknowledging both provocations and the dire consequences of inaction.

• Personal Transformation: Near-death experiences can profoundly alter one's perspective on life, death, and the meaning of existence, fostering a deeper appreciation for loved ones and everyday moments.

• Consciousness Mysteries: The consistent nature of NDEs challenges purely scientific explanations, suggesting potential facets of consciousness that remain enigmatic.

• Societal Roles Balance: A harmonious society necessitates a balance between risk-taking and caution, typically embodied through the interplay of liberal and conservative values.

• Evolutionary Perspectives: Certain societal expectations, such as the pressure on men to "man up," may have evolutionary underpinnings tied to survival and societal stability.

---

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• [02:58] Sebastian Junger:
  "The long range missiles that we allowed them to use inside Russia, that is dangerous, but doing nothing could also be dangerous."

• [13:58] Sebastian Junger:
  "You need those people to keep society at least somewhat fair. And the liberals need the conservatives to keep society at least somewhat safe."

• [52:19] Sebastian Junger:
  "I finally got it. Like, I might die. They might not have an answer. Whatever this is, they might not have an answer for it."

• [82:24] Sebastian Junger:
  "What I've learned to do is to love the Traffic on the 405 because it exists and because I exist and all of this exists."

• [64:03] Sebastian Junger:
  "The consistency is remarkable. And so what I don't understand, I understand urologists say, 'Oh, we know why dying people hallucinate,' but how do they all see the dead?"

---

Final Thoughts

This episode of "Keeping It Real" masterfully intertwines global political discourse with deeply personal reflections on mortality and existence. Sebastian Junger's candid recounting of his near-death experience offers listeners an intimate glimpse into how such profound events can reshape one's worldview, drive philosophical inquiries, and reinforce the value of human connections. Jillian Michaels skillfully navigates these heavy topics, fostering a conversation that is both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant.

For those seeking a thoughtful exploration of life's most challenging questions through the lens of personal experience and journalistic integrity, this episode stands out as a must-listen.

Transcript

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Sebastian Junger]

Screeching about the liberals like they shouldn't exist. You need those people to keep society at least somewhat fair. And the liberals need the conservatives to keep society at least somewhat safe.

[Jillian Michaels]

I'm honored to sit down with an extraordinary guest, Sebastian Younger.

[Sebastian Junger]

The long range missiles that we allowed them to use inside Russia, that is dangerous, but doing nothing could also be dangerous.

[Jillian Michaels]

He's the acclaimed author of the Perfect Storm Tribe and War beyond his books. Sebastian is also an award winning journalist and filmmaker. His documentaries like Restrepo and Korngal take us straight to the front lines of war, offering raw, unfiltered perspectives on the human cost of conflict.

[Sebastian Junger]

You can either talk to them or fight them, and that's just a human truth. You're not willing to talk to someone. You may have to fight them.

[Jillian Michaels]

But today we're going to shift gears to a deeply personal chapter in his life. Sebastian's latest book, In My Time of Dying, recounts his harrowing near death experience.

[Sebastian Junger]

I didn't. The really terrifying thing about death is that it can be so casual. I felt a funny pain in my abdomen that was me starting to die.

[Jillian Michaels]

A moment that not only brought him face to face with his own mortality, but profoundly transformed his outlook on life, death, and what truly matters.

[Sebastian Junger]

I'm looking down on my family and they're below me and they're crying. I said, you gotta hurry. You're losing me.

[Jillian Michaels]

Keeping it real with Jillian, Michael.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, don't lose my flip phone.

[Jillian Michaels]

Shut up.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I've never, I've never had a smartphone. Yeah, I'm a smartphone virgin. I'm. I, I'm. I'm.

[Jillian Michaels]

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No talking. Am. Okay. I intended to open this asking you about whether or not you thought Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian asset, whether or not Netanyahu is guilty of war crimes, and whether or not you think Biden should be ramping up the war. But I just discovered that you. Oh, and by the way, when you died and saw your dead father hovering over you. All things I've got planned on my little note sheet here, but I noticed you had a flip phone and I think that's going to be my first question.

[Sebastian Junger]

I just never wanted one of those freaking things. They just look distracting and addictive and everyone looks miserable on them and anxious. And the data are in. People are increasingly depressed and anxious, particularly teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And I just like, Sorry, I'm Good, thank you.

[Jillian Michaels]

How are you functioning, though? Emails, text messages?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I get emails on my laptop at my desk. Right. I mean, only when I'm home, like we used to, like 15 years ago. And my phone can text and call. It is a phone. Right. And I, you know, I have a glove compartment full of maps and I know how to orient my way around the world. The only thing I don't. Can't find out is, like, what the traffic is. Right. But I live in New York City. I don't drive that much. Like, it doesn't matter. I'm digitally sober. That's the way I put digitally sober. I'm digitally sober. Social media in your, you know, in your front pocket all the time, 24. 7 is.

[Jillian Michaels]

You're a journalist.

[Sebastian Junger]

It's addict. It's addictive, right? No, but it's. You're right, but I don't want to be an addict while I'm a journalist. Right. And everyone's addicted to the.

[Jillian Michaels]

It's true.

[Sebastian Junger]

And. And you don't need it. You don't need social media to function. Right. And I. You could. You make a pretty good argument that it diminishes your Life. And I'm 62 and I don't want my life diminished in whatever time I have left. So. Sorry, you know, I'm not buying it.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's your flip phone.

[Sebastian Junger]

You got your flip phone there it is, yeah. You can touch it if you want. There it is. Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

I didn't die.

[Sebastian Junger]

I did not die. You've been infected with it. You're going to get one. You're going to see.

[Jillian Michaels]

Gosh. Well, my little brother has, like, one of those bags that you can. Have you ever seen this? You put your phone in it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

And you're. The phone can't listen to you. It can't track you. He's 34 and I'm 50. And I'm like, greg, is this necessary? He's like, yes, it is.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yes, it's necessary to buy a flip phone. It won't be necessary. The battery lasts for days. I don't even bring a charger when I travel. Right. It lasts forever. Come on, they're 50 bucks. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Amazing.

[Jillian Michaels]

All right, so then back to the topics at hand. As one of the most famous journalists who have ever covered war, I mean, between your documentaries, your books, you've been on the front lines. What do you think about what's going on in the world? I think you. I know you. You're like, listen, I'm, you know, I Don't specialize in the Middle East. It's not that you have a unique perspective, in my opinion, that politicians don't have. It's very easy to ramp up conflict when it's not your kid, when it's not your husband. And I'm wondering right now, Biden is pushing the up button on the situation in Russia and Ukraine. And as a mom, I'm like, yeah, I don't want this. This is not World War II. We're not fighting. You know, what are your thoughts on that?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, you know, those kinds of calculations are extremely complex. Not. I'm not privy to the information they have that goes into them and to the sort of 3D chess game that is geopolitics. Right. I mean, I just. I. But what I would say is that the placing North Korean troops in Russia is to attack a sovereign country, Ukraine is a pretty outrageous move by Putin. Right. And so in this sort of balance of world, you know, world power, the idea that that kind of provocation and transgression goes unaddressed, unacknowledged, could also be extremely dangerous.

[Jillian Michaels]

I see.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And you know what? Biden. So I'm not for or against anything, Right. I'm a journalist. I just, as a friend of mine said, we don't tell people what to think. We tell people what to think about. Right. So think about it.

[Jillian Michaels]

And for me, I actually don't know, and I think many people don't know. And this is why I want to hear from you.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. So, you know, I mean, the Putin regime, regime. I mean, they attacked Chechnya twice, Right. The world did nothing. Georgia, Transnistria, Moldova. I mean, his transgressions are in the former Soviet sphere, are numerous, and the world did not do anything. Right. So it's not like we respond to the slightest provocation. It finally took an outrageous invasion of a sovereign country, a fledgling democracy, for. For the west to respond. And I do think democracies have to defend each other against despots. And Putin's a desperate. So I, you know, I just. On. On some level, I sort of understand the reasoning.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Sebastian Junger]

Did we make strategic mistakes that led to a situation where an invasion was possible? Yeah, I Think probably, I think we probably misplayed the NATO hand, et cetera. But the end, to ask you, but.

