Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with_Sebastian Junger

Summary

Episode Summary: Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with Sebastian Junger

Released on May 26, 2025

Introduction

In this compelling episode of The MeatEater Podcast, host Steven Rinella engages in a profound conversation with Sebastian Junger, a renowned journalist, bestselling author, and documentary filmmaker. Junger shares his harrowing experiences as a war correspondent, explores the concept of dangerous work, and delves into his own near-death experience (NDE), offering listeners deep insights into human resilience and the mysteries of consciousness.

Background of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger is celebrated for his fearless reporting from battlefields as an embedded war correspondent and his exploration of human interactions with perilous environments. His notable works include the international bestseller The Perfect Storm, which inspired a major motion picture, and War, a detailed account of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Junger’s latest book, In My Time of Dying, examines his personal NDE and its implications on our understanding of life and consciousness.

Dangerous Work and Personal Injury

The conversation begins with Steven Rinella recounting a chainsaw injury Junger sustained while working as a tree climber. Junger describes the incident in detail:

[05:03] Sebastian Junger: "...I rappelled down to the ground. My crew took me to a sort of urgent care place and they sewed me up. But it got me limping for quite a while."

This injury sparked Junger’s interest in writing about dangerous occupations, highlighting the often-overlooked risks faced by workers in industries like logging and commercial fishing.

Journalism and War Correspondence

Junger reflects on his journey to becoming a war correspondent, emphasizing his purist approach to journalism—focusing solely on topics that deeply fascinate him without commercial considerations. He recounts his time in Sarajevo during the Bosnian Civil War and later with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan:

[19:33] Sebastian Junger: "...I was with Masood. Yes, I spent two months with him and his forces in Barakchan in 2000, in the fall of 2000..."

Junger’s dedication to immersing himself in conflict zones provides an authentic perspective on the lives of soldiers, moving beyond geopolitical debates to focus on personal experiences.

A Near-Death Experience (NDE)

A significant portion of the episode delves into Junger’s near-death experience. Five years prior, while at a remote property in Massachusetts during the COVID-19 pandemic, Junger suffered a sudden internal hemorrhage due to median arcuate ligament syndrome. He describes the onset of symptoms and his struggle to receive timely medical attention:

[49:00] Sebastian Junger: "I have a ligament in the wrong place... It has crushed the celiac artery... When it ruptured, I was suddenly bleeding out from an artery in my abdomen."

Despite his fitness, the initial medical assessment overlooked the severity of his condition due to his low heart rate masking the hemorrhage. Junger narrates the critical moments in the hospital, including an encounter with a nurse who offered profound advice:

[82:54] Sebastian Junger: "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred."

This interaction led Junger to explore the concept of sacredness in life’s pivotal moments, influencing his interpretation of his NDE.

Exploring Near-Death Experiences and Consciousness

Post-recovery, Junger researched NDEs extensively, questioning the consistency of visions across different individuals. He ponders the relationship between consciousness and reality, raising questions about the nature of consciousness and its potential existence beyond physical death:

[87:45] Sebastian Junger: "There's a proposal that consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe, like gravity is, and that our individual consciousness returns to that greater entity when we die."

Junger discusses the limitations of scientific explanations in fully accounting for the consistent elements of NDEs, such as seeing deceased loved ones, and contemplates the implications of quantum physics on our understanding of consciousness.

Impact on Personal and Professional Life

The NDE profoundly affected Junger’s worldview, intertwining his scientific rationalism with existential questions about life and death. He connects these reflections to his broader work on community and human connection, themes central to his book Tribe.

[84:58] Sebastian Junger: "Being a dad is what I'm doing. It's the center of my identity, my existence. And if I can get through to where they're okay, like, you know, I'm good."

Junger emphasizes the importance of human connections and community, both in his personal life and his professional endeavors, advocating for the preservation of societal unity amidst modern challenges.

Conclusion

Episode 708 of The MeatEater Podcast offers an in-depth and introspective dialogue between Steven Rinella and Sebastian Junger. Through recounting his own near-death experience and exploring broader themes of dangerous work, consciousness, and community, Junger provides listeners with a nuanced understanding of human resilience and the enduring quest to comprehend life’s ultimate mysteries.

Notable Quotes:

• Sebastian Junger [07:14]: "There are all these work in this country that the nation needs... and these people deserve some love, basically."
• Sebastian Junger [16:10]: "When I write about soldiers, they themselves were not thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just weren't thinking about it."
• Sebastian Junger [33:44]: "I wrote a book called Tribe, about that phenomenon."
• Sebastian Junger [82:54]: "Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred."
• Sebastian Junger [87:45]: "There's a proposal that consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe, like gravity is... we don't know."

Further Resources:

For more insights into Sebastian Junger’s work, visit his official website at SebastianJunger.com where you can explore his books and latest projects.

Transcript

[Steve Rinella]

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[Steve Rinella]

Steve Rinella here the American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Florence Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the west, unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores on Apple, Spotify, I Heart or wherever you get your podcast. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. This is the Me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, unawareless.

[Sebastian Junger]

The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

[Steve Rinella]

The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light. Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light.com f I R-S-T l I t e.com Good Lord. Joined today By Sebastian Younger. Journalist, best selling author, documentary filmmaker. He's reported from the battlefield as an embedded war correspondent. Written about humans interacting with dangerous jobs with the natural world. Long ago he had the huge international bestseller the Perfect Storm. He's written an outside magazine where I used to be a correspondent about many things. Whale hunters for one. Went on to do a ton of work about soldiers and the impacts of war. His latest book In My Time of Dying came out last year. It contemplates death and the afterlife after a near death experience. The paperback version, who knows? If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might have to wait indefinitely. Spring of 26, I would recommend going getting the hardcover. Other works from Sebastian include Fire Tribe. I mentioned Perfect Storm already. I remember seeing when that came out the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg after I read the book about a commercial sword fishing boat that never returned. So we're going to talk about his new book and also about his years as a war correspondent and a bunch of other stuff. Man, Sebastian, when you're the Perfect Storm came out. Yeah, dude, that hit me hard, like in a good way. But you know, one of the biggest things is I used to be a tree a climber for a tree service.

[Sebastian Junger]

Really?

[Steve Rinella]

And I know the story came out of that. That you were climbing.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

You were a tree service climber. Had a chainsaw injury.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

What was the chainsaw injury?

[Sebastian Junger]

So I was doing a ton of work and I was exhausted. The, the, my, the area I lived in had been hit by a hurricane.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, insurance work.

[Sebastian Junger]

I was just doing work for home homeowners that needed cheap tree work. And I was sort of a one man show. And sometimes they'd be actually holding the lowering line like the homeowner would be on the line, like that kind of thing. Right. But I was doing a ton of work. I was a good climber and I was exhausted and I, I was, I had, you know, I had a little climbing saw and I was working in a big elm and, and there was a little sucker that was like between my ankles, like sort of getting in the way, like a tiny little branch. Right. And I just reached down. I was in the flow, right. I mean I was sort of moving, right. And I would just reach down to zip it, this little sucker to sort of zip it so it wouldn't like tangle up my feet. And I was just sloppy and in a hurry and the tip of the bar hit the tree and popped up in the back of my ankle. And I wasn't spiking So I wasn't wearing big leather boots, right? Because I wasn't spiking the tree. It was a prune. And it just went right into the back of my ankle. And it didn't hurt, but I was like, something hit my ankle. The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw. I should just at least take a look to make sure I'm all right. And turned off the saw and clipped it onto my belt and. And pulled my pant leg up and sure enough so I could see my Achilles tendon. I mean, I was looking at it, right, but it wasn't cut. It just had been laid open. And I rappelled down to the ground. And my crew took me to a sort of urgent care place and they sewed me up. But it got me. I was limping for quite a while. And it got me thinking about dangerous work and that there's all this work in this country that the nation needs, right? We need people drilling for oil, we need loggers, we need all kinds of people doing commercial fishermen. And no one's really thinking about them. And they're taking casualty rates that are sometimes comparable to units in the US military, Right. I mean, it's like the commercial fishing industry is deadly. Right. And so I thought, I'm going to write about dangerous work because no one's thinking about it and these people deserve some love, basically.

[Steve Rinella]

You were already fixing to write. You were already fixing to be a writer, though?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I'd sort of muddled my way through my 20s trying to figure out how to be a freelance writer. And, you know, which, you know, I waited tables for a while and then I got this great job as a climber, which I was really proud. I was a terrible waiter, but I was a good climber, right. And so one of the things I really liked about climbing is that, you know, it's inherently dangerous. You're 80ft in the air with a chainsaw or whatever, and of course you can get killed up there. But I realized there's no random element. Like if you're gonna get killed doing tree work, it's cause you screwed up. You know, it's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you rolled the dice wrong, right? You lose a chess because you made bad decisions and the other guy didn't. And tree work was the same way. If you don't make a mistake, you're gonna be all right. So really focus. Be in the moment right now and be perfect. And there was almost a sort of Zen discipline to that. Mindset that I really, really liked.

[Steve Rinella]

Did you have awareness of commercial fishing from growing up? You grew up in Massachusetts, right?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. I mean, no, except that at the time I'd moved up to a fishing town called Gloucester with my girlfriend at the time. And I was doing tree work from there locally and in Boston and writing, you know, working on this writing project and that writing project. My girlfriend was a violinist and, you know, pretty typical, sort of bohemian, you know, young person's life for a while, very nice. And Gloucester was a really, you know, rugged fishing town. And I, and I was there, we were there and I was limping around from my chainsaw wound when this huge storm hit the coast of New England. And the next day I found out that a Gloucester boat, the Andrea Gale with six men had been lost a thousand miles offshore along line.

[Dr. Randall]

What year was that again, that storm?

[Sebastian Junger]

1991. Okay. And then there were these crazy rescues as well. And the seas offshore were measured at 100ft, which was sort of record setting. The, the offshore data buoys were registering 100ft and dude, you can't, you can't even like a.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You can't picture it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh God.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, you got to picture five.

[Dr. Randall]

Feet in a skiff. It's like, oh my God, I'm gonna die.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

When you're. Yeah, you gotta like. I'm just trying to think of how to. You could probably explain it to listeners. But I mean like a five foot swell obscures everything. A five foot swell. If you're in a small boat in a five foot swell, you're you, you're sub, you're sub wave.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean like when you look, it's just water, 100 foot waves.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. And this was a 68 foot steel hulled, long lining, long liner and. But still 68ft in seas of 70, 80ft, 90ft as it'll get overwhelmed. Right. It can be flipped end over end pitch, pulled, rolled. You know, all kinds of things can happen.

[Steve Rinella]

Has that, did that boat ever get recovered?

[Sebastian Junger]

No, no, they don't. They lost radio contact. They don't know where it went down.

[Steve Rinella]

I, I don't mean to jump ahead to the movie, but the visual, one of the visual. I mean the visuals in the movie of the, the boat going up these waves and down these waves. I think like always stands out in my mind as something that's. And you're watching it, you're like, this can't happen on Earth.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Did you ever talk to people who had been in seas like that? And what, as far as like, what their. How, how accurately that captured the.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I mean, I didn't, I, I talked to them to research the book. So I didn't, after the movie, I didn't because I'd done my work right on that topic. But yeah, I mean, the boat disappeared. I was trying to understand what it was probably like for those guys before they went down. So I talked to other captains of other boats sort of in the area that had survived, and I even talked to a guy named Ernie Hazard, whose boat was pitch poled off George's bank and flipped end over end and he wound up trapped in the cabin, in a flooded cabin, upside down at night in the North Atlantic. I mean, the ultimate nightmare, right? And he managed to, on a lung full of air, swim out through a busted window and make his way to the surface in this huge storm. And the life raft popped up right next to him and he got in it and he managed to survive. So I interviewed him about what's it like to be trapped in a flooded boat upside down at night. What's going through your mind? Because I was trying to recreate the state of mind of those guys in their last day, their last hours, their last minutes. And yeah, so these captains said that the waves, they're. They're huge. And the problem isn't that their individual waves are that big that they will, but they'll converge like waves will. They're coming from different directions, they'll converge and suddenly you have a wave that's twice as high as all the other waves and they will just overwhelm you.