[Jillian Michaels]

At the end of the day, like, did we provoke it to a certain extent?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, you know, it's like we could have taken, you know, I hate you because you made me angry. Right. And it's like, yeah, maybe we provoked him, but he still invaded a sovereign country with a huge army and has pounded it flat with his artillery and his missiles. Like, there's, there's nothing that, that, that legitimizes that. Okay, right. It's an outrage. Right. So, so, and now he's got North Korean troops in there. It's extremely volatile, bad situation. And so doing the missiles, the long range missiles that we allowed them to use inside Russia, that is dangerous, but doing nothing could also be dangerous. Right. And you just don't know how these, like, calculations are made. So I'm agnostic about whether it was a good or bad thing. But what I don't believe is the sort of paranoid, like, you know, Biden's senile and trying to get us into World War iii. I mean, it's just like, that's not.

[Jillian Michaels]

He's making those decisions, it seems like.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I mean, we don't know. We don't know. I mean, we have no idea. Like, we're not in those rooms. Right. We just don't know. And you know, I think he, of course he's part of those decisions and, but, but also a lot of very smart people also are who don't want World War iii and neither does Putin. Right? So, you know, this is all, there's a lot of, you know, hold me, hold me back, hold me back in the bar fight. Right? No one really wants to be in the bar fight, but how do you posture in such a way that you don't lose face? Like you don't lose your dignity and you don't have to get in a fight. Like, how. What's that? How do you thread that needle? And that's a lot of geopolitics.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Sebastian Junger]

So I was a young man. I wanted to test myself, right? War had affected my family a lot. My father was a refugee from two wars. He was born in Germany in 1923. His father was Jewish. They left in 33 when things started to get unpleasant. They went to Spain. They left in 36 when the fascists rose to power under Franco. And they went to France. And then they fled France when the Germans. Then the Nazis came in. More fascists, as I like to say. My father speaks five languages because, thanks to the fascists, they just chased them all over Europe. Basically. They went to Portugal and then United States. So it impacted my family a lot. And I was about 30 years old. I was a climber for tree companies. I was a high climber. I worked 80, 90ft in the air with a chainsaw and a rope. I'd hurt myself doing it. I wanted to be a writer. Thought about writing about dangerous jobs, because I had one. And in the fall of 1992, my girlfriend dumped me. And I thought, I need a radical change. I'm going to go. There was a civil war in Bosnia. I'm like, I'm going to go see. I'm going to go to that war and see what happens. Can I become a journalist in a war zone? Will that be the kind of crucible that I need to transform myself into? That kind of professional, but also as a person, as a man, how will I respond to that environment? Will I make? Will I do okay? And a lot of young men, and maybe young women as well, I don't know. But a lot of young men are like, how would I do in a war? Like, would I measure up?

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah, I've asked that. And the answer is no question. I don't think I would. Well, which is why I have. I can't say, you know, that. It's like, I don't want to ever advocate for something. I don't think I would have the courage to fight or kill someone or watch my son or daughter go in and kill someone.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right? But understand that a lot of young men do want to answer that question for themselves. How would I do? Right, Right. And that's partly how do I become an adult. How do I become a man in a situation where I've never been tested, never been challenged, I've never been in a situation that's out of my control, where I have to show a certain amount of courage and altruism for others and et cetera. And so off I went to the siege of Sarajevo and the meaningfulness of it, the sense of importance and gravity, like, wow, I'm part of this and I'm communicating information to the rest of the world about this tragedy. Like, that was intoxicating. And I just, I just kept going back to wars and the war reporters were 10 times as experienced as me. I mean, you know, I'm. But for whatever reason, I got a certain amount of visibility and I did work that people responded to, like emotionally. It was meaningful. And, you know, so here I am. I no longer cover wars. I have a family, I have two little girls. I wouldn't go near a war right now. But I'm awfully glad I did it. It made me who I am in some, in some really powerful and profound ways.

[Jillian Michaels]

Why do you think men need this kind of test?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, you know, I think they get the sense that, I mean, there's this phrase, be a man about it, right? Yeah, right. So people, and women, many women as well, use that phrase. Like what do they mean by that phrase?

[Jillian Michaels]

Man up?

[Sebastian Junger]

Man up. What do they mean? Right. And what do women mean when they say man up? Like what? And society means a specific thing. And what it means is, bro, it's time for you to put yourself last. Last. It's time for you. And you know, I think partly women who give birth and risk their lives giving birth almost biologically wind up putting themselves last. Like, you know, it's sort of, it's a kind of inevitability, right? With a man, it's a choice. And if you're not mature enough and courageous enough to do what every mother has done, right, is like, put your concerns last, be willing to suffer, be willing to take a risk for other people, for this society that we, we are going to ask you to protect. If you're not willing to do that, you're not a man. You're just self concerned and you're a child. So you can be a 45 year old male and not a man. Right. I would argue that there are very few 45 year old women who are not women who are considered girls. There's just not a category of that in our language and in our culture. But we all know the 45 year old guys who are basically still children, Right, Right. And women don't want to marry those guys and nor should they in society is fed up with those guys, as we should be. Right. And we need those guys doing all kinds of dangerous things. Like the, the. I can't remember the numbers, but the vast majority of workplace fatalities are male, right? Because men do dangerous stuff that society needs done that gets them killed. Right. Like 90%, something like 90% of workplace fatalities are men. Right? So we, society needs men to step up and take on dangers that women are already facing in childbirth. The mortality rate pre Western medicine, but the sort of like in human terms, the mortality rate for childbirth is 1% per birth. So if you're a woman in, you know, 1600, whatever, and you have five kids, you're running a 5% mortality risk, which is, you know, the equivalent of battlefield deaths for soldiers, right? So like, that's why we ask men to man up and like, listen, put yourself last if you get killed. Sorry about that. But you guys do what you gotta do. So when you grow up, like I did in a wealthy suburb, right, where there's never a risk, never a challenge, never a danger, never even a hardship, you can grow up wondering, am I a man? And I know it's impolitic to say it that way, but just to be honest, that is the question many of us have who have grown up in situations that we're not challenging. And so sometimes you have to seek those situations to demonstrate to yourself, I've got what it takes. Right. And it's just, that's how society works and every society works that way. And it always has.

[Jillian Michaels]

One of the things that has fascinated me about your book in My Time of Dying is we open up and you're surfing alone in really dangerous conditions in the winter on the east coast and you almost die. And then there's another story where you like, go off on your own into the wilderness in Spain and you almost freeze to death. And then you're a war correspondent on the front lines where you could almost die. And in these moments, I'm like, this guy's like some sort of David Goggins esque lunatic. And then you died in a situation.

[Sebastian Junger]

That was, that finally wasn't my fault.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yes.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Well, listen, there's almost no limit to male stupidity as well, right? I mean, men die at six times the rate that young women do because they do take stupid risks, right, from violence and accidents, Right. I think, I think that the figure is something like 85% of people who die of lightning strikes are male because they're just. They're out during lightning storms. Right. You know, it's just that's the. And society needs risk takers as well. Right? And young males are great risk takers because they kind of don't matter in some ways, Right, right. I mean, they don't matter in reproductive terms. You can kill half the men in a society, and within a generation, the population is the same, right? Yeah. You kill half the women and it cripples the population. But men are replaceable in that sense, right? Female reproduction is very, very limited resource. Male reproduction is almost infinite. Right. So you can kill many more men in a society and the population will be the same within a generation. That's not true for women. Right. So if you're going to use a sex as cannon fodder, as it were, use the men, right? Do not use the women. It'll cripple your population.

[Jillian Michaels]

You say that and you have two daughters and a wife. I say that, and of course I have a daughter and a wife, but I have a son. And I can't think of any war in history. I mean, maybe, I guess World War II in my sort of sphere of knowing, you know, in the last hundred or so years, World War I, no shot fighting Hitler. I mean, oh, my God, no Vietnam, no on Korea, no on Iraq. So it's like. And he's nuts. The kid's nuts. So he's always into something. And we had a conversation recently where he was trying to bar. He's 12, trying to barbecue himself a steak. He wasn't with me. He was with my ex, even though she's a great mother. Lit his face on fire, burned off his eyebrows. And this is not the first time this child has almost died. And we had a conversation and I was like, bud, listen to me, okay? I make a lot of decisions on a daily basis because you exist. I gave up motorcycles. I did this, I did that, I did this. And I did it for you. And I'm gonna tell you right now that I'm gonna need like this some reciprocity here, because if you die, you're going to ruin my life. Like, it will ruin my life, it will ruin Mommy's life, it's going to ruin lives. Like, I need you to think this shit through.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, yeah. Right? Well, yeah. I mean, there's a balance to strike. Because if he leads a completely safe life, he risks feeling not mature, not manly, not attractive to girls. Girls, like risk takers. I'm sorry. They just do. Right? Like. And and not all. Not all women, but men who take risks and succeed at it get a lot of female attention.

[Jillian Michaels]

Wow.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Sebastian Junger]

So. So.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And there's a. So my. I have two. Two young, Young girls. Daughters, Right. Seven and four. And I was teaching them how to rock club. Right. My wife was like, very nervous about this, and she's pretty game for anything. But we were out in the woods and I had a rope and a harness, and I was like belaying them up a little like a bowl, you know, a boulder. I mean, nothing. Right. And. And my. My oldest daughter said in my. My wife couldn't watch. Right. I know what I'm doing. It wasn't unsafe at all. But, you know, my wife couldn't watch.

[Jillian Michaels]

You didn't climb trees and chop them down. So I think you got that.

[Sebastian Junger]

So my daughter says daddies are for adventure and mommies are for staying alive. Wow. And if you get those two imbalance, you have a relatively safe but challenging, interesting, dynamic life. Right. So that's the balance that we need. And of course, it doesn't, you know, mommy and daddy doesn't have to be a man and a woman. It could be two men or two women, you know, whatever. But those two roles, one which is sort of expeditionary. Right. And risk taking, and one which is cautious. You have them together, they balance each other. That's why the populations in every society are almost exactly divided between liberals and conservatives. When you bounce, they're both legitimate concerns. They don't work when they get out of balance with each other, but when they're nicely balanced, you have a society that functions pretty well.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. So extremes, conservative concerns are legitimate and important. Right. Liberal concerns, ditto. But when one or the other runs everything, it's a disaster. Right. So that's so just. And there's a genetic component to political belief, Right? It's adaptive. There's literally liberal and conservative genetics involved. Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Wait, wait, elaborate. I'm sorry.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. 60% of the variance in political opinion is genetic. And they know this from twin studies. So they look at identical twins and fraternal twins that are raised separately. And the identical twins are far more likely to share political belief, even though they're raised in separate families, separate parts of the country, than the fraternal twins that don't share genetic material in the same way. It's wild. But if you think how evolution works, it reinforces adaptive behaviors. So conservative concerns are adaptive. They keep us safe in a hostile world, et cetera, et cetera. They're informed by hierarchy, by stability, all that stuff, right? Liberal concerns, ditto. They're less worried about the enemies, but they're more worried about, listen, we need equality here. We need some justice. We need a fair society or we're gonna split in half and then both sides will be more vulnerable. So when you get the two together, it works very well. And so the idea that there's a genetic basis for these two basic worldviews makes perfect sense and is divided 50, 50 in our society. Right? So when liberals say that conservatives are, you know, like, shouldn't exist and blah, blah, blah, you're wrong. This is genetically encoded. And ditto for the conserv. Conservatives, like, stop screeching about the liberals like they shouldn't exist. You need those people to keep society at least somewhat fair. And we need the concern, the liberals need the conservatives to keep society at least somewhat safe. Right? And you get them together. That's how it's always worked. Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

What do you think about more people moving towards being an independent and going in a case by case? Well, you know, those candidate by candidate, those.

[Sebastian Junger]

I mean, those categories are a function of our political system. Right? But the sort of basic liberal and conservative ethos, the basic concerns, what worries you most? Right? A lot of liberals who say, what worries me most is that the country is gonna fracture. It's gonna fall apart because of injustice and inequality and blah, blah, blah, Right? And you say to a conservative, what worries you most? And you're like, immigration, the Chinese, you know, like, whatever. And you're like, God bless everybody. Right? We need both of those concerns fully, you know, like, fully developed and addressed. They're both serious threats to our country.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay. That makes perfect sense. I have a question specifically, and I wonder, your thoughts on this, Tulsi Gabbard. I personally am a fan. I've actually never met her, but she has struck me, struck a chord for me for a few different reasons. She's a combat veteran, and she did what I have often questioned if I could do. So I admire that about her. And she was actually. She came from a family that it was not okay to be gay. She's obviously not gay, but she did a complete 180 on her position about gay marriage, gay rights, and did this when her family and her religious background was rooted in that. And somehow we've forgiven the entire Democratic Party that was anti gay marriage. It's like, oh, everybody evolved. But now that she's been forced onto the other side, people are trying to weaponize that against her. And she did it in a very authentic way very early on and struggled with going against things that were in her DNA. Literally, she's turned around and tried to, as far as I can tell, explain the NATO piece of that conflict you and I were talking about, and has sat down with guys like Assad on a fact finding mission to see what it would require to bring peace. This is out of her own mouth. It wasn't secret. Nothing was secret. And now it's like, oh, we don't do that. And here's my question. So now Tabling Tulsi Gabbard, having seen what you've seen, Reagan sat with Gorbachev, Kennedy sat with Khrushchev, Trump has sat with Kim Jong Un. What do you think about that? Cause you've watched people die in these situations. Would you do anything to stop it? Or am I just kind of like the mom that doesn't want her 12 year old going to war at any point ever over anything?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I mean, look, Trump sat down with the Taliban and negotiated with them and negotiated a peace. Right? I mean, these are the people that supported the people who killed 3,000 people on 9 11. Right. So the truth is in the world, like you're gonna either talk to them or fight them. And that's just a human truth. You're not willing to talk to someone, you may have to fight them. Right. So what are you gonna do? I think there are people who have transgressed so grossly, so grotesquely Hitler that you're just, what are you going to talk about?

[Jillian Michaels]

Right, right.

[Sebastian Junger]

What's some, what middle ground are you imagining with Hitler where you can sort of live with a bit of what he's about and stop the war? Like, I, I don't know, I'm not there. Right, you know.

[Jillian Michaels]

Right, yeah, that makes perfect sense. It's a continuum is what you're saying.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. And so, you know, Assad's a freaking war criminal. Right. And, and, but should we talk to war criminals to try to improve the lot of humans in that part of the world? If you're concerned about human suffering, and if you think that conversation will help. Yeah, you might have to. People talk to war criminals all the time. Right. I mean, Netanyahu has just been indicted by the icc. Right. He's been charged with being a war criminal. Right. Would we talk with Netanyahu trying to promote a ceasefire deal, a peace in Gaza? Of course we would. Right, right. So, you know, I don't know what she said to Assad.