[Steve Rinella]

Go, man.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

When you, like when you developed, I don't want to call it shtick, seems real condescending. That's not what I mean. But like when you decided to focus on that, the dangerous work thing was that. Did that become like a. I guess like a strategic professional decision? Or was it, was it personal obsession or was it just like that? You wanted to make, you want to make a living as a writer and this would be a way that you could develop expertise and establish a name for yourself.

[Sebastian Junger]

So I've always been a sort of purist about only working on things that I find so compelling that I would do that work for free if I had to, just in order to find out about that topic. And this was a case where I've never made purely commercial concerns. I think that like sort of ruins your work. But this was a case actually where a sort of personal decision about what fascinated me actually coincided with something that turned out to be a great commercial decision. And I didn't strategize it like that. I've never thought like that in terms of my work. But it actually was a kind of good fit for where the marketplace was at the time. And no one had really. Studs Terkel wrote a great book called Working. It was an oral history of work, an amazing book, but it wasn't focused on dangerous work. Right. And I just thought this is, you know, there was a sort of class issue here. You know, I mean, the people that do dangerous work are mostly, not exclusively, mostly working class males. And they get hurt and they die without much fanfare. And we're all depending on their work. Right. And I mean, we all, you know, we live in houses made out of wood that someone cut down and we're eating fish and, you know, on and on we're driving cars that the oil got drilled out of the ground by somebody, you know. And so I just. All of that was really compelling to me. And it turned out to be a sort of gap in the market. You know, no one had really focused on this yet. And so it, you know, it works.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you, do you intentionally steer clear of some of the broader geopolitical concerns when you're getting like, like if you get into, if you're talking about oil workers, you don't want to set it up like it's a debate about dependence on oil. Right, right. If you're talking about timber, you're not setting it up that it's a debate about how much old growth, logging.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

Too much. Like you try to really focus on these people that are. Focus on the lives of people who.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, are.

[Steve Rinella]

It's kind of hard to put like Randall, I talk a lot about with the, with market hunters of a century ago would be. They probably, if you quiz them, they're probably aware of the broader geopolitical market factors that are pushing them to do what they do. But their desire to participate or they're moving in to participate is like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's what's available to them.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So there are great journalists, better journalists than I am in so many ways that are writing about the sort of macro issues. I'm not an economist, I'm not a scientist, whatever. There's people doing really good work about the urgent issues of our day. The economy, the climate, whatever, you name it. I'm not that guy. It interests me because I'm a part of the planet and part of this country and I'M invested in good outcomes. Right. But I'm not intellectually. It doesn't interest me that much. What interests me is people's experiences, and that often gets lost in the reporting. And so when I was, I mean, just to jump ahead a bit in my career, but many years later, when I was embedded with US Forces in Afghanistan, I had plenty of personal opinions about the war and some positive, some critical, but I wanted to write about the soldiers. Right. I was 173rd Airborne in a remote valley with a lot of combat, and I was interested in those guys. And they themselves were not thinking about the war in large scale terms. They just weren't thinking about it. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And. And so when I wrote my book War and made my film Restrepo about those guys, there was no discussion about the larger issues because those guys were not interested in it. And I wanted to, I wanted to make work that, that made people understand what it was like to be an American soldier in combat in Afghanistan. Like end of Senates and, and you know, they're 20 years old, they're 21 years old. They're not. I wasn't thinking about the economy when I was 20. Like, give me. Why, why would they, you know, like, why would they think about the larger issues? They're already have their hands full just doing the job that's right in front of them.

[Steve Rinella]

If you go back to look at your work with Swordfish longliners, where there's a disaster and lives are lost, and then you come in after and explain that to become a war correspondent, you're like, you're, you're not in the after. It's like you're in the mix.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, that, that, like, it, it, it puts you on the long line boat.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

In the storm.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

What was that like? What, how would that. With your family, friends, did they think you were nuts? Like, like, how did it come about that? You're like, man, I want to go and I want to like, be with soldiers in combat. Do I call the Pentagon? You know, how do I get this rolling?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I mean, I'd done a little bit of that in the early 90s. I was in Idaho on some hotshot crews. They're fighting these big fires. I was really interested in wildland fire and myself. I would have loved to have been on a hotshot crew. I just didn't know. Sort of from the east coast where I live, the bureaucracy, like, trying to figure out how to do that just on a bureaucratic level was almost impossible. And so I ended up reporting on them. Spent quite a lot of time out there. So I was a sort of participant, a journalist in some situations before that. But, you know, my first war was in 1993.

[Steve Rinella]

Back up for one sec. When you were doing the fire stuff, though, did they really let you get in there or was it too.

[Sebastian Junger]

They did. Okay. Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I didn't know if it was like. If it'd be, like, sort of too easy to constrain someone and keep them out of harm's way for.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, they just put me on a helicopter and dropped me in and. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was amazing. And I mean, with absolutely no. I had absolutely no credentials or anything. I mean, I just showed up.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, it's. It's refreshing to hear that. That someone didn't be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you stay here.

[Sebastian Junger]

It was the early 90s, right. I don't, you know, maybe different now, but I showed up. I was like, hey, you know, I'm interested in writing about wildland fire and could you get me on a crew? And the next thing I knew, I was in a helicopter. They dropped me off with a shot crew up in the, you know, mountains north of Idaho, north of Boise. Was a huge fire. Yeah.

[Dr. Randall]

Was the process a lot different, becoming a war correspondent? Like, were there. Was there certain training you had to go through or, like, security clearances and.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, you know, most wars don't involve the US Military in most wars in the world. Right, right. So there isn't a government agency involved in whether you can go to Sierra Leone. I see. Yeah. Right. So I mean, I covered civil wars in West Africa. I was in Afghanistan in 1996. I watched the Taliban take over. I was with the. In Kabul.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Because you interviewed. You interviewed Ahmad.

[Sebastian Junger]

Masood. Yes.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he was killed.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, he was killed.

[Steve Rinella]

By later interviewers.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I interviewed him. I spent two months with him and his forces in Barakchan in 2000, in the fall of 2000. And I was with his commanders when they took. When they liberated Kabul after 9, 11.

[Steve Rinella]

And that's incredible, man.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, it's amazing. So the guy, you know, the US Government has nothing to do with that decision of yours to go seek out Massoud and spend a couple months with him fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. They have nothing to do with it. Right. And so I wasn't embedded with US forces until 2005 was the first time. So most of my war reporting has not been with U.S. forces.

[Steve Rinella]

It's just been. You try to get closer, closer, closer, until you're in it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So I was. You know, my first war was Sarajevo in 1993, besieged by the Bosnian Serbs. It was a. You know, I would say. I mean, I'm showing my sympathies here, but I would say it was quite similar to Russia in Ukraine, except on a much smaller scale. Right. It's not Russia in Ukraine, it's the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia. But the same sort of awful shelling of civilians. They besieged Sarajevo. It was an ethnically driven conflict, you know, sort of a nationalistic conflict, and grotesque, grotesquely violent. And I managed to convince a magazine editor I knew at a magazine called Men's Journal, which is, back in the day, a pretty good magazine. He gave me a sort of letter of passage, like, Sebastian is working on a piece for us, which wasn't even true for the civil war in Bosnia, and please help him in any way you can. I just showed that to some UN guy and he gave me a UN press pass. And the next thing I knew, I was on a relief flight into Sarajevo, and then, boom, there I was, like, it was no credentials from anybody, right. But there were a lot of freelancers in Sarajevo who made their. Made their bones. I mean, it sort of like, learned the craft because they just put themselves in that situation. They started freelancing. Radio, newspaper. You know, I went there. Basically, the girlfriend I was living with in Gloucester dumped me, and I was.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, look, I'll show her you.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right? So I was sort of heartbroken and like, oh, I could. You mean, I can do anything I want right now. Are you kidding? Right? So it's that. That heady mix of heartbreak and liberation. You know what I mean? It's sort of an interesting moment in your life. And so I went to Sarajevo and there was a lot of other freelancers like me, and I would say 80% of them were young males like I was. And I would say 80% of those guys had just been dumped by their girlfriend, like.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, eight. So. Oh, sorry. I was going to say there's a. There's a book, My War Gone By.

[Sebastian Junger]

I miss it. So, yeah, I met him. Yeah, I met him in. In Bosnia in 93. I mean, that.

[Steve Rinella]

I remember reading that. Probably read that 15 or so years ago. But, yeah, it was a very similar story. I mean, it's like in hotel rooms and.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah, he was probably dumped by his girlfriend also.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, he seemed like it. You know, it was 17 years ago this summer that I first decided I didn't want to die. Okay. And I realized when I Was I topped my last. I topped my last big tree.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And. And you know that thing when you relieve that top load, it really bucks. Like, bucks huge. And I used to just. I don't know. I liked it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Was indifferent to it. Didn't think about it. And I was like, man, I don't want to. I climbed down on that tree. Never. Like, I changed my behaviors, and I was getting married that summer. But you have to. To go do what you did, like, tree climb is one thing, but to go do you did and, like, go into Afghanistan during the Civil War. 1. For a lot of people, having an American captive is really cool. And then being able to, like, kill an American captive is very enticing. Right. It's like you had to kind of have been like. I mean, I don't want to sound like, you know, like you had like. Like, it's like a mental issue, but you had to be, like, kind of indifferent to death, you know, I wasn't.

[Sebastian Junger]

Indifferent to death, but I felt like I was taking calculated risks that were manageable. Like, I would. Yeah. I would never have gone into Syria. I mean, Syria, there was an open market for Western. Yeah, Right.

[Steve Rinella]

So when Afghanistan didn't feel that way when you were there.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, I mean, I was. I was with Massoud and the Northern alliance, and there were absolutely zero issues with them about. They were my hosts and my protectors. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

I mean, well, but he was also blown up.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, of course. I mean. Right. But I don't.

[Steve Rinella]

Including people around him.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. But, you know, it's not like they would have seized me and decided to cut my head off. Right. I mean, I was among people. I mean, I was there to report on, frankly, the tragedy and the outrage of what the Taliban, backed by Pakistan were doing to the Afghan people. Right. I mean, and they were full. The people, the Northern alliance and Massoud were fully on board with the fact that someone had. From the Western press had come in to shine a spotlight on this. So I was very. I mean, they felt protected. They would have died protecting me. Right. I mean, seriously. Not true. In West Africa. West Africa was a lot scarier. Even the indigenous forces that I was with, I didn't trust them because they were traumatized child soldiers, all high on drugs. So, you know, like, it just. There were a lot of variables that were terrifying, and I had some incredibly scary situations with them.

[Steve Rinella]

What. What would you categorize when you say that? Like, what would be the kind of scenario or situation you'd be in that you would categorize as scary, because I think most people would find that every moment was scary, you know, just to be in the proximity of shelling, to be in the proximity of war.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I've been shelled plenty, and that's very scary. I mean, I've been shot at. I mean, lots of things have happened. But I think, you know, the two scariest moments, I think, were moments where I thought I was going to be executed. And both of them were in West Africa. One was in Sierra Leone. I was coming back from a frontline fight back towards Freetown with a couple of government soldiers and a couple of journalists. And a group of rebels stepped out of the jungle and stopped us on this deserted road. And two weeks later, they wiped out two cars full of journalists on the same road. Like, right near where we were, these same guys stopped us, and they had their rifles, their machine guns leveled, and they were arguing with each other. We were in an open jeep, and they were arguing with each other, seemed to be arguing with each other about whether to kill us all or not. And we just sat. There was nothing we could do. We just sat there. And at one point, one of them, like, leveled his rifle at us to fire, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upward so it wouldn't.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, my God, man.