[Jillian Michaels]

So I literally said a fact finding mission and talk to both sides, everybody involved trying to figure out what it would require for it to end. And I know a little bit about that because I have Syrian ancestry on my father's side. I remember these children washing up on the beach. It made me go work for the unhcr, which at the United Nations. I'm sorry, the United Nations Refugee Agency. They ended up sending me to South Sudan because they had much bigger celebrities working on Syria. Like, we've got, you know, Ben Stiller and Angelina Jolie. If you want to go to South Sudan. I was like, all right, I'll go to South Sudan. But something. It's interesting because I am drawn to trying to find a path to peace. Peace always. Especially when I'm not the one doing the fighting.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Jillian Michaels]

But you make this like a completely different perspective of being the one that was out there, being the one that would have had to go in and did go and did risk your life to cover these stories and tell these tales and make sure the world knew what was going on and humanizing these conflicts for people so it wasn't somebody else's kid dying on the other side of the world. And, you know, it's like, you brought.

[Sebastian Junger]

Up, I think what you. I mean, talking to people can help, and so it should be done. But I think what we want to make sure we don't do is be an apologist for criminal behavior.

[Jillian Michaels]

Of course. Right.

[Sebastian Junger]

Putin is a regime that has invaded and diminished border country after border country.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Sebastian Junger]

Have you ever spotted McDonald's hot crispy fries right as they're being Scooped into the carton and time just stands still, right? I mean, just ask the Georgians, ask the Moldovans, right. Ask the Chechens, right? I mean, this has been going on for a long time and the west has never done anything, right? And so, yes, that might be true about NATO and, you know, I get it. But if you look at his history, a history that the west did not respond to, right. Finally, when he says, okay, we're going to take over Ukraine, 40 million people on the border of Europe, right. That we would sort of not respond to, that isn't realistic. And even if we made some miscalculations in our strategy or did some stupid things in our strategy, at the end of the day, Putin decided to invade a fledgling democracy with 300,000 men, right? And the way those soldiers acted in Ukraine is unspeakable, Right? I mean, there was mass torture and executions and all this ghastly stuff, right? So you have to acknowledge that when you talk about NATO transgressions, yeah, we may have transgressed in our signaling, right. But we didn't invade another country with 300,000 men. Right. Like that. We didn't do that. And, you know, the problem with some of the America's mistakes is that I think Putin could legitimately say, yes, you did, you invaded Iraq. Right. I mean, you know, so that, you know, and I was against the Iraq war and I didn't cover it for that reason. I didn't think I could be objective, Right. I don't think Putin would say that about Afghanistan. I think he probably understood. I mean, even in Iran, I mean, apparently after 9 11, there was a moment of silence in a soccer stadium during a soccer game for the victims of 9 11, immediately after. Right. And I don't, you know, I think Iran, when we went into, when we went into Afghanistan to, you know, corner and kill Al Qaeda, I think Iran was like, yeah, we get it. Like, of course you would. Why wouldn't you? Iraq was a different matter, Right? So that's the, you know, you. I put Ukraine in that category of like, what, you invaded a, a sovereign country, like, on a pretext, like, come on.

[Jillian Michaels]

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[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I. Okay, so I didn't, medically, I didn't die. I was extremely close My heart did not stop beating. Okay, Right. So. And even when that does, obviously it takes a while for you to irreversibly die. Right? I mean, you can be brought after, you know, your heart stops, you can be brought back. But so, so what happened was I, you know, I was a war reporter for a long time. After my friend and brother and colleague Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya, I stopped war reporting. And eventually I got married. I had a family and I sort of turned away from. I want to turn towards life. Right. I mean, I turned. I was like, now I'm so ironic.

[Jillian Michaels]

You appreciate, obviously.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah, no, it's. Right. I'm in my 50s, I'm an older dad, and this is all I want is to have now, to have a family. I, I slid into home base. As far as I was concerned. I was almost killed several times, of course. And I was like, I'm done with that. The drama of that was amazing. Way to spend 20 years. But so. And I'm a healthy person. I was a marathon runner when I was young. I'm not a walking heart attack. I've lived a pretty good life, medically speaking, like, you know, whatever I'm like. And so it was during COVID and we were in a very. We were living in Massachusetts in a remote house at the end of a dead end dirt road in the woods. No cell phone coverage, the landlines were old and when it rained they didn't work because they would short out. It was basically paradise, right? And surrounded by, Surrounded by woods.

[Jillian Michaels]

Flip phones on crack.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, exactly. And, and one day we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who lived up the road. And, and my, my wife and I walked off into the woods down this little path to a post and little post and beam cabin that I'd built a couple of years earlier overlooking this little lake, an oil lamp, totally off the grid, wood stove, like the most beautiful place in the world, right? And so just because we had a couple of hours to ourselves, we walked out to this little sanctuary. And I always thought of death as very dramatic. I've been blown up by a roadside bomb. I've had bullets hit next to my head. And it was. Stand back. The really terrifying thing about death is that it can be so casual, so offhand, so ordinary, so mundane, right? And so in mid sentence with my wife in the most beautiful place in the world, right, I felt a funny pain in my abdomen that was me starting to die, right. As a healthy 58 year old. And I didn't know. Right? I was like, oh, what's that? Right. And so it was sort of indigestion plus. Right. I mean, it wasn't agonizing, but I was like, damn, that is weird. So I stood up to try to sort of walk it out, and the floor just went reeling away from me, and I almost fell over, and I sat back down and I said to my wife, I think I'm gonna need some help. You know? Words I never thought I'd ever have to say. Right. And the problem. What was going on, I didn't know this, thank God, is that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, which is super rare. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. You know, it's not cholesterol, it's not clogged arteries. It's a totally random structural problem. It's a plumbing problem. Right? And in my case, super rare. And aneurysms will grow for decades. Slowly, slowly get bigger and bigger. The artery wall gets stretched and stretched. They're undetectable, usually asymptomatic. And then eventually they'll burst and you will start bleeding out into your own abdomen. Right. If someone stabs you in the stomach, a you know what happened, you know what's wrong. And the doctors know where to stick their finger to plug the leak. Like, that's, you know, you're doing well at that point. Right. With internal hemorrhage, no one knows where it is. It could be anywhere in your abdomen. Right. So I was losing a pint of blood every. Every 10 or 15 minutes into my own abdomen. Right. And I was just gushing blood internally. And, you know, there's 10 pints of blood in the human body.

[Jillian Michaels]

I was going to ask you. I couldn't remember that.

[Sebastian Junger]

Ten pints of blood in the human body and you can lose about half before you die. I'm losing a pint every 10 or 15 minutes, I'm guessing. Right. And we live an hour from the hospital, so you can do the math. Like, I was literally a human hourglass. I didn't know that. Thank God. So I got my hand over my wife's shoulder. She put her arm around my waist. She dragged me out of the cabin through the woods, got me to the. To the car in the dirt driveway, put me in the passenger seat, ran in and told the babysitters, who were like 13 and 15. Right. Said something wrong with Sebastian. Can you call 91 1? The phone lines were out because it had been Raining. So this girl got one bar of signal at one particular spot in the driveway. She got one bar of signal and called the ambulance. So my wife is meanwhile with me, holding my hand and watching me go in and out of consciousness. And every time I go, every time I sort of pass out, she thinks, that's it, he's not coming back. And I come back, she's like, stay with me, stay with me. Eventually the ambulance got there and they took me. We started out on the long drive, and now I'm feeling a little bit better because I've gone into something called compensatory shock. Your body kind of rallies and clamps down on everything and hoards the blood that you still have in your chest, in your brain, where it's needed, and so you sort of feel a little bit better. So I'm like, damn, maybe I shouldn't go to the hospital. It's going to waste a whole day. I'm thinking like that, right? And my tummy still hurt. My tummy hurts, right? But I'm like, no, who goes to the hospital for a tummy ache? Like, come on.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's what's so crazy about stuff like this is. I had a back injury that was actually severe, but I was like, it was a spasmed muscle. It was like a fractured vertebrae and three herniated discs. But it just. Your brain doesn't put it together that it could be something this crazy.

[Sebastian Junger]

And, you know, there's a famous statistic that married men live longer than unmarried men. And this is why, right? Because it was my wife who said, he's going to the hospital.

[Jillian Michaels]

Wow.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right? Don't listen to him. He's not doing well. Take him to the hospital. Because the paramedics, both men were like, oh, he seems pretty good, maybe just dehydrated. It's a hot day. And she's like, no, take him to the hospital. I made it within 10 minutes of dying. Like, had she not done that, I'd be dead, right? So I got there, an hour later, I make. I hold on, make it to the hospital. As soon as I get there, I just go off a cliff. Medically, I go into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I. I'm convulsing. I'm so hypothermic, my blood pressure is 60 over 40. I mean, I'm like running on fumes, right? I'm probably 10 minutes, 15 minutes from cardiac arrest and death. And they rush me. The doctors know immediately what's going on. They rush me into the trauma bay. And this doctor comes up to me with this big needle. He says, I want to insert this through your neck into your jugular to transfuse you, to give you blood, right? And, you know, it doesn't look like it's going to be a whole lot of fun to do this. And so I said, do you mean in case there's an emergency? He said, this is the emergency. I just did not get it. I had no idea. And so they're prepping my neck, and I'm lying in the trauma bay. I'm lying down, and so I have to pause and say, I'm an atheist. And I'm not an atheist, but kind of like mystical or spiritual. I'm none of those things. I'm nothing. I'm truly nothing. And my father, who has been dead eight years at this point, was an atheist and a physicist, which is like an atheist squared, right? So I'm lying there, and all of a sudden, underneath me, I sense this black pit open up, like this portal to the abyss, right? And it's terrifying, and it's pulling me in, right? And I don't know, I'm dying, but I have this animal sense, like, if you go into the infinitely black pit, you're not coming out. Do not go in there. Do not go in there. But I'm getting pulled into it, and I'm starting to panic. And then suddenly, above me, slightly to my left above me, is my father, my dead father in this sort of weird energy form, like his essence is right there above me. And he's communicating with me. And I'm shocked to see him, right? Like, what are you doing up there? Like, what? And he communicates to me. It's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. I'm like, go with you? You're dead. Like, I'm alive. The party's over here. Why would I want to go with you? I'm just in for belly pain. I think you got the wrong idea of what's going on here, right? And I said to the doctor, you gotta hurry. I'm going.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh, my God.

[Sebastian Junger]

I knew I was being taken. I didn't know where, but I knew I was being taken. I wouldn't come back, right? I said, you gotta hurry. You're losing me. So they brought me into the interventional radiology suite, and using catheters through your groin, you can get anywhere in your body with catheters right through your venous system. And interventional radiology is this Sort of miracle, right? It's sort of magic. They put you on a fluoroscope, which is like real time X ray video, and they can thread these things through your body and they can just maneuver them anywhere in your body, right? It's like, okay, here's a map of the interstates. Where do you want to go in the United States? Like, that's your vascular system, right? And you know, I wasn't sedated because my vital signs were too low. So I'm conscious for all this. I'm in incredible pain. And for the next hours they tried to save my life and they couldn't do it. And I remember, like at 1 in the morning, and I'm in incredible pain. I remember at one in the morning, right? Like lately, like, what transfusions have they.

[Jillian Michaels]

Given you at this point? Because it was like, thank God they didn't run out of the blood. I remember this.

[Sebastian Junger]

Eventually it was 10 years units of blood that I needed, like a full body's worth of blood, like a full oil change, basically. So late, early hours of that morning, you know, one in the morning or something, I remember the doctor saying, well, we tried, like, we can't, we can't, we can't do it. And what that meant, I didn't know this, but I mean, I was shocked. I mean, it was at that moment I was like, I finally got it. Like, I might die. They might not have an answer. Whatever this is, they might not have an answer for it. What that moment was, was if you don't go, if interventional radiology doesn't work, they send you into the OR and they try a last ditch attempt to save your life, which is they open up your abdomen and they start looking for the ruptured blood vessel. They push your organs aside and they start looking for the ruptured blood vessel before you bleed out. And the outcomes are so bad. I mean, sometimes it works, but the outcomes are so bad that the doctors said, we would have brought your wife in to say goodbye before doing. If we'd had to do that, right. Meanwhile, she's gotten to the hospital, right? And she was called to come to the hospital. And she knew what that meant.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yep.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. But then they went through my left wrist that somehow fixed the pro. They figured it out.

[Jillian Michaels]

Some special guy that wasn't supposed to be there though, right?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Dr. Dombrowski. Phil Dombrowski. So he would. So he.

[Jillian Michaels]

And like everyone was like, it's not gonna work.

[Sebastian Junger]

He was at the forefront of developing interventional radiology 30 years ago. And he just happens to live near the hospital where I was on Cape Cod. And they called him from dinner. He's like, Dr. Dombrowski, there's someone who needs you. He's. You know, he's an abdominal hemorrhage. And we need. You know, so he drove an hour, you know, in the evening to come save my life. And they managed. They managed to do it. And, you know, and the next thing I'm. The next thing I know, I'm in this sort of vast darkness, and I hear this voice, you know, a century later is what it felt like, right? I hear this voice. It's a woman speaking, and she's got a really intense Boston accent. And I'm like, where am I? What is going on? And I'm in the icu, and it's the voice of a nurse.

[Jillian Michaels]

There was a moment that you talked about, and I think this was the dream that you had the night before this happened where you were over your family and they couldn't see you.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So what. You know, one of the.

[Jillian Michaels]

It was like a foreshadowing. Forgive me. I read the book in June, and it's December, and I didn't refresh. Cause I wanted to kind of re. Remember it as the audience was watching it. But I remember that so clearly. And it was deeply disturbing.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. I mean, what. Yeah, it was. So for me, as a rationalist, I mean, what I say in the book is the problem with rationality, which is a very powerful tool, Right. The problem with rationality is that things keep happening that you can't explain. And this is one of them, right. I mean, I might be able to explain the vision of my father as a dying hallucination, you know, whatever. That explanation has problems. But I can sort of imagine proposing that. Right. And hoping that you'll buy it. Right? But the dream, the predictive dream is a different matter. And so. And this is what happened. It was 36 hours before. So it was just before dawn on the morning prior to the day that I almost died. That I was supposed to die, really. Right? And I was. I'm there, and I'm looking down on my family, and they're below me, and they're crying, and they're crying about me, and I don't understand why. And I'm sort of waving my hand. I'm shouting to them. So my little girls are three years old and six months old at this point, and my wife is with. And so they're. And I'm trying to communicate with them like I'm Here, I'm here, I'm here. And they can't hear me, they can't see me, and I don't know why. And then I'm made to understand I'm above them, right? And then I'm made to understand that they can't hear me or see me because I'm dead, I'm a spirit, and that I'm headed out like this is it, there's no going back. And the sense that I had was I was on this enormous orbit out into the darkness and I was leaving them, like in this orbit. I was never coming back. It was too big an orbit. I would never see them again. And it was an orbit in the sort of infinite darkness. Right. And that's just what was happening. Sorry. Right. And I was so racked with anguish and just remorse and like, oh my God. I mean, and it woke me up and suddenly I'm in the bed when we co sleep. So with my. The four of us, the two girls and my wife and me, and it's just before dawn, I'm like, oh my God, thank God that was a dream. Because it felt real. It felt like it was happening, right? That was a dream. Thank God it was real. Well, that's what's so strange about it, right? Yeah, it was predictive. And so I got quite neurotic afterwards because I started to read a lot about NDEs. Near death experiences, all transparency.

[Jillian Michaels]

I'm fascinated. And I've spent years reading about them.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. And I didn't know anything about them, so I started reading about them after I came home from the hospital. And I came home very shaken up. I mean, imagine, right? I mean, and. But I thought the hard part's over with, right? I survived. Here I am back with my family. Why am I crying so, so hard? You know, like. And then I started researching NDEs because I was curious about what happened. And I realized that that dream, I mean, NDEs, they're not near death experiences because anybody is.

[Jillian Michaels]

Not anybody who's not as avid of a content devourer on this topic as us at this point.