[Sebastian Junger]

So I, you know, I had, you know, for about 10 or 15 minutes, I was thinking, this really could go down, right? And I. It was the extraordinary feeling. I became sort of. I dissociated, right? I mean, my body sort of went numb, and I was. I was so scared that I wasn't even scared anymore. It's like I wasn't there. And the psychological effect. And then they didn't shoot us, and I don't know why. Right? And the psychological trauma of that is way worse than someone shooting at you from 300 meters and you managed to get behind some sandbags. I mean, that's child's play, right? Compared to, wow, we are totally screwed and they could shoot us or not. And then a similar thing happened in Nigeria in 2006. I was seized by rebels, the Ijaw warriors, who were fighting in a group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a partly criminal, partly righteous like group. And they seized me in a small village in the creeks, the Niger river and in the Delta and accused me of being a spy. And one guy came up, sort of strutted up to me, you know, machine gun. And these guys, these Ijaw warriors, are.

[Steve Rinella]

They.

[Sebastian Junger]

They got feathers and paint and all kinds of fetishes on Them and they're wild looking guys, right? And really intense warriors. And he said very matter of factly, he said, when we kill you later today, I'm going to be the one to do it. He didn't say it meanly. He was just, I just want you to, you know, just by way of introduction.

[Steve Rinella]

That's like Princess Bride, remember the pirate. Probably kill you in the morning, right?

[Sebastian Junger]

So, you know, I just remember thinking, don't let your knees buckle. Like, whatever you do, don't let your knees buckle. So those, you know, those two situations are.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you think he's just tormenting you?

[Sebastian Junger]

I don't know what he was doing. There was a lot of, I don't know, there was a lot of aggression. There was a lot of sort of performative aggression. They didn't know who I was. Their commander. Eventually they called their commander and put me on the phone with him on a cell phone. Like one bar of signal. Like I was standing on top of a log trying to maintain my cell connection with him. And he was in South Africa. Actually, he was an arms dealer in South Africa, but indigenous ijaw. And I talked with him and he said, okay, give the phone back to the guy who gave you the phone. And I didn't know what he was going to say. I'm going to say kill him or don't. And I gave the phone back and the guy said, okay, sir, yes, sir. All right, we'll do it. And I didn't know what, you know. And he shut the phone, you know, flipped the phone. It was a flip phone. He flipped it closed and he said, it's going to be fine. We're going to let you go. But I didn't know until that moment that it would be fine. So they might have been bluffing. I mean, he might, you know, I'm an American, right? I mean, you know, there are repercussions for whacking in America.

[Dr. Randall]

I was going to ask, is there, is there like any tr. Is it like a myth that, like, being a member of, like the American press affords you some degree of safety in those situations?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I mean, it protects you with people that don't want to get on the wrong side of America. And the ija, as badass as they are, probably don't want to want the American military as an adversary. They have their hands full with the Nigerian military, right? But then there's groups like ISIS who make. The point of their existence is to fight America, to fight the infidel, to fight the West. So it depends who you're talking about.

[Steve Rinella]

Brands spend $32 billion every year on influencer marketing, yet most still don't know if it's actually working. Are you seeing a positive ROI from your influencer campaigns or is your team just tracking likes and follows? At Jive PR and Digital, we turn influencer engagement into real, measurable sales. Our clients see a 50% lower cost per acquisition compared to traditional ads. No more wasted budgets, no more guessing. Head to jiveprdigital.com to see if your brand is a fit. Steve Rinella here the American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores On Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out. And I mean that in a very good way. How different did it feel for you when it was when, when you got to a point and the, the global war on terror started and all of a sudden it was like you were with like Americans.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh it was, it was so nice, right? Because I didn't have to worry that the people I was with were going to kill me, right? If I got wounded I knew I'd be evacuated. Like I knew that these guys would do whatever they could to help me and, and as I would them, as I got to know them, right? I mean I really this one, you know, so I spent most in beds are a week or two right. But I spent a year off and on with one platoon which was like 30, 40 guys at this remote outpost called Restrepo was named after the platoon medic who was killed basically at the bottom of the hill. And so I really became part of that platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of a group. I mean a really ancient in a really ancient pretty much a way that's been pretty much lost to our society here at home. I felt like Wow. I belong to this thing. And they would risk their lives for me, and I know I would for them. And here we are. Let's get it done. It was absolutely extraordinary. So that experience really changed me. I mean, I feel like in our society, we don't get to enjoy that group affiliation in such a profound way. And it is what our evolutionary past consists of, right, that we're social primates. We survived. We survived not because we're rugged individuals, but because we affiliate very well. And when we're in groups like that, the individuals in them will risk their lives or give their lives to protect the group. It's like firemen or something, right? And that's our evolutionary past. And when you find yourself in a situation like that, it is almost intoxicating. It plays to so many. So much evolutionary wiring. It plays to so many profound human emotions. And I just kept thinking, this is. This is all I want. Like, I don't want to go home. Why would I want to do that? Like, it was quite extraordinary.

[Steve Rinella]

And that was with how that was a group of what size then?

[Sebastian Junger]

You know, 30 guys or so. I mean, you know, so 30 to 50 people, as the anthropologists will tell you, is the typical group size in our evolutionary past, right? So the groups of about that size that are affiliated by clan or by tribe with other groups around that size, but the sort of survival community is about that size, and it's sort of a perfect size. It's the largest number that you can have quite close emotional relationships with. And you can't be emotionally close to 500 dudes, right? It's not happening, right. Even if you're in the same battalion, that's a rather abstract knowledge, right? But 30, 40 people, you're like, wow, these are my people. What wouldn't I do for them? Right? And of course, in our evolutionary past, it wouldn't be all one sex. It wouldn't be all male. It would be a mix, right? It would be a mix of old and young, male and female, et cetera. And what wouldn't you do with, you know, with your family? What wouldn't you do to protect them? Like, nothing. You would do anything to protect them, right? Feeling that way, about 30 or 40 people. That is the human experience in evolutionary terms. And it's the loss of that experience for most people in modern society is. Is a tragic one.

[Steve Rinella]

The other day, we had some anthropologists here, and they were excavating. They had been working on an excavation of an Ice Age encampment in Wyoming. Okay, so these are like mammoth hunters.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

And we were talking about, well, how big. Like, how big was the encampment then? He. He's like 30, 40 people.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. You know what I mean?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, no, that's exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah, that's.

[Steve Rinella]

There's a thing I've been like, what? You should feel free as we're talking. I would. I appreciate that you're not doing this, but I. I appreciate the impulse. Please tie into the books.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, what you're talking about now is your book tribe.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yes, right, exactly. Yeah, I wrote a book. Right. I wrote a book Tribe, about.

[Steve Rinella]

That's not what you're talking about. But you're. Yeah, these ideas are explored in.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. No, I was trying to figure out why does this modern society, which is so safe and so affluent, have such high rates of mental illness, you know, depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction. Why was it that along the American frontier, at its various points in Pennsylvania and the Ohio, and further west all the way to Texas and Arizona, like, why were pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native society and disappearing in native society and the natives didn't do the opposite? And what it really seemed to be. And Benjamin Franklin wrote about this because, of course, if you're like a good Christian, the idea that, like, white Christians would rather live with what they called the savages, like, is. It flies in the face of the entire sense of Western superiority. Right. And Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about this. Like, what is the appeal?

[Steve Rinella]

Like?

[Sebastian Junger]

And the appeal is that those kinds of organic, hunter gatherer societies are extremely egalitarian. The leadership is not imposed, it's granted by the people. I mean, all these sort of, like, democratic ideals that are. That we do not live up to actually are acted out in societies of that scale. And there's community. There's community, really close community. And of course, if you're a young man, instead of having to plow fields all day, you can go hunting. You know what I mean? What's not to like? Sort of. And so that was the genesis of my thoughts, that maybe what people are really drawn to is close connection to each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with, against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo. They got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars and everything. All the things young men like, whoa. I mean, a number of them said to me, if we could take a helicopter back to Restrepo right now and do another year out there, we would do It. And that's how. So my book Tribe was about that phenomenon.

[Steve Rinella]

We recently had a guy on, a guy named Pastor Shane Yates, who's sitting right in that chair, and he was talking about coming home from. Yeah. Coming home from Iraq. No, coming home from. I think it was in Afghanistan. Coming home from Afghanistan. Was that where it was? It was the kids, like, eating. He's like, there's. You know, you're literally watching children looking in the garbage for food.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Competing with dogs.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

In the streets. And he said. And, like, you get home so fast.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And also, you're just home. And he's standing there, and there's a woman arguing with a Starbucks employee.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

About the state of her latte. And he's like, I wanted to kill her.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He's talking about just the. The hard. Like the very difficult adjustment. But there's this thing I've been. And think about what you're talking about in the ideas that you explore. And Tribe. It's like, I'm kind of struggling with this thing I'm seeing happen later. I'm just becoming aware of it, and it's very troubling to me about American culture where. What. When you're on the Internet, what you. If you solely relied on the Internet, you would get a view of American culture that does not at all match the view of American culture that you have as you're alive, being an American outside of the web.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Meaning any one of my neighbors. Any one of my neighbors would. If my house was on fire, any one of my neighbors would go into my house to get my kids.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

I would go into any one of my neighbor's houses to get their kids. And when I say this, I'm not like, I have no idea of the political affiliation.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Except for one of my neighbors. I have no idea of their political affiliation. Zero. But, like, you get this. I used to think of people think of the, like, the radical right and the radical left as being, like, diametrically opposed. I'm starting to view it more like that these are just symptoms of a. That these are symptoms of an ailment.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

It's like you could have a certain ailment, and you might get, like. Like, stunning headaches or you might have a certain ailment and be. Other people would have the same ailment and be that they can't get a full breath or whatever, or all the weird shit that would happen to people with COVID It's like too much time online is the thing.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And Then the symptoms are, you could be radicalized in one direction, you radicalized another direction. You, you, like, you wind up being that you're just bound by what you hate. Like, your culture is my people that I find are people that hate what I hate.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right?

[Steve Rinella]

And that's my team. And, dude. And like, the part what you're talking about is, like, of that need, like, like build a team that's not based on just that you all hate the same shit, right?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, you know, in evolutionary terms, outrage is a powerful unifier because you're unified with other people who are outraged by the same thing, and it creates a sort of pugilistic state of mind that's good at defending itself. So you think in evolutionary terms that anger and outrage response is a very effective defense against the threat. Right. And the algorithms that are used in social media are very good at generating outrage. It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle but also very important feelings of love or sadness or regret. There's sort of gentler emotions that also are really important for keeping society and people glued together. Right. Shared value is shared, a shared warmth with each other. Even though those are hard, they don't have the algorithms for that. The algorithms for hatred are very, very simple. There's a threat over there. We have to unify. We have to denounce the threat and unify against it, and then we'll survive, right? So you're going into very, very ancient human history when you gin up those emotions. And, you know, it used to be that at the town hall, someone might stand, you know, before the Internet, right, before the apocalypse of the Internet came along, you got, you know, the town hall, and someone would stand up with a different view about, you know, paving the streets or whatever. And you'd be like, okay, I'm totally against that. But that's Joe. I know his. You know, I have a relationship with Joe, like, and I don't agree with them, and I might even end up shouting at him. But we're all in this together. We all live in this little, you know, that's gone. Right? And so you can hate on people online and there are no repercussions. The person is not going to come grab you by the shirt front and say, do not speak to me like that in front of my community or in front of my family. You're not in any danger, right? You're free to be a sort of cowardly adversary. And that's very seductive to a lot of people. And so I, you know, I don't. The Internet's a great tool for all kinds of things.