[Sebastian Junger]

But they're not like an inf. They're not an infinite, a variety of NDEs, right? There's like three or four basic buckets that they fall into. One is the dead showing up to receive the dying, which is what happened to me with my dad. And another really common form that they take is that you're hovering over your loved ones, over your body, over the doctors, you're sort of above them and going out, right? And So I researched this. I'm like, oh, my God, that dream was a classic NDE, except I knew nothing about NDEs. And had someone told me about NDEs, I'd be like, oh, that's nonsense. Like, come on, don't come at me with that. That's ridiculous. Right? And I had this fear. I was like, oh, my God. Maybe. Maybe that was my experience of actually dying. Maybe I died in my.

[Jillian Michaels]

When I read it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, maybe I died in my sleep.

[Jillian Michaels]

That's what I thought.

[Sebastian Junger]

Maybe. Maybe everything since then, or like you.

[Jillian Michaels]

The time being relative with, you know, you being related to physicists, maybe it was a glimpse of that moment in time or something.

[Sebastian Junger]

A different reality, a parallel reality. I mean, I didn't, you know, and so I'm asking questions that in some ways sounded very flaky to me, right? But I'm like, how did I. How did I know? Like, how what? And. And so I had this fear that. That everything now was actually a dying hallucination, that I wasn't. And I wasn't alive. Right. Or that there are multiple dimensions, multiple realities, and that I had actually died in a different one. And that's what that dream was.

[Jillian Michaels]

You think so?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, no, I don't. I mean, these are questions I was asking myself, right. I didn't. I don't think so. But what I was worried about was that there was some other reality where. Where. Where my wife and children were grieving me.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yes.

[Sebastian Junger]

I was like, how do I get over to that reality to say to them, listen, there's another reality over here where I made it and we're all together and we're all okay, just so that you know. Right. And I just drove myself into a kind of madness around this. And so what I was experiencing is called derealization. And it's a product of trauma. It's a known thing, and a lot of people who almost die. I just talked to a guy last night. I did a reading at Vrooman's, and this guy came up to me. He'd had a kidney transplant. And he said, you know, this is years earlier. And he said, I still don't entirely believe that I survived. I think this all might be an illusion. Right? So it's a common. After the trauma of this, it's a common terror, right? And I eventually got the help I needed and climbed out of this pit. But it was quite a pit. I mean, I was very, very neurotic, very anxious, very panicky, extremely depressed. Like, I was not of. I was a semi functional person. For quite a while.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah. Especially. Cause it's like, as you're saying, you've got both the girls, your wife, and they're both young. And I often say this.

[Sebastian Junger]

I live.

[Jillian Michaels]

Had a great life. I've had a great life. I'm lucky. I could go tomorrow and be super lucky. But I gotta get the kids. I've got to get my kids.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

Somewhat to a point where.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

My wife's like, what about me? I'm like, it'll be okay. I'll leave the house. You're young, you meet someone else, but it's, you know. And you go on this journey in the book researching these things. And I'll tell you what struck me, is that everything you talk about in the book or things that I had sort of investigated and looked into, and it's these. Oh, there's just a handful of these experiences, and the similarities are staggering.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yep, yep.

[Jillian Michaels]

What do you make of that?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, yeah, okay, so there's.

[Jillian Michaels]

As an atheist.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

And the son of a. That fellow physicist.

[Sebastian Junger]

So there's. So my favorite baseball team are the Rationalists. Right. Like, every time they play, they defeat the opponent. Right. I mean, I love watching the rational mind in action. It almost always wins. Right. And so deeply satisfying process to sort of. For me to, like, participate in or listen to. So when I researched NDEs, there are thousands of cases of this. They're all quite similar. They're all very compelling. They all make you think, well, maybe there is something. You know, maybe we don't have to worry. Like, it's tempting. Right. And I fell for that temptation a little bit. Right. And then I read the rebuttal, the sort of rational rebuttal to all this. I was like, oh, well, nice try, but clearly the neurochemistry can explain this low blood oxygen. You know, there's various sort of explanations involving biology and neurology. They explained an awful lot of this. The light at the end of the tunnel. I mean, people who are pilots, who are put in human centrifug to be subjected to high G forces, experience exactly that. Right. They don't have enough blood in their brain. And they see a light at the end of a tunnel. It's like, all right, I got it. Most of this, I feel like, can be explained through sort of rational medical terms. It's not evidence of an afterlife. It's evidence of a struggling brain that's dying and it's going through these changes. Right, I get it. Right. Except for one thing. Right. And so one of the things, important thing about skepticism and rationality is that you have to apply skepticism to skepticism. You have to apply rational analysis to rationality. Right. It should be done to itself as well. Right. So for me, the thing that sticks out, and I'm agnostic on this, I'm not going to say there is or isn't anything, right? But for me, this is the question, this is the conversation. If you give a room full of people lsd, they will all hallucinate. There's no mystery why. But they don't all hallucinate the same thing, right? The strange thing about dying is that the dying see the dead. They have remarkably similar experiences on the threshold. Identical? No, but very, very similar. It happens in societies all over the world throughout history. The consistency is remarkable. And so what I don't understand, I understand urologists say, oh, we know why dying people hallucinate. Of course they do. Their brains under a lot of stress, et cetera, neurotransmitters, all, you know, stuff I don't even quite understand, what no one has explained is why they all see the dead. Even dead people that they didn't know had died because the person had just died. Right?

[Jillian Michaels]

Yes. I've read two of those experiences. Julian, Michael, I feel like we should tell people this, this fun story. So there's a researcher. I'm wondering if we're talking about the same thing. I imagine we might be because there aren't many cases of this. But there's one guy who's dedicated his life to researching this. And there was a boy in the hospital and he has a near death experience and he sees one of the nurses there and she tells him, you have to go back. Tell my parents I love them and I'm sorry. He wakes up, the nurse had the weekend off, her parents had given her a car for her birthday, crashes the car and dies. There was no way he could have known.

[Sebastian Junger]

I mean, listen, I talked to a woman who was in a coma for four months and her stepfather, who she loved, who had died, came to her while she was in a coma. There's only two things she remembers. Her stepfather came to her, right? And weirdly, because she wasn't a basketball fan, Kobe Bryant came to her, right? And so when they got her out of the coma after four months and she said, you know, the only thing I remember is my stepfather, I just talked to this woman a few weeks ago. She came to a reading that I did and she told me the story and she said, and Kobe Bryant, of all people, like she didn't care about Kobe Bryant and, and he had died while she was in a coma. She had no idea. I mean, she had no idea. Right. Does that prove there's an afterlife? No, but it does raise some powerful questions. And so the rationalist response to this, to like why the dying see the dead is like, well, clearly these people are scared. Even if they're unconscious, they're unconsciously scared. Their body knows what's happening and they're projecting a comforting image, right, of the sort of afterlife. So they have a receptive place to go. They're trying, they're self soothing coping mechanism, Right, Exactly. Problem with that, to be skeptical about skepticism, right? The problem with that is that if this is happening to people who are unconscious, if it's happening all over the world, people who are in extreme duress, you're talking about very deep structures in the brain, right? You're talking about things that are really, really hardwired and come out. Not because we're choosing to project, oh, I miss my girlfriend, I'm going to imagine her, right? That's a cognitive process. These are really, really deeply rooted behaviors. And those behaviors are a product of evolution of natural selection. So the question would be, for people proposing that, the skeptical question would be how would that work in terms of evolution? Like, evolution rewards behaviors that either lead to reproduction, higher reproductive rates or higher survival rates. But we're talking about a situation where you're minutes or hours from dying, you're not going to reproduce and you're not even going to survive. We're talking about dying here. So how does evolution doesn't care if you're scared when you die? It doesn't give a shit, right? Like how would evolution shape the human brain in such a way that we produce, unconsciously produce comforting images when there's no evolutionary reward for doing so? It doesn't work, right? So finally for me, because the $10,000 question is, so what's going on? What's going on here? Right? I don't think it's all neurochemistry, right? But I also, I am still an atheist and I don't believe the sort of God explanation for all this. And this sort of like cliched idea of an afterlife where we just continue on as we are unencumbered by our bodies and by anything unpleasant. Like I just don't believe, like it's a fairy tale, right? But in the realm of quantum physics, there are some profound questions about the nature of consciousness, whether consciousness is collective or individual, right? Yes. The very, very strange and mysterious fact that a subatomic particle can be in two places simultaneously. There are great, great mysteries in the quantum world and not mysteries that are like spiritual and supernatural. Right. These are things that you can do in a lab and you can say, this makes no sense.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah. This little particle was in. What is it? Superposition. It was everywhere, all at the same time until we observed it and it collapsed into one reality. And that's proven right.

[Sebastian Junger]

And those entangled particles can communicate information faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible, but we've shown it to be possible, and we don't know why. So the book. Basically, I sort of walk people through all of this stuff. And it's a short book, right? It's not a long book. It's 180 pages.

[Jillian Michaels]

I wrote a book, and you narrated me through it. I listened to it as I was driving through Europe. It's such an awesome read. I mean, obviously, go get the book. We can't tell you everything.

[Sebastian Junger]

Thank you.

[Jillian Michaels]

But I was like, get me Sebastian Younger. Must speak with him. Because it's so. Just incredibly compelling and emotional and moving and thoughtful and I'm not letting you go just yet.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, I'm good. I'm good.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah. I'm wondering, you know, you spoke about the way your father communicated to you was almost like a transmission, like a knowing. A mind reading. And I must admit that I also have grew up for years as an atheist. And I was very close with my grandmother. I lost her when I was 10 years old. And we had this pact, like, if I can come back, I'll come back years. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And I was like, okay, this is just it. This is just over so I can have. And I never even dreamed of her. Nothing. And I was like, my God, she's not even in my dreams. 27. I'm going through a really hard time. And I'm in my mom's. My mom's house. In a dream, following my mom down this hallway, my mom kind of peels off down this hallway, and there's a woman putting things away in my mom's room. I keep walking, and she turns around, and it's my grandmother Sebastian. I mean, it's crystal clear, like, I love you. But even the way she penciled on her eyebrows. And I immediately break into tears. And she begins kind of communicating all of these different things to me, but she's not talking. I can hear her, but she's not talking. And one of the things that I was able to hold onto when I woke up was it was the thing that you were trying to tell your family in the dream of like, I know I'm like, we see each other every day. And it wasn't, I'm always with you. It was something. And I didn't understand the potential of parallel universes at this time. It was 22 years, 20, however many years ago. But it was something to the effect of like, we're doing this all the time together.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. It's okay, but you just don't realize it. Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yes.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

And I didn't know what she meant at the time, but now.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. And you know, and there's a credible, you know, conversation among physicists about is consciousness, which is something we can't even can define. Right. But it's core to our existence. Is it part of the entire physical universe the way gravity is? Right. And does it determine the nature of the physical universe the way gravity does? Right. And it's a legitimate question. And Schrodinger, who was connected to my family in some nefarious ways a long time ago, and one of the fathers of quantum physics, his belief, for what it's worth, his opinion was that consciousness, that there was a universal consciousness that we're all a tiny bit part of. And so that might, if, if that's true, that when we die, our individual consciousness might return to the universal consciousness. And is that some of these weird mysteries of ghosts and telepathy and dreams and near death experience, is it all part of one basic fact that we cannot comprehend, which is that the entire universe is connected to itself and all of us are connected to each other and to the universe in ways that we just will never understand. But is that what's behind the veil and we'll just never see it?

[Jillian Michaels]

I tend to think so. And I don't know why, I can't tell if it's. But it's always felt very organic to me. I haven't done any sort of heroic dose of psychedelics yet, but I've heard this. I don't know if you have, but they, they'll give, researchers will give people who have terminal cancer.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Psychedelics, and it brings them some sort of peace because they feel as they.

[Sebastian Junger]

Realize they're part of something. Yeah, yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

And it's this universal feeling.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right. And it's the point, you know, it's the point of religions. I mean, there's sort of loss of ego that comes with religious revelation, with enlightenment. It all involves not a consolidation of ego, but a loss of ego, which, I mean, you think about how important ego is in leading Our lives and making things happen that we need to make happen all these years. Our ego. I don't mean egotistical, I mean just our ego, our sort of central identity and concern. It's crucial to our survival, right? And so why would enlightenment mean the loss of ego? That's sort of counterintuitive. But in fact, all over the world, religious epiphanies and drug trips and near death experiences and all these extraordinary things all have this one thing in common, which is an ecstatic loss of ego. And that is what Schrodinger in his way was sort of proposing about cautiousness. Yeah. You die and you become part of all things, Right? So if I can tell a brief anecdote, please.

[Jillian Michaels]

Oh my God, please.

[Sebastian Junger]

So it's not in the book, but I read this after I finished the book and it's about Dostoevsky, the writer. And so when he was in his 20s, he was like a young radical, right? He had some buddies that he would sit around and talk about radical things with. I think it was called the Petrovsky Circle and among other things, liberating the serfs.

[Jillian Michaels]

Could you imagine being a fly on that wall?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Oh yeah.

[Jillian Michaels]

So cool.

[Sebastian Junger]

In the 1840s, liberate the serfs. They told heresy in czarist Russia, right? So eventually the czar was like, enough of this and had them rounded up and arrested and thrown in prison. Prison. Him and Dostoevsky and his buddies. Like six guys, six young guys in their 20s, right? And they spent eight months in prison. And it wasn't a particularly serious crime, so they weren't particularly worried about it. Prison must have sucked. But eight months later, they're let out of their cells, loaded on into a carriage. They just assumed they were going to be driven to the courthouse and released to their families, right? And instead they were driven to a town, a city square, and tied to posts and found themselves in front of a firing squad. And they had just moments to make peace with the fact they were about to die. They're 25, 26 years old. And moments to make this adjustment. And the commands were given. Ready, aim. And at that moment, a rider galloped into the square and said, the Tsar forgives. It was all theater. It was a mock execution. Incredibly cruel, right? Two of the six men were insane for the rest of their lives. It broke them psychologically. But here's what Dostoevsky said about that moment before, what he thought would be his final moment in that ready, aim. What's the world look like to someone in that position? And it's like a drug trip. It's a completely hallucinatory vision. And so what he said he saw, he said he looked out beyond the firing squad in the distance and he saw sunlight glinting off a church steeple. And he had the thought, in moments, I'm going to become part of the sunlight. I'm going to become part of all things. He had the exact same vision of unity, of rejoining of this earth, of infinite expansion into the colossus of the universe. He had the exact same vision in that terrible moment that people have on drug trips and near death experiences and religious epiphanies and all this, ah, finally, I'm part of everything. Right. And does that show something unique about the human brain's neurology or does it show something unique about the universe that we just don't get? I mean, I don't know.

[Jillian Michaels]

I think it's the latter.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, it might be. I mean, it is.

[Jillian Michaels]

And I think, you know what else was so interesting to me about in my time of dying? Is that because your family, you come from this family of physicists and your father was genius scientist and, you know, which has made you an atheist because that's what intelligent people do. And I, you know, I get it, but yet I'll never forget, and I don't know if I ever misinterpreted this, but when Einstein was like, if I could just know all this stuff, then I would know the mind of God. And that to me was church. It was like understanding the way this stuff works. That was my religion. And it didn't take me to a place of thinking. Oh, yeah, so it's all nothing. It took me to a place of thinking. It's just so big, we don't get it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right. And yeah, and when I have conversations with people who believe in God, we talk about this. I'll talk about the idea of universal consciousness, which is an idea that comes out of the work of physicists. Right. It's not a spiritual conversation, it's a scientific one. Right. But, but what they will say, one person said to me was, well, maybe universal consciousness is God. Right. And so my answer was like, well, that's a semantic battle. Right? Like just changing the wording doesn't change what it is. If you want to call universal consciousness God, go ahead. That's a fine word to use. Right. But it doesn't sort of get you out of, out of the trap, right? Because like, where does God come from? Or where does the universe come from?