[Steve Rinella]

Sure.

[Sebastian Junger]

I don't. You know, I have a flip phone, because I think the smartphones are just, like, killing people. Like, literally. Literally killing people. They're. It was a deliberate addiction designed by the tech companies. Right. It's a very powerful addiction. It's particularly powerful with our children. And I think it's destroying the society. I just refuse to participate in it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, man, it's tough. Cause I use the Internet to find out how the Internet's destroying society. Because I'm into this thing right now. It's like American Veterans Institute. It's like interviews with World War II veterans.

[Sebastian Junger]

They just.

[Steve Rinella]

They've been very good. Like, when these guys. They kind of were catching all these dudes in their 80s, 90s.

[Sebastian Junger]

I've seen some of those amazing.

[Steve Rinella]

It's like, I'll tell my wife the other day, I'm sitting there on a Saturday morning. I'm sitting there doing some work, and I got one of those playing, and I was like. I said, this is gonna sound so nostalgic, but holy. We've fallen.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Far.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, listening to interview after interview after interview with these guys about. They call kind of start, like, where were you when Pearl harbor was attacked?

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

In the portraits they paint.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

There's this dude. There's this Italian dude, and he says, like, he goes down to. He goes down to a gas station or something to buy a soda, you know, and everybody's in the gas stations listening because Pearl Harbors got attacked. He goes home, his dad listens to the address from Franklin Roosevelt, calls his four sons down into the room, informs them, you will all fight because we moved to this country. We have a house and a car. This country cannot fail. And he says when he goes to the train station, his dad makes a point that his dad wants to drive him alone to the train station. So he's expecting some kind of lecture. His dad never says a word to him. All the drive. They get to the train station, and you know what his dad says to him? He says to him in Italian, don't do anything that will cause me to hang my head in shame.

[Sebastian Junger]

Wow.

[Steve Rinella]

That was. That was it. Dude out the door. And I'm like, I don't know, man. I just get nostalgic about it, you know?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, I just, like, I feel like something's corroding. Like, I just, like, I have this terrible anxiety about culture right now with. With, like, the Internet hatred.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. I mean, I still. You know, we're we're all human. We're still all human. And I think that same noble. Those same noble sentiments and actions, individuals today are just as capable of them. Right. But what's gone, not gone, but what's in danger, what's under threat is the idea of a nation that is unified, that thinks of itself as a nation despite its internal differences. Right. I love that there's Republicans and Democrats. I happen to be a Democrat, but I don't care. Whatever. I mean, that's great that the country is. My father's a refugee from two wars. He's an immigrant. Right. And the country's made up of people like my dad. Right. And I was born in this country. Whatever. It's all. So the idea that we're all unified in this American project is an incredibly powerful one. Right. And it transcends. It should transcend all these other divisions, including left and right. And I think one of the problems right now is that the Internet. And look, I have a laptop. I'm online. I research stuff. I get it. I just don't have a smartphone because I don't want that following me around all day and being where my brain disappears when I have 30 seconds to spare while I'm waiting for the bus. Like, I just. That, to me, is horrible. Right. For the brain. But I think that. I think we've sort of lost sight of the idea that there is one, that the ultimate category we're all in is American. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

That's. As a patriot. That's what I'm getting worried about, increasingly. Was it your quote or were you quoting somebody when you said that? Journalists. I can't remember if you said should or shouldn't or. It's not should or do or whatever. But, like, journalists don't tell you what to think.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. Journalists don't tell you what to. I was paraphrasing someone else who was actually talking about theater.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh.

[Sebastian Junger]

Which is interesting. Right. But I repurposed it for journalism is journalists don't tell you what to think. They tell you what to think about. And if a journalist is telling you what to think, how to think, they're not a journalist. Don't listen.

[Steve Rinella]

Turn it off. They're a commentator.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

They're an analyst or commentator.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Worse than an analyst. Like, we need analysts.

[Steve Rinella]

They're commentators.

[Sebastian Junger]

They're a commentator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and I. So I feel like the Internet has. And there are political forces in this country that are depending on the ability to fracture people in order to achieve their agenda and also make money I mean, you can sort of monetize this. Right. And. And what they're sacrificing, maybe not deliberately, unconsciously, but ultimately what's happening is they are sacrificing the cultural and political unity of this country for smaller gains, for smaller personal gains, including many politicians who do that.

[Steve Rinella]

Let's talk about your health scare, man. Yeah, I've never heard of that.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, me neither, until it happened to me.

[Steve Rinella]

Isn't that funny? We're going through that with my boy right now. My little boy has a thing that, like, not any person in our social circle has ever heard of.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, right.

[Steve Rinella]

Like a. Like a cartilage issue, you know?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Right.

[Dr. Randall]

You got to be careful here, Steve, because you might get your. Your thing where you. You think you're developing a problem because he talks about it.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. I had this, like, if someone's telling me, like, whatever. Anyone. Problem. Someone tells you, especially internal.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, they're like, yeah, you know, I got a whatever in my kidney. I'm like. All of a sudden, I'll be like, son of a. Yeah. Now I've got a weird feeling in my kidney.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that. That sort of paranoia is very human. And it. And it. And. And it. It helps keep us. Keep us alive. Right. Once in a while, someone does have a weird thing in their kidney, and they weren't aware of it until someone mentioned it, and they go to the doctor and say, you know, so there's a. There is a sort of use for that. But no. So basically, what happened to me, I have a. I have a ligament in the wrong place, my median arcuate ligament, which sort of goes across your abdomen about where your sternum is.

[Steve Rinella]

I would know. You had a. I guess you do have a ligament in your abdomen.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah. It crosses right near the bottom of your rib cage, crosses your abdomen, and mine is too tight. So it has. It's called median arcuate ligament syndrome. It has crushed the celiac artery. Now, the celiac artery is like a garden hose that irrigates all of your organs with blood. Right. Imagine how big it is, and it comes right out.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't want to. I have this thing I'm trying to do where when someone's telling me something I don't understand.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, the impulse is going, huh, huh.

[Dr. Randall]

I'm trying to picture it when I'm cutting a deer open, where it would be.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't understand.

[Sebastian Junger]

So the celiac comes out of the aorta and the descending aorta, and it branches down and it brings Blood to the liver and the intestines and the stomach and all the organs in your abdomen. Right. So a lot of blood goes through this celiac if you block it with a ligament.

[Steve Rinella]

So this ligament is, like, on the outside, pushing it down, binding in.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

And it's just crimping it off or whatever.

[Sebastian Junger]

Exactly. It's just an irregularity. It isn't because I led a bad life and I'm filled with cholesterol, whatever. Nothing like that. Right. It's just a strange. A bad design. Right. It's very rare. But what the body does, because the body is a walking miracle, is it's like, okay, we still got to get the blood to where it needs to go. There's a lot of sort of redundancy in the vascular system. So the blood flows to where it needs to go through smaller arteries, these branch arteries that are not designed to take that kind of blood flow. Right. That kind of pressure. So what they do is they dilate so that they can carry all this blood they're not supposed to take. It works fine. Right. The problem, they're meant to dilate, but if there's a weak spot in one of the arteries, instead of dilating, it will bubble out, it will balloon outwards, and it's called an aneurysm. Okay. The artery wall will balloon outwards, and it will get bigger over the course of decades. So there's no symptoms. It's very hard to detect. And it very slowly gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And then when it ruptures, and it will. When it ruptures, you are suddenly bleeding. You're bleeding out from an artery. You know, an arterial bleed is deadly, right? You're bleeding out from an artery, a smaller artery, into your own abdomen. So if someone stabbed you in the stomach and you made it alive to the hospital, the doctors don't have anything to figure out. They're like, oh, we know what the problem is.

[Steve Rinella]

There's blood coming out of a hole in there. Exactly.

[Sebastian Junger]

They know where to stick their finger almost literally to stop the bleed. Like, it's. There's no mystery there. With internal hemorrhage, it could be anywhere. Right. And so this happened five years ago, and it was during.

[Steve Rinella]

But you know when the blood's coming out.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I didn't know that's what was happening, but I. I felt a lot of pain. Right. But I'm an old stoic, and it's.

[Steve Rinella]

Like high pressure blood.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Well, I mean, blood. Blood's an irritant when it's not in the vascular system.

[Steve Rinella]

That's what's causing the pain.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So I'm like, there's blood around my kidneys and around my liver, and it just, like, feels odd. It's very, very. All of a sudden, in mid sentence, it ruptured. So I mean. I mean, we're.

[Steve Rinella]

What were you taught? What was the sentence?

[Sebastian Junger]

I'm gonna live forever. I think this is the sentence. So it was during COVID And So I have two little girls that are now 8 and 5. At the time, they were 3 years old in 6 months. And my wife and. It was during COVID We own a property in Massachusetts that's very remote. It's in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road. There's no cell phone coverage. There's. The landlines are old, and when it rains, they short out. So there's no landlines. We're surrounded by government land. It's just basically paradise, right? It's an old house from 1800. And we were there during COVID And I built a post and beam cabin deeper in the woods. And one day we managed that. Some teenage girls that lived up the road that we knew called. When does this ever happen? They called and said, hey, we're free this afternoon. Would you like some babysitting time? Right? And I was like, yes, we pay $1,000 an hour. Like, how long can you. How long can you stay? Right. Yeah. So they came over a few hours, and my wife and I went out to this beautiful little cabin. It's totally off the grid, like oil lamp, wood stove, you know, I built it myself, you know, so we're in this place of peace and beauty and just sort of enjoying our, you know, a couple hours of alone time. And all of a sudden there's this pain in my abdomen, like, oh, what was that? And it wouldn't stop. And so I stood up to sort of work it out. I thought it was some crazy indigestion, and I almost fell over. And what was happening was I was bleeding out in my abdomen. My blood pressure was tanking, and I was graying out, right? And I sat back down, I said to my wife, I never thought I'd have to ever say these words to anyone. I said, I think I'm going to need some help. And, you know, I was a marathon runner when I was young. I was a really good competitive runner. I've always been very fit, very healthy. I just never thought that I would need physical help from anybody. You know, it just like, never. I never. And now my wife's dragging me out of the woods, like literally dragging me down a trail to get me to help. And we finally got. There was no cell phone.

[Steve Rinella]

Did she have one of those, like mysterious bursts of power?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I got, you know, she didn't. I mean, I had my arm over her shoulder. I wasn't unconscious, but I was sort of half.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, I got. I thought she was like pulling you.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, right, right. The car. Baby. No, that's fine. So the ambulance came. It took him 20 minutes to get there. I'm losing a pint of blood maybe every 10 or 15 minutes in my abdomen, but all in you, all in me. And you can lose about half your blood before you die. And we live an hour from the hospital, so you can do the math. I was a human hourglass. And the ambulance got there and I had sort of rebooted it. Then you go into compensatory shock. So your body, it's extraordinary. Your body knows when there's a five alarm fire even if you don't. Right. I didn't know I was dying. I had no idea. Right. And so it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body that you don't need to survive. Your surface areas, your skin, your legs, your arms, and it pools it in your brain and in your abdomen around your heart. So when it does that, your blood pressure goes back up. And I became sort of clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there, they were like, you know, it's a hot day, you're probably dehydrated. Sir. They're looking at me. I'm 58. They're like, you're an old man.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, they're 20s.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right?

[Steve Rinella]

Dehydration thing, man.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. And. And why don't you sit in the shade and drink some water and call us if you still don't feel well.

[Steve Rinella]

My wife, oh, my God.

[Sebastian Junger]

My wife said, you got. You're taking him to the hospital. Like he couldn't walk a few minutes ago.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, I've seen thirsty people.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, right, exactly.

[Steve Rinella]

And he was not acting thirsty in.

[Sebastian Junger]

My mind at the time. I remember thinking, I've always heard that married men live longer. This is why I'm seeing it right now. Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Cause your wife's always like, well, why don't you see somebody about it?

[Sebastian Junger]

So they put me in and they started the long drive. And my compensatory shock held for most of the drive. And right when we got to the hospital.

[Steve Rinella]

And they've got no idea what's going on.

[Sebastian Junger]

None.

[Dr. Randall]

So they didn't like Check your vitals and see that something was.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, they did. So the thing is, if you're, if you have internal bleeding, your heart tries to compensate for the drop in blood pressure by beating faster, which pressurizes the system. Right. You run the pump, you pressurize the pump. Right. Except I'm very fit. So they looked at my heart rate and it was probably in the 80s. They're like, all right, he's almost 60 years old. His heart rate's in the 80s. That's pretty normal. Got it right. My heart rate's 55, so they didn't know I was 30 beats up. Had they known that, they were like, oh, this is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But my fitness level was masking it. Right. So they were totally cavalier about it. Right. We almost stopped for coffee practically, you know, like, oh, my gosh. And we got to the hospital and I. I just went off a cliff. Your body decompensate. It has to decompensate at some point. And I just. And I went into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I'm convulsing with hypothermia and they rush me into the trauma bay. The doctors know immediately what's going on, and immediately. They diagnosed me immediately and sent me through a CAT scan. They saw the. Where the blood was pooling and they. And oh. So I'm in the trauma bay. And.

[Steve Rinella]

I just want to mention what you were just describing. Did you say hype? Like, what'd you say?

[Sebastian Junger]

Hemorrhagic shock. So is that.

[Steve Rinella]

No, they said something about hypothermia.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah. You go into hypothermia when you have. When you're in hemorrhagic shock, your body gets hypothermic.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't understand that. Why is that?

[Sebastian Junger]

It's as if you're very, very cold. Your body can't keep up its internal temperature. Right. Which is.

[Steve Rinella]

Did you feel. Did you. I guess when you're super hypothermic, you don't know you're cold. I mean, did you feel like a cold sensation?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I was convulsing. I mean, I was having like these spastic shivering, like.

[Steve Rinella]

Oh, really?

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I didn't know what was going on, but I kind of sensed it wasn't good. I didn't know I was dying. I mean, there's a lot of.

[Steve Rinella]

But you knew it was a cold feeling?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, yes, I was shaking. I've only shaked. I've only shaken like that when I was very, very cold. And I've never even convulsively shake, right? Shaken. Shaked, shaken, whatever it is. So I knew there's a lot of. When you're dying, there's a lot of denial. I had no idea I was dying, but I was like, okay, I was going blind a while ago. I couldn't talk, and now I'm convulsively shaking, but I'm fine. Like, you know, like, they're just either.

[Steve Rinella]

Gatorade.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, exactly. So it never crossed my mind. Of course, everyone else knew, and they.

[Steve Rinella]

So they were. They, like, they were able to look at what's going on because, you know, I mean, it would never occur to me, like, perhaps they're having internal bleeding. Like, they're good enough where they're like, this dude is having a. Yeah, yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

I had all this. I had all the symptoms, right?

[Steve Rinella]

And they recognized.

[Sebastian Junger]

And then they saw it on the CT scan. And so my blood pressure was 60 over 40, right. I'd lost half my blood. At that point, I was probably 10 minutes from dead, right? I needed 10 units of blood to stay alive, which is basically a full oil change.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, how do they get the old blood out? They pump it out?

[Sebastian Junger]

No, it's in your abdomen, and it takes a few months to be reabsorbed by your body if you survive.

[Steve Rinella]

So they don't try to get it out?

[Sebastian Junger]

No, no, no. It's not doing it. They got, like. They got their.

[Steve Rinella]

Hey, Sun Pouch deal.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, no, that. They don't. That doesn't matter. Like, yeah, they don't need to worry about that.

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[Sebastian Junger]

I was probably 10 minutes from dead, right? And they put me in the trauma bay, and a doctor starts prepping my neck to insert a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me, because I need a lot of blood fast, right? And he asked my permission to do this, and I still didn't get. I was like, you mean in case there's an emergency. He's like, this is the emergency right now. If you say so. My life, you know, my wife seemed worried also. But if I, you know, whatever, do what you got to do. And I'm lying there while he's working on my neck and all of a sudden and I have to stop and just explain. I'm an atheist, right? My dad was an atheist and a physicist.

[Steve Rinella]

Just like atheists kind of go hand in hand a little bit.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, well, it's sort of atheist squared, right? Like hyper rational. And I'm a lifelong atheist. So you need to know this for what I'm about to say, because it flew in the face of a lot of my understanding of reality, of your understanding of life in the world a little bit. So beneath me and to my left, this sort of yawning blackness opened up. Like the universe has sort of cracked open into this just infinite black void. And I was getting pulled into it and I didn't want to go. I was like a wounded animal. Like, I didn't. I wasn't thinking about my family. I didn't know I was dying. I just didn't want to go into the vast darkness, right? Like when you take your dog to the vet and dog doesn't want to go to the. You know, I was like that, like, no, no, no, I'm not going in there. And I was getting pulled in and I couldn't stop it and I was panicking. And then above me to my left, suddenly appeared my dead father. He'd been dead eight years and he was there in this just energy form, like it wasn't even quite vision that I used to perceive him. It was a sense that's not familiar to me, but it was absolutely like, oh, there's my dad. What is he doing? He was very benevolent and he was communicating with me. He was hovering right above me and he was communicating with me basically. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. He was very, very paternal and loving and caring. And, you know, he was so. He was a physicist. He was, I realized later on the spectrum he was not a particularly emotional person, right? Like, I loved him, but my connection to him was not visceral and loving in that way that he was at that moment. Like, it was in some ways the most loving, sort of viscerally loving thing he'd ever done for me. Right in that moment. It's like, I'll take care of you. And I was horrified. I was like, you're dead. Why would I go with you? I'm alive. The party's over here. What are you doing here? I mean, I was shocked and horrified, Offended. Almost offended that he would think I would want to go with him and not want to stay alive with my family. I was really offended. I was like, what are you. What do you think? And I said to the doctor, you gotta hurry. I'm going.

[Dr. Randall]

I was going to ask you if you were aware that you were conscious or not.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

I was talking to the doctor, and then there was my dad. And I said to the doctor, he was right over here. I said, you got to hurry. I'm going right now. I'm being taken. Oh.

[Steve Rinella]

Did the hole in your dad seem like diametric?

[Sebastian Junger]

They were connected to each other. He was like, don't be sort of. He didn't say this, but he was basically, don't be scared of what's happening right now.

[Steve Rinella]

So it wasn't a different directions?

[Sebastian Junger]

No, no. Well, he was there. The pit was above me. He was up there. But basically he was saying, you don't have to. I was fighting. Going into the hole.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And he was like, you don't have to fight it. I'll be like, I'll be with you. I'll take care of you. It's okay.

[Steve Rinella]

I'll accompany you into the hole.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah. And they eventually.

[Steve Rinella]

And you're. And you're still talking to this doctor?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yep. And, you know, they couldn't sedate me. Cause my vital signs were too low. So everything that they did, they had to do with me fully conscious. I had a little bit of fentanyl, but it didn't. It didn't do anything. I was in a huge amount of pain. And they brought me into the interventional radiology suite. And. Which is this ir. Is this sort of like magic? Basically, like you're on a fluoroscope, which is an X ray machine that takes real time video. And they pop a hole in your groin, and they thread a wire up your femoral artery, and they can snake it around to any part of your body. And so instead of. If they need to put a stent in your aorta, they can put it in by wire instead of opening your heart up. Right. It's amazing what they can do. And they were trying to get the wire to the ruptured artery to embolize it, to block it, so I would stop bleeding. And the alternative to doing that is what they would have had to do 20 years ago is like, cut me open and try to Find the bleed before I bled out, right? And the outcomes are terrible for that. And if they'd had to do that, they would have brought my wife in to say goodbye. They told me that later. Like, we would have brought her in to say goodbye because you probably wouldn't have made it. So they were trying and trying with this wire to thread its way through my sort of weird vasculature because the ligament totally contorted all my vasculature when it compensated, right? And they couldn't get the wire to the place. And I was on the fluoroscope for hours. And now it's two in the morning. And I remember the doctors giving up, right? And I remember them. One of them shrugged, he was like, well, we tried, we did everything we could, and now I finally realized that I might die. Like, I didn't know it until then.

[Dr. Randall]

And during this, they're pumping blood to you and you're just bleeding it out.

[Sebastian Junger]

It's kind of like, yeah, that's right. And also, you know, you can't just replace blood without consequences, right? I mean, you can die from blood loss with a full complement of blood in you, but blood from other people. And there's a chemical process that gets going when you experience extreme blood loss that they can't. It's called acidosis, and they can't get ahead of it and it will kill you. So I was right. I was right at the edge of where that process would start, right? And so I was barely hanging on. The nurse was there holding my hand. And that human contact was so important. I mean, literally important for survival, right? You need the doctors that you know the mechanics, but you also need some because it's very lonely. Dying is. Being a patient in a hospital is extremely lonely, right? Everyone's masked, there's very bright lights. You don't know what's going on. And so this nurse, she was holding my hand, she was like, breathe with me. It's okay. Keep your eyes open. I'm right here. And she was my lifeline. And one of the reasons I survived, I shouldn't have survived. The doctors didn't think I would, and they're sort of amazed that I did. But one of the reasons I survived was that human connection along with amazing medical. Was she. Did she have a glove on or it was skin? I don't remember. I think it was skin. I think it was skin, yeah. It was just absolutely crucial. And so I watched the doctors give up and I was like, oh, my God, I'm not going to make it And I thought I was just in for belly pain. What's going on? Right. I had no idea. And then the doctor said, why don't we try going through his left wrist? And the other doctor was like, whoa, I like the way you think that. And so because of my weird vasculature, that was a different angle of attack that the doc, the IR guy thought might work. And it did. And he saved my life. And he'd been called from dinner an hour away and had driven to the hospital to save my life. What these doctors do is just amazing. He was on call, and so they brought me up to the icu, you know, then they sedated me, they put me under, and, you know, I was in this sort of wild darkness for like a hundred years or something. Like, I felt like I was gone for a very long time. And then the next thing I knew, I heard this really intense Boston accent. A woman speaking in a. So this is on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, right? You all know the Boston accent. Not the loveliest accent on the planet, right? Pretty harsh.

[Steve Rinella]

You said that, not us.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, it's pretty harsh. Pretty harsh. Pretty harsh accent, right? And just this woman speaking a really intense Boston accent. And I'm still in darkness, right? My eyes are closed, and I'm like, where am I? Like, they probably don't have these accents anywhere you want to go later, right? Might not be a good sign.

[Steve Rinella]

Guy's getting mean.

[Sebastian Junger]

So he, I, I, I, I. I opened my eyes and she said, Congratulations, Mr. Younger. You made it. We. You almost died last night. No one thought you were going to make it. You're kind of a miracle. And I was like, well, that's some straight shooting info right there, right? And I was shocked. I had no idea I'd almost died, right? I was absolutely shocked. It's quite traumatic to find that out, right? Particularly if you have young kids. I was absolutely shocked. And she left because she was doing her rounds, and I'm a mess. I'm throwing out blood. I got wires coming out all over the place. I'm a total mess. And I couldn't stop thinking about what she told me. And she came back and she said, how you doing? I said, well, not that great, actually. Like, what you said is terrifying. I had no idea I'd almost died, and I can't stop thinking about it. And she said the wisest thing I think just about anyone has ever said to me. She said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And she walked up I later tried to find her, you know, two weeks later to find her, to thank her and ask her what did she mean? Because I made my own use of that advice, right? I'm an atheist. The word sacred is a very important word to me. And for me, it means anything that. Anything that helps preserve human dignity, like that's a sacred task. It might be a schoolteacher, it might be a shrink, it might be a nurse, it might be a minister. Sacred work happens in church as well, right? So anything that preserves human dignity. And as a journalist, on our best days, we bring back information that our country, the world, can use responsibly to help alleviate human suffering. That's a sacred job. On our best days, that's like sacred work, right? So I thought, I've been going to frontlines my whole life. I stopped after my buddy Tim was killed in Libya. I went to the ultimate frontline, my own mortality. I was allowed to come back. Did I come back with sacred information that would help myself and others face the terrifying prospect of our mortality? We're all going to face it. Do I have sacred information from this? That's the meaning I took, right? But I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, what did you mean by that? And I couldn't find her. And not only could I not find her, no one at the hospital, in the icu, no one knew who I was talking about. Like, oh, there's no one here by that description. Like, what, she totally disappeared? And she might have been a visit, you know, I'm not getting all woo woo here. Like, she might have been a visiting nurse. And just, I mean, I, who know, who knows? But I couldn't find her. And it, and it contributed to what afterwards was a terrible sense of unreality. Like, I worried when I finally got home, I started to worry that I had died and that I was imagining everything. It was my dying hallucination that I actually didn't survive.

[Dr. Randall]

Did that moment with your father in the darkness, did that stick with you through that process? Or is that something that you came back to later?

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, yeah. I mean, as soon as this nurse said that to me, I remembered my dad. I was like, oh my God. I saw my father and the pit. And that stayed with me in sort of troubling ways. I mean. So I started researching NDEs. Near death experiences, right? They're very common. They happen all over the world. They're not infinitely varied, right? They fall into three or four basic buckets. One of them being that the dead show up to either tell you to go back or help escort you across. And it's very, very common as every society in the world. It's quite a mystery. And I started researching NDEs, and there's some pretty good rational explanations rooted in medicine and neurochemistry for many of the visions that people have when they're on the threshold. I'm a rationalist and I'm like, all right, that sort of makes sense. I get it. The tunnel, the out of body experience. You can do that with drugs. You can do that in a human centrifuge, like fighter pilots undergo. The one thing that didn't quite make sense to me is the consistency of the vision, right? So many, many people see the dead when they're dying, in hospice, in ERs. I mean, it's a really, really common thing. And, you know, if you give a room full of people lsd, they will all hallucinate. There's no mystery there. The chemistry of that is well known. But they won't all hallucinate the same thing. What's odd about dying is the consistency of the hallucinations that they involve the dead. Even people that don't know they're dying, even people who don't like the dead person who showed up. Right. It's not a comforting vision, necessarily. And that's the only part of this that really made me sort of wonder, like, do we really understand anything about reality? And I went into quantum physics to try to sort of understand, like, maybe the problem is that we think we live on a flat Earth and it's actually a globe. You know, maybe the problem is this boundary between life and death that we assume is absolute. Maybe it actually isn't the boundary we think it is. And, you know, I hate the word afterlife. I think it's a misnomer and misleading. But there might be at some sort of quantum level a reality that we don't understand, involving consciousness and life and death and time and all these sort of basic components of the universe. I don't know. I'm an atheist with questions, which is a huge step for an atheist or for a person of faith. Also, if you're a person of faith and have questions, that's also a huge step in the right direction.

[Steve Rinella]

There's this guy I knew that wrote me an email one time and he had had. He was tipping over a tree. Here we are, chainsaws and trees. He was tipping over a tree and the wind picked up and he lives. And all of a sudden the tree was going away. He didn't anticipate and he tripped and fell. Jeez. And the tree landed on him. But he was in just enough of a depression where the tree didn't kill him, but it messed with him. So he had a thing like you just mentioned. He later went back a few days later. He describes going back and looking into that hole.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He's in such a weird state mentally that he went back looking in that hole half thinking that he would see himself in that hole. And he was so tripped up that he did what you said.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Where he's like, maybe I did die.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And now I'm in a weird spot.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

And he went to look.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. And weird look like he was in it.

[Steve Rinella]

Got that weird form over those next few days.

[Sebastian Junger]

You know, it's. I didn't know this, but it's really common. I talked to a woman who was rear ended by a truck at a red light. And medically she was hurt a little bit. She didn't have an nde. But after that she was just plagued with the fear that she had died in the accident and didn't know it. She was in limbo and eventually would find. And so I had the same problem. And part of my problem was that. And this is. And I'm not woo woo. I'm really not a mystic. I mean, I really am a rationalist. Right. But our rationality doesn't understand everything. And that's where I have questions. But so the dawn of the day before, right before dawn, my family and I co. Sleep. Right. So my wife and I are little girls. Sleep in the same area on the pad, on the big pad on the floor. It's like we're camping, basically, except at home. It's very, very nice. And I had a dream that I didn't know was a dream at the time, but I had a dream that my family was below me. My wife, my two little girls. And they were crying. They were crying about me and I was waving. I was like, I'm right here, it's okay. And they couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me. I was floating above them and I was in this sort of darkness looking down at them. And I was made to understand that they couldn't see me or hear me because I was dead. I was a spirit. I had died and that I was headed out and there was no going back. And that's it. And I woke up in a panic. I mean, I woke up and then was shocked to realize that I wasn't dead. I mean, that's how real the dream was. Right. And thank God that was just a dream. I was really shaken. And 36 hours later, I started dying. So when I started researching NDEs, another common NDE is that you're floating above the doctors, above your body, above your feet.

[Steve Rinella]

I was going to ask about that. The bright light and the floating.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So I started researching NDEs, and again, the rationalist explanations for most of it, I kind of buy. Right, and what are they? Oh, that the brain is being traumatized by low blood oxygen and it releases endorphins and you can hallucinate. Brains hallucinate during times of stress. There's all these just sort of neurochemical explanations that do a pretty good job at explaining most of the phenomena of NDEs, not the visions of the dead. The specificity of that can't be explained by low blood oxygen. Right. And only the dying seem to see the dead. But another common experience is sort of floating above your loved ones. Right. And so I was seized by this fear. Oh, my God, maybe I died in my sleep. Maybe the rest of it is a dying hallucination. The trip to the hospital, the return home, the tearful reunion with my children, my reading a story to my daughter, who's on my lap right at this moment. Maybe it's all a hallucination. I actually died in my sleep and my wife woke up next to her dead husband, Right. How would I know that's not true, Right? So it's really, really this. It's called derealization. It's really, really common with people who have almost died, either for medical reasons or from a near, you know, a near miss. Like, you're like your friend. And so I got pretty crazy, right? I really started. I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma is anxiety and panic, and another is depression. And I actually went through those phases, a classic trauma reaction, but I didn't know it at the time. At the time, I thought, oh, my God, it's been revealed. The word apocalypse means the revealing of all things, right? I've experienced the apocalypse. I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing of what reality actually is. It's actually, we're not here. You know, like, I really got crazy. And at one point, I went up to my poor wife. Her name. Her name's Barbara. I said, honey, just. Can you just tell me that you see me? No spouse wants to hear this, right? Can you just tell me that you see me? That I'm right in front of you, that I survived? Like, just tell me that I'm here. And she was like, yes, sweetheart, you're here. I see you. You survived for the last time. You're fine.

[Steve Rinella]

Can you please take the garbage off?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah. Can you please take.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, exactly.

[Sebastian Junger]

How about them dishes? Right? But in my mind, I was like, that's exactly what a hallucination would tell you to maintain the hallucination. I didn't believe it. And she eventually said to me, and another very profound, like, this nurse, like, incredibly profound thing, she said, okay, Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you?

[Steve Rinella]

Hmm?

[Sebastian Junger]

Right? Not. Not that you survived. Of course you're lucky you survived. But if you could push a button and have none of it have happened, would you push that button? And I know what she was talking about, because on the one hand, I'm sort of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead or the reality doesn't exist or what, all these existentially epistemological sort of terrors. Right. On the other hand, I was sort of allowed to look over the final precipice and return home. I had a special trip, right? Like, I was granted special access. I didn't have to pay with my life. I was allowed to come back and, like, was I lucky or unlucky? And I couldn't answer. I didn't know. And it really tormented me that I couldn't answer that question. And I finally answered it by putting it in more sort of mythological terms. I was like, all right. She's really saying, am I blessed or cursed? Right. And often when I'm at a sort of dead end in my work, I'll look up the etymology, the origins of the important words in the topic that I'm researching to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what significance they attach to these words.

[Steve Rinella]

Give me an example what you mean.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, I will. I will right now with the word blessing. So the word curse. Curse, no one knows what its origin is. It's a total blank. Like, nobody know. There's no known origin for the word curse. But blessed, yeah, but blessing, there's some theories that is related to the word course, like a course that you're on that you can't deviate from. There's some theories, but no one knows with blessing. They do know what the origin is and from the Anglo Saxon word bletsian, which means blood. And the idea was that there is no blessing without a wounding, that the shedding of blood actually confers the blessing. Right. So battlefields are sacred because blood was shed on them. Oh, wow.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

Childbirth is sacred because blood is Lost. And they think it might date back to the pre Christian rituals of animal sacrifice where you kill the sheep or whatever and the spilling of the sheep's blood is what makes that moment and that place sacred. And so it suddenly I got it, I was like, oh, it's not that. It's always they're twin. Blessed and cursed are twin. They're part of the same thing. Right. And so you actually, it's a false question. You don't choose. You don't even get to choose. If you're blessed, you're also cursed. If you're cursed, you might also be blessed. And the story of Jacob actually goes right back to that. He is crippled by. He wrestles with God and is crippled by God, but also blessed. Like God bless, unjoints his hip and cripples him for life and, and blesses him at the same time. And so it's a very ancient human, human thought. And that just relieved me for some reason and helped relieve me of this sort of like unanswerable terror.

[Steve Rinella]

If you might go, so in the next 20 years, this is going to happen again sometime.

[Sebastian Junger]

Maybe more of the aneurysm.

[Steve Rinella]

No, no. That you're going to die.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, they're going to die. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you. How did this shape your. Yeah, how did this shape your awareness that you'll have that you'll do this again? You know, you'll, like, you'll, you'll have another moment and maybe there will be the hole and in your dad, you know.

[Sebastian Junger]

You know, if, if part of my unconsciously, I think, part of my horror at, you know, if I was, if I was in a lot of pain and dying of cancer, I think my dad would have been a blessing and a relief to see and I would have thrown my arms around him like, please take me away from my pain wracked body. I'm done. Right. Thank you. And one of the problems was that I was in the midst of my life. I had young children and being taken away felt unimaginably tragic. And so if I live long enough that my girls are okay on their own, that my wife is not left as a single mom, that everything's okay, you know, I'm going to miss them, but, you know, but I'll be at peace with it. You're not, you know, you leave children behind. You're not at peace. I mean, you know what I mean? Like you're a dad. I mean, imagine, right? Like, so it's the worst thought. It's the worst thought. And that I'm going and I won't be around to protect them if they need it and to love them when they need it. And it's unthinkable, right? And so it's the point of my. I'm an older dad. My first daughter was born when I was 55. Being a dad is what I'm doing, right? I'm not, you know, I write books as I need to make a living. I don't. I could care less, right? Being a dad is what I'm doing. It's the center of my identity, my existence. And if I can get through to where they're okay, like, you know, I'm good.

[Steve Rinella]

In your research, what did you turn up about that feeling of your life? People that have that they'd say their life passed before their eyes. What's going on there?

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, again, we don't know the answers to these things, but on a sort of neurochemical level, the brain gets very active when you're dying. And they've actually monitored people's brains while they were dying because they had to for other medical reasons. They needed to know what was going on with the brain. And they were actually able to watch the gamma rays and the gamma waves and the different waves in the brain that are part of consciousness. They got to watch them change around the moment of death. And one of the things that happens as you die is that the parts of the brain that are engaged in memory activate when you die, right? So like when you're dreaming, like you can have a dream that feels like it takes, you know, 10 minutes, right? And they know that those, you know, supposedly 10 minute dreams happen in seconds, right? So one of the things that might be happening when. And this is in the neurochemical part side of the explanation for what? For NDEs, one of the things that might be happening is that equivalent to a dream that you have an experience of a long, you know, vast amount of time and a vast sort of perspective, right? You're seeing all of life in one moment. The kind of overarching knowledge that you can have with dreams. Like in dreams, you sort of understand things that you can't understand. You know, there's this sort of all encompassing knowledge sometimes. So that might be what's going on with that. And let me just say that there could be neurochem, perfectly good neurochemical explanations for NDEs and also a part of NDEs which neurochemistry can't explain that do tie into some basic question about quantum physics. And what is reality? What is Consciousness. I mean, the Quantum physicists of 100 years ago realized that conscious observation changes quantum reality. Like, if you observe quantum reality, if a conscious observer observes quantum reality, it changes it. And so the obvious question is, does consciousness in the universe, human and otherwise, there's consciousness in the universe, create the universe that that consciousness then exists in? Right. I mean, it's a profound question. So when you're talking on those terms, the idea that the consciousness that you enjoy when you're alive, that there's some other version of it that continues on as part of the universe, a kind of universal consciousness, continues on after you die, it's not an insane question, right? It's a legitimate question. Question.

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[Steve Rinella]

You're getting it. Like this stuff. You know, I was saying earlier about if I don't understand something, I try to ask. No, I can't, because I know that I can't understand quantum mechanics, quantum physics. But there's a thing that. There's a trippy thing like if. If everything. If everything in the universe, like, if everything's electrochemical, with life, it's all electrochemical, you get into this problem where there cannot be free will. Right. Like, if everything is right, happens according to physics, and you go like, well, life is electrochemical.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right? Right.

[Steve Rinella]

There's no room then, like, then someone, then a really good person who's really good at predictive modeling, right. Would be able to all. You'd be able to, like, run all of it and predict the future. Because everything is electrochemical. Everything conforms to physics, you know, so when you get a lot of stuff, it's just like. It's kind of like when you're sitting there and you're looking outer space and you're like, even if there was like a big brick wall out there, there's on the other side of the brick wall.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, the sort of like joker card in the deck, there is consciousness is. Scientists don't understand. They can't even define what it is. Right. The definition is Something around the ability to think about itself. Right. Sort of self reflective, but they don't have a good explanation or a good definition of it. And they have no explanation for it. Right. And the fact that consciousness can, can determine outcomes in the physical world simply because it exists and is observing. So basically, if that's possible, all bets are out. All bets are off, sort of. Right. So you're right in a purely mechanistic universe. But how do you fit consciousness into a mechanistic universe? And it doesn't seem to be. Consciousness resides in the brain, which is sort of electrical, chemical like process, but it doesn't itself have, it's not itself manifested physically, consciousness itself. Right. But it can affect the physical world in profound ways, at least at the quantum level. So, and let me just say, you don't understand quantum physics, neither do quantum physicists. Right? I mean, that's the great mystery. Like, you know, what they've shown is that things happen in the quantum world that sort of don't make sense in the macroscopic world. Right. But it doesn't mean they can't explain why. Right? And for that matter, they can't explain why there's a universe. I mean, there really shouldn't be a universe. And the universe, basically religion and physics, they're closer than you might think. So in religion you have to believe that God is self creating.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

Otherwise you're stuck with, oh well, someone created God, why aren't we worshiping that entity? Right. Like God has to be self creating. From that point onwards, it all works fine. If you just take that leap, like work with me here. God self creating, and then from now on we just believe in that God, we're all good, right? Quantum physics is the same or physics is the same way in some ways, like the universe is self creating. After that we can explain everything. Right? So there's a similar act of faith, this leap that both have to take. I'm not saying that they're intellectually equivalent. I think religion is a story and physics is an attempt at an explanation. And stories and explanations are very, very different beasts. Right. But on some level, they both require an act of faith that is probably beyond human comprehension.

[Dr. Randall]

When you, when you finished the book, did you end that process with like, like, did you have your, did you now have like your own understanding or your own ideas of stuff? Or were you just like man, I don't know, I'd still.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, of course I don't know, right? I mean, I'm like, yeah, like, did you feel better? More like I'M was. Yeah. So there's this idea about consciousness affecting the physical world at a macroscopic level. I mean, so one of the proposals is that consciousness, like gravity, is essential to the physical reality of the universe. I mean, it suffuses the entire thing. It's not visible, but it makes the entire thing possible. Without gravity, there wouldn't be a universe, there wouldn't be planets, there wouldn't be anything. Right. Magnetism, likewise, these sort of like, invisible forces. And, you know, we get used to the idea of gravity, but if you didn't know anything and someone said to you, you know what? There's this invisible force, and the closer two objects are to each other, the stronger the force is. And if you throw a rock out a window, like, why wouldn't it float in midair? Right? It doesn't. Because of this invisible force called gravity. And it exists throughout the universe. And we don't know why. That would sound like the rantings of a schizophrenic. Right. I'm sorry. Likewise with consciousness. And so there's a proposal, there's a sort of serious proposal that consciousness is part of the physical manifestation of the universe, like gravity is, and that our individual consciousness returns to that greater entity when we die. And it's, you know, you can't prove it or disprove it. It's a sort of pleasing theory for me as an atheist. It gave me a sort of slightly more comfortable place rather than the just pure nihilism of we're a bunch of cells and when we die, we're done. I also don't want to have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now for eternity. Like, thank you. No, Right, Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I had a moment of panic earlier in this conversation when I was starting to contemplate that possibility.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I mean, it's like, careful what you ask for, right. I mean, 80 years is a long time, and we sort of limp through it at the end thinking, thank God there's a finish line here in some ways. Right? But imagine an eternity of conscience. I mean, just. Do you remember what math class felt like in fifth grade? Like, imagine that for eternity, right? Like, just, will this never end like that? That's where I don't quite get about people of faith wanting an afterlife. I think they want to see their loved ones is what's going on.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Let me hit you with another one. That used to. That troubled me for a while. I had a scary thing happen one time, and. And I had that feeling of things. I had that feeling of. Of my focus becoming singular and, and reading about why that was like a feeling of, like, slowing down. Things slow down. And then I was intensely focused on a thing and I was reading about that. People in. People in traumatic experiences, people near and experiences. It's not so much near death experiences, but people in proximity to that. There's like two paths. And the example that I read about one day was that there's an explosion, okay, and there's chaos. Some people can be in that moment and there's an arm on the ground. The only thing they see right is the arm on the ground. And they just get lost in like a sort of timeless consideration of the arm on the ground, right? There's people that. All they see is everything, right? It's utter chaos. Nothing makes sense. And then there's people that are like, that guy needs help, that's happening, that's going to fall, right? And in certain disciplines, they're looking for the people that don't have those. And your experiences in war and your experience with death, have you ever grappled with that or did you find any of that, anything in your research about these different sort of responses people have?

[Sebastian Junger]

I mean, I've had all. I think we're all capable of all of them. I don't think there are, you know, like, rigid categories where some people do this, some people do that. You know, partly depends on how much preparation you have. And, you know, one of the things they do when they train firemen or they train soldiers or what have you, is they just get them to rehearse and practice the, the actions they'll need to take in a crisis moment over and over and over again so that, you know, they teach paratroopers how to jump out of airplanes, you know, that, you know, they got that muscle memory of whatever they do, you know, count to count to five and whatever, you know, whatever it is, like, they get that muscle memory down so that it doesn't depend on deliberate, deliberate thought. And so there's a lot of tactics in combat that are somewhat formulaic, like football is, right? I mean, there's a sort of team. Team coordination that doesn't have to be thought about in detail in order to be enacted. And if you have no training like that, your brain hasn't been properly formatted for that kind of situation, and it's scrambling to get enough information to make a good decision. And then, of course, people go into shock. And so I've had all of them. I mean, one time we got hit when I was with American soldiers. We got hit very unexpectedly, very hard. And for, I don't know, about 20 seconds, I was frozen. Like, I just couldn't move. Right. I mean, there was bullets hitting the ground like, and then I snapped out of it and I was hyper functional. Other times I've, I.

[Steve Rinella]

In that 20 seconds, where were you mentally? Were you on an object or like what was your focus?

[Sebastian Junger]

It was a blur, right. And I couldn't keep up with the blur, so I couldn't make good decisions. Cause it was like this jumbled blur. And my buddy Tim was behind a hesco barrier and we were taking a huge amount of fire. And one of the problems was I didn't have my camera and my bulletproof vest. If you're in a situation and you have a job to do, you're a medic, you're a journalist, you're a soldier, you're a parent with a child who's in danger, you know, whatever it is you had a job to do, like that's a refuge from your fear. The job you have to do provides a shelter from your own feelings of fear and self concern. If you have no job to do because you're not holding your camera, fear just moves in and sets up camp, right. And so Tim threw across, we were this far away, like between me and you, like 5ft. There was too much gunfire and he threw me my bulletproof vest and, and my camera. And as soon as I was like geared up, boom, I was good, right?

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah.

[Sebastian Junger]

And so that gives you insight into how soldiers perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they got the gear, the tools they need. They have something they have to do. They're not thinking about their own fear because they are charged with such responsibility for each other. And it looks from the outside it looks like bravery actually. Those roles that soldiers play in combat are very powerful. Protection from fear, you understand? You don't have to overcome fear to do them. They are a protection from the fear, as would be true if. I mean, I find grizzly bears absolutely terrifying. Right. If my child was in danger from a grizzly bear, I don't think I would find the grizzly bear terrifying. I would try to distract it. You know what I mean? Totally changes that fear equation.

[Steve Rinella]

I was with my fire one of my buddies who's a firefighter yesterday and it kind of seems random, but we're, we're looking like, we're looking at this thing in my yard and there's a big cobweb, okay. And I wanted to clean this trough out And I was saying that I was gonna have my kids do it, but my daughter. That I've come to respect my daughter's hatred of spiders.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And I'm like, it's her. I was like, dude, you could hand my daughter anything on the planet. She's gonna grab it if I said to grab it. Unless it's got a cobweb on it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

And he. He says, for me, it's eyeballs. That's the words. It seems avoidable. You go, not my line of work.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah, I know. I can see. Yeah. One. One traumatic incident. Yeah. And then it's locked in eyeballs like, no, thank you. No. I mean, I'm. I have arachnophobia since I was a young child. I sympathize with your daughter. I mean, I remember at one point I was sort of joking around. I said to my wife, listen, I'll protect you and the family from anything. Grizzly bears, home, intruders, whatever. Anything except black widows. Except spiders. Like, we're camping in the southwest and there's a tarantula. It's yours. Like, I'm not doing it. And you can tell it's a phobia because someone. People with phobia, phobias have trouble even looking at a photograph of the thing they're scared of. Right. I know tarantulas tested this out.

[Steve Rinella]

I was skeptical. I've tested it out. It's legit.

[Sebastian Junger]

It's legit.

[Steve Rinella]

And I've come to accept it. I used to be like, give me a break.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. No, it's. And it has nothing to do with the danger that's posed. Right. And that's where the photo comes in. You can't even look at a photo. It's a really deep suited, deep seated panic reaction. You can't. You can't just turn it off.

[Steve Rinella]

You know what's. What's interesting about it is she has incredible detection skills. Like, I wish she was afraid of deer. She'll come in the room. Like, if she walked in this room and there's a spider, like, you know, somewhere. Yeah. On it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Steve Rinella]

That's a great skill.

[Sebastian Junger]

Oh, totally.

[Steve Rinella]

But just applied to something I'm not interested in. Well, if she was in the tribe, that would be her job.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Spider.

[Steve Rinella]

You know, I feel like you sort of have our own little.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

What are you gonna work on next?

[Sebastian Junger]

I don't know.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you searching a little bit?

[Sebastian Junger]

I mean, this, you know, this. This book felt. Felt like a sort of capstone of my career. You know, I'm 63. And it's about such an ultimate question that it was hard to think about something, you know, then what's next? After writing about what? You know, life, you know, like, what are you gonna.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, you can write a book about what you ought to have done different.

[Sebastian Junger]

That's right. So. So I don't know. I'm. You know, I'm. I'm. I've spent a lot of time as a dad, as a parent, and my wife had, you know, pretty major surgery last fall, so we've been sort of in a fallow period because of that as well. She's coming out of it, so I, you know, something good to work on something. I don't. I don't know. Quite wet yet.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, but you might wrap it up.

[Sebastian Junger]

No, I love writing. I mean, it's like I. You know, I'm. I love running. You know, I'm. I. I don't run races anymore, but I love the act of running, so I still run, and I love the act of writing. Like, it's just. It's. It's one of my. One of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.

[Steve Rinella]

And you like the act of it?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, I love it.

[Steve Rinella]

Doing it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Doing it. God.

[Steve Rinella]

Hate doing it. I only like having done it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right. We are people that treat running like that. Right. I don't like doing it, but I love it afterwards. Right. And. No, I. I love it. It's. It's a. It's a higher state of mind for me.

[Steve Rinella]

Doing it.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Good for you.

[Sebastian Junger]

Not always. Not always, but when it's. When it's good. You know, musicians say the same thing. Right. You know, when they're really.

[Steve Rinella]

That's on fun, man. That's like.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, for me. For me, it's a kind of music. I mean, the sentences have to have cadence, they have to have rhythm, and they got, you know, like. There's a lot of musical components for me to the experience of writing.

[Steve Rinella]

Are you familiar with the writer Ian Frazier?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. He once told me that, you know, he wrote a lot of humor. He was a humorist. I mean, some of his stuff is very. I mean, he wrote about Stalin and, you know, the pogroms, but he also wrote a lot of humor. And he said when he wanted to be a writer, when he was young and he wanted to be a writer, he always imagined a writer sitting at his typewriter, chuckling to himself. I didn't want him not being that way.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, right, right, right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

You know who's got an interesting philosophy about, like, you're talking about whether you'll do another one. I don't know if you're a Quentin Tarantino fan. I am, yeah, sure. Very much so. I don't know if he'll stay true to it, but he has said for a long time, I will make 10 movies. I've made nine.

[Sebastian Junger]

Wow.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah, Annette, we'll see.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Dr. Randall]

I want to turn into a washed up director.

[Steve Rinella]

I'm like, I'm like, skeptical.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

He's. He's gonna do 10 and then.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to picture the.

[Steve Rinella]

End, man, but it all ties into that mortality, you know?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. And I'm not gonna write a book just because I should write a book. Like, it has to be a topic that I find so compelling that I can't not. Right. Like, that's, that's where. That's what it has to feel like.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. David Grant, you know, the writer David Graham.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, of course.

[Steve Rinella]

He, when he was on. He came on recently after finishing the Wager, and I just found it interesting. He was like, actively searching.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Do you know what I mean?

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

He was hunting for a topic.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

Which is cool.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. It's a different way to do it. I mean, it's, you know, it's. I feel like it kind of has to come to you, like, falling in love. If you're actively looking for your. Your wife out there, like, you may not. You may not find her, you know, you may not recognize, like. And I feel like it's a little bit like that. Like, if you're, if you're trying, trying too hard at it, like, you won't see the essential things that you need, the essential qualities that you need in that thing. You won't. You might not see them, you know, And I feel like it's, you know, I feel that way about God as well. Like, sometimes people are like, are you kidding? You're still an atheist. You haven't found God. I'm like, look, God has to find me. Right. I mean, if I'm making a decision to believe in God, it's a decision and it doesn't have much content to it. Right.

[Steve Rinella]

Like, I don't know. I don't understand what you mean.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, my understanding about faith is that it's an overwhelming feeling of love and connection. Right. So it's like, if you're just deciding to marry Susie, you might not be in love with Susie. Right. It's a higher level decision about something you want to have in your life. Fine, no problem. Right. But that's not. I'm not sure that that's love. Right. And likewise, a higher level decision to. Oh, now I'm going to believe in God. I was mortally terrified. I almost died. Now I'm going to believe in God just to be on the safe side because maybe he gave me a break. That isn't what religion really should be about. Religion should be about an overwhelming feeling of connection and love and that, like, love for another person. I think it has to find you if you're out seeking.

[Steve Rinella]

I understand.

[Sebastian Junger]

You don't understand what I'm saying. So, like, if somehow God came to me in some form and overwhelmed me in a moment with a profound feeling of connection, I'd be like, okay, you convinced me. I got it right. I wasn't looking for you. You found me. I'm all ears. What more do you got to say? I'll listen.

[Steve Rinella]

We just released this. It wasn't our project in this room, but one of our guys on our network had this episode that he made. He does these kind of mini documentaries, audio documentaries, you know, so what the hell? What's the word I'm looking for? What's an audio documentary? Bear Grease.

[Sebastian Junger]

Podcast.

[Steve Rinella]

I know.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

But no, maybe you could have a podcast.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

I don't know. Yeah, that's just like a distribution platform. Right.

[Sebastian Junger]

Whatever.

[Dr. Randall]

You're right. It's like a documentary.

[Steve Rinella]

Yeah. Anyhow, he's doing this bit on this guy and the guy has. What you're talking about. The guy has an epiphany in a moment.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

And was an addict, you know.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right.

[Steve Rinella]

And he describes, like, where he's standing on what day, what was happening, and all of a sudden, like, all was made clear.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right, right.

[Steve Rinella]

And dropped his addictions.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah.

[Steve Rinella]

Committed himself to his wife. You know what I mean?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yep.

[Steve Rinella]

And it was like he had like an epiphany. Well, that's like he got overwhelmed.

[Sebastian Junger]

Right. And that's. That's very powerful. I mean, for me, I would need evidence to believe in God. I need evidence of God. Right. Like, I believe in gravity because there's evidence that gravity, you know, throw a rock out a window, it will fall. I believe in gravity. I need evidence of God. And for me, evidence of God would be that God suddenly presents. I'm going to have to say itself, because the idea of applying gender to God is silly itself in my life in an overwhelming way where I cannot turn away. And I'm. I'm like, okay, that, that passes the test, you know? Right.

[Steve Rinella]

A lot of dudes listening are like, it happened when he almost died.

[Sebastian Junger]

Well, no, except I didn't see God, right? Like, I mean, I mean, I saw my dad, right? And I saw the nurse and the, you know, I actually did not see God. And if I had, we'd be. We might be having a different podcast right now, right? Or. But I didn't. The things that I saw were very real world and mundane. And one of them I can't explain, which is my dead father hovering above me. But it may just be I can't explain him because our minds, our human minds are sufficiently limited that that ultimate reality is not accessible to us.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, man, I'm glad you pulled through.

[Sebastian Junger]

Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Steve Rinella]

Thanks for coming on the show. Do you mind? What's the best way for people to go? Do we have a good list of all your books here on our documents?

[Sebastian Junger]

I'll rattle them off right now.

[Steve Rinella]

Rattle them off, man. You had a book about. You had a book about a murder, like do the whole thing?

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So my first book was called the Perfect Storm. It was about this huge storm in 1991. Sword fishing boat that was lost offshore, 100 foot waves, et cetera. My next book was called Fire. It was a collection of my long form journalism, including quite a lot about wildland firefighting, hotshot crews. And then after that was a death in Belmont when I was six months old. My parents, we lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. My parents were building an addition to their house. And One of the three carpenters was a guy named Al, Al DeSalvo. And he, a couple of years after they finished building the addition to the house, Al confessed to being the Boston Strangler. And he actually, he was killing people while he was working at our house. And there was a murder down the street that was a classic Boston strangling. But a black handyman from Mississippi happened to have cleaned this lady's house that day, left his phone number on the counter. The police got the phone number, chased him down. He was convicted and sent to prison. He died in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit. And no one knew that Al DeSalvo was down the street at our house that day, all day by himself, that he might have committed the murder. So a death in Belmont is about that possibility. It's a cold case, whodunit, basically. After that I wrote a book called War about this platoon in the 173rd Airborne that I was with off and on for a year in the Korengal Valley. I also shot a lot of video with my buddy Tim and We made a documentary called Verstreppo. I was nominated for an Academy Award a couple months after we were at the Oscars. We didn't win, but a couple months later, we were supposed to go on assignment to Libya together to cover the Arab Spring. And at the last moment, I couldn't go. And Tim was killed. He died of blood loss from a shrapnel wound in his groin in the city of Misrata. And after that, I decided to give up war reporting and I wrote a book called Tribe, about community and how it works and how soldiers experience it, Native Americans and how the loss of community has affected people in this country and the nation as a whole. And after that, I wrote a book called Freedom. It was an examination of successful underdog groups and how they defeat greater powers. Like, if smaller individuals couldn't defeat larger individuals in combat, or if smaller groups couldn't defeat larger groups, the empire would always win. Right? I mean, the world would be made up of like fascist coalitions and. But that's actually not true. Like under. Smaller underdog groups are very, actually very good at winning as long as they have certain attributes. And so the book, my book Freedom goes into what those characteristics are that allow smaller groups or smaller individuals to win over larger, more powerful adversaries.

[Steve Rinella]

Like why did the Americans win the revolution? Why did the Viet Cong win Vietnam?

[Sebastian Junger]

Exactly, exactly. And the problem, you know, just the brief, the very brief version, is with strength and size comes a loss of mobility, a loss of agility. That's true for an individual in a boxing ring. It's also true for, for the US military or any military. And the smaller you are, the faster you are. And that can more than compensate for your lack of size and strength. So without that unique trait, it's unique to humans and every other species. Size wins, Size dominates. Right. Only in humans can the smaller entity win. And that allows for human freedom, for human autonomy, self definition, you know. And then finally, my recent book is called In My Time of Dying, and it's about my near death experience and what that might mean for all of us facing our mortality and what it might mean for how we understand the universe to function. Great.

[Steve Rinella]

And then you have a website, like how people want to track you down, not you down personally, but go find like a collection of all your stuff.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, obviously on Amazon or your local bookstore, it's easy to get.

[Steve Rinella]

Well, you probably have one of those author profiles on there where people can see everything packaged on Amazon and stuff.

[Sebastian Junger]

Yeah, yeah. But you can Also go on SebastianYounger.com is my website and it's J-U-N-G-E R SebastianYounger.com and all my stuff is there as well.

[Steve Rinella]

Thanks for doing the show man. Appreciate it.

[Sebastian Junger]

I loved it. That was a wonderful conversation. Thank you very much.

[Steve Rinella]

Thanks. Steve Rinella here the American west with Dan Flores is a new podcast production on the Meat Eater Podcast Network. It's hosted by author and historian Dan Flores, who happens to be mine and our own Dr. Randall's former professor. By focusing on deep time wild animals, native peoples in the West's unique environments, Flores will challenge your understanding of the American west and he will help to explain why it is the way it is today. I count Dan Flores as a friend. We do not agree on everything, but he has had a massive impact on my understanding of American history and I invite you to get challenged by him in the same way that I have. Catch the premiere of the American west with Dan flores on Tuesday, May 6th on the meat Eater Podcast Network. Subscribe to the American west with Dan Flores On Apple, Spotify, iHeart or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Dan and it will stretch your brain all out and I mean that in a very good way. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.