[Jillian Michaels]

Chicken and an egg.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Right. So I call it what you want. You want to call it God. That's fine. God being different from religion. Right? And religion is, you know, has. It has its complications and issues. The concept of God, fine. If that's your word for universal consciousness, and that's what you think is going on, great. You believe in God. It's just not a choice that I make.

[Jillian Michaels]

So after having been through everything you've been through, and again, like, forgive me for being a little woo woo on here, but it's okay. It's not lost on me that somebody like you has had this experience. And I remember actually listening to you talk to Rogan about it. And you're like, I am a frigging atheist. I thought I was a scientist. Think of all the people in the world to be like you. The guy that was on the front lines of war, surfing alone and, you know, probably what was a small craft warning like you. Now it's like, no, you, buddy. And by the way, you happen to be the perfect person to tell the story.

[Sebastian Junger]

Let's mess with the atheist.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah, kinda. And the guy who has the ability to connect all these dots intellectually, the guy who's a journalist and a storyteller. Do you think there's something to that?

[Sebastian Junger]

If you mean a divine hand, kind of.

[Jillian Michaels]

Really?

[Sebastian Junger]

No, I don't.

[Jillian Michaels]

Okay.

[Sebastian Junger]

I mean, it's a nice story. In order to believe something to be true, I'd have to. Okay, this might be helpful. There's two things. There's stories and there's explanations. We need stories, right? We live potentially meaningless lives that end after 60 or 70 years of toil and trouble and pain. And to do that, psychologically, it's very hard. And we need stories that make us feel like it's for something, right? That there's a God, there's an afterlife. We're gonna be taken care of. Lead a good life and you'll be cared for by, you know, those are stories, right? And we need stories in order to. Psychologically, to get through what is a tough existence for many, many people. For everyone. Then there's explanations. Why do airplanes fly? Right? Not because God's hand keeps them aloft. Planes fly because there's something called an airfoil with enough thrust, there's lift and et cetera, Right? So that's an explanation. It's not a story. Right. You know, you're in the realm of explanations because you can test them, right? So gravity is an explanation for the behavior of objects, right? You can test it by throwing a rock out the window and it will fall towards the center of the earth. Right? That's how you test gravity. You're like, okay, that's an explanation, it's not a story. Right. Stories cannot be tested. Right. It doesn't mean that they're unnecessary or that they're not useful or helpful or beautiful or. It doesn't mean anything. It just means that they're not explanations. So when you say, was there a kind of divine hand that guided me towards this? I'm like, that's a nice story if you want it as an explanation for how I wound up doing this. You're going to have to devise a test that will show us that that is in fact what happened. What would that test look like? What would a test for God look like?

[Jillian Michaels]

I don't think we're given those tools because otherwise what's the whole point? Like, I tend to think as I search for meaning that, yes, I do think meaning is what you make it. You know, you bring a meaning to a suffering and a loss and a tragedy. It's like man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl. I get it. Something shitty happens and you better make that meaning out of it or die and live a devastated life. However, I can't help but think on some level only because I think I've also experienced it at certain times of like a knowing, a calling, a voice, a feeling, a weird dream that has similarities. Your story, like 1 in 10,000 people have a near death experience. I can't remember the number, but yeah, you had. Had all that, all that information is in your book. Get it? But, but I just, I don't know, I. I'll put it, I'll leave it with you. Here. This happened to you. How are you different? Because of.

[Sebastian Junger]

DID well, had I seen God instead of my father, I would believe in God.

[Jillian Michaels]

But you didn't technically die, you said.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, but regardless, I mean, it had the vision above me been a divine presence, I would have, I would be like, wow, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there is a divine force in the universe. But I saw my father, right? I mean, so a human, right? Now, his appearance and certainly the dream beforehand begs some questions about if we know anything about how the universe works. Which for me is a scientific question. Yes. Right.

[Jillian Michaels]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And I wasn't looking for a story about what happened to me. I was looking for an explanation about what happened to me. And one that maybe could be tested, right? So that I could trust it. Like I trust the theory of gravity, the law of gravity. Okay. So it opened my Mind to the possibility that we don't understand everything. In fact, we might understand very little of what's actually happening in the physical universe, right? But what it also did is change me emotionally. It changed me as a person, right? And it sort of made me. I mean, it's going to be so cliched, but it's sort of. It made me appreciative, right? I mean, life doesn't come into focus until death comes into focus. And when death comes into focus, you see life crystal clear, right? And I was an older dad. I have two daughters who I love above all things. I'm married to a wonderful woman. And it's possible, in the frustrations of daily life, to lose sight of what a miracle it is that you're living a good life, that you're with people you love and that you exist in the first place. It's very easy to lose sight of that when you're stuck in Traffic on the 405, right? So what I've learned to do is to love the Traffic on the 405 because it exists and because I exist and all of this exists. You know what I mean? Like, I've learned to do that. And I'm not Buddha, right? I mean, I'm perfectly capable of frustration and anger and all those sort of juvenile emotions that are understandable, right? But I'm able to rein them in, like, very, very quickly. And then the final thing, sometimes people ask me, did this experience make you less scared of death? No, it was terrifying, right? What made me less scared of death actually was something that my daughter said in the wake of all this, right? And I was sort of awake to the beauty of the world and of some of the things my children say because I'd almost died. So I'm not sensitive to this, this way of thinking. And so what she said, I mean, the wisdom of children, right? I mean, they see the world clearly. They see the world for what it is. Adults don't. They probably can't afford to, right? But children can and they do. And they're a source of unbelievable wisdom because of it. And at one point, I explained to my daughter a couple years ago, she was maybe five, I explained to my older daughter how the solar system works. I said, the Earth is a sphere and the sun's over here and everything. Gave her the basics, right? And she's.

[Jillian Michaels]

This goes around that. That goes around this, right? Exactly.

[Sebastian Junger]

So, you know, she's a smart little bean, and she chewed on that for a while and like a couple of days later, she Came back and she said, daddy, I know why there's night. I said, why is there night, sweetheart? And she said, so other people can have day, right? So after my heart finished melting, I thought, oh, I get it. I know why we die. So other people can live like the Earth. The universe cannot accommodate all of us forever. It's not possible. And if it were possible, it certainly wouldn't be desirable, right? So when we die, it's not something that's done to us. It's not something that's taken from us. It's this last act of generosity and love for our children and their generation. And parents will do anything for their children. And so if you think in terms of dying, you're dying for your child and their generation and for the future of the earth. When you think about it like that. So that they can enjoy this beautiful earth like we did. When you think about it like that, it's not a punishment, right? It's not a loss. It's an honor. It's an obligation and an honor, right? And this is my final act of love for you. I will be going now. Enjoy.

[Jillian Michaels]

Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn't?

[Sebastian Junger]

No. That was a pretty good conversation. Yeah. Thank you.

[Jillian Michaels]

What's next and where can everyone find you? And the book is everywhere, for goodness sake. I mean, where can we get the book everywhere? So where can we find you and what's next?

[Sebastian Junger]

Next? Well, my website is sebastianyounger.com J U N G R. You can get my books in bookstores, preferably, or on Amazon or what have you, or off my website. And I'm. I don't know what I'm working on next, actually. Like, I mean, I got my. I got two young children. This book was, you know, it depleted me in all kinds of ways. That's going to take a while to recharge. Magnificent. Thank you.

[Jillian Michaels]

He's a must read.

[Sebastian Junger]

Thank you.

[Jillian Michaels]

I've sent to like 10 different people.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, thank you so much.

[Jillian Michaels]

I think it moved me more than it moved you. We can end on that one. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels.