Ep. 708: A Near Death Experience with Sebastian Junger

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Sebastian Junger https://www.instagram.com/sebastianjungerofficial/, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/, Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/, Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en, and Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en. Topics discussed: In My Time of Dying https://www.sebastianjunger.com/in-my-time-of-dying, The Perfect Storm https://www.sebastianjunger.com/the-perfect-storm, Fire https://www.sebastianjunger.com/fire-by-sebastian-junger, and Sebastian’s other books; climbing trees; embedding with U. S. troops in Afghanistan; dangerous work; swordfish long liners; when you think you’re about to be executed; massive internal bleeding and going into shock; the black void and near death experiences; defining “sacred” as preserving human dignity; consciousness; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 2:35Speaker 02

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• 3:06Steven Rinella?

  Good Lord. Joined today by Sebastian Younger journalist bestselling 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 best seller, 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.

• 3:51Steven Rinella?

  The paperback version, who knows? If you're looking to save a few bucks, you might have to wait indefinitely. Spring of 26. So I'd recommend going and 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 our stuff. Man, Sebastian, when you're.

• 4:30Steven Rinella?

  When, when, when the perfect storm came out?

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:34Steven Rinella?

  Dude, that hit me hard, like in a good way, but you know what? One of the biggest things is, uh, I used to be a tree, a climber for a tree service.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Really?

• 4:42Steven Rinella?

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

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:45Steven Rinella?

  You were a tree service climber, had a chainsaw injury.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:49Steven Rinella?

  What was the chainsaw injury?

• 4:51Speaker 03

  So I was, 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.

• 4:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, insurance work.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  Uh, I was just doing work for home, homeowners that needed cheap tree work and I was sort of a one man show and, um, 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, uh, I, um, I was, I, I had, you know, I had a little climbing saw and I was working in a big elm and, uh, and there was a little sucker that was like between my ankles, like it's sort of getting in the way, like a tiny little branch, right? And I just reached down, I was, I was in the flow, right? I mean, I was sort of moving, right? And I would just reach down to zip it. Uh, this little sucker to sort of zip it so it would, it wouldn't like tangle up my feet.

• 5:42Speaker 03

  And I was just sloppy and in a hurry and the, the tip of the, uh, bar hit the tree and popped up in the back of my ankle. And, uh, it was, I wasn't spiking it. So I was wearing, uh, I wasn't wearing big leather boots, right? Cause I wasn't spiking the tree. It was a prune. And, uh, and it just went right into the back of my ankle and I, it didn't hurt, but I was like, something hit my ankle. The only thing moving down there was the chainsaw. I gotta, I should just at least take a look to make sure I'm all right. And, uh, turned off the saw and clipped it on my, my belt and, uh, and pulled my pant leg up and, uh, sure enough. So I could see my Achilles tendon. I mean, I was looking at it, right? And, but it wasn't severed. It wasn't cut. It just had been laid open.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  And I rappelled down to the, you know, the ground and my crew took me, took me to a sort of urgent care place and they sewed me up. And but it got me, I, I was limping for quite a while and it, 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, you know, commercial fishermen. And no one's really thinking about them and they're taking casualty rates that, you know, are sometimes comparable to units in the US military, right? I mean, it's like it, there's, the, the commercial fishing industry is, is deadly, right? And so I thought, I'm going to write about dangerous work and because it's no one's thinking about it and these people deserve some, some love, basically.

• 7:11Steven Rinella?

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

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd spent my, I'd sort of muddled my way through my twenties trying to figure out how to be a freelance writer and, you know, which, you know, I waited tables for a while, 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 80 feet 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 going to get killed doing tree work is because you screwed up.

• 7:41Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  You know, it's like chess. You don't lose a chess because you rolled the dice wrong, right? You, 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 going to be all right. So really focus, be in the moment right now and, and, and be perfect. And there was a, almost a sort of zen discipline to that mindset that I really, really liked.

• 8:05Steven Rinella?

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

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, at the, no, except that at the time I'd moved up to a fishing town called Gloucester.

• 8:17Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  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, uh, 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, a long line.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  What year was that again, that storm?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  1991. And then there were these crazy rescues as well, and the seas offshore were measured at a hundred feet, which was sort of record setting. The offshore data buoys were registering a hundred feet and-

• 9:07Steven Rinella?

  Dude, you can't, you can't even like a, do you know what I mean?

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  You can't picture it.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 9:12Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you gotta picture-

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Five feet in a skiff is like, oh my God, I'm gonna die.

• 9:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, 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're sub, you're sub wave.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:35Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like when you look, it's just water. Hundred foot waves.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and this was a 68 foot steel hulled long lining. Long liner, um, and, uh, but still 68 feet in the, in seas of 70, 80 feet, 90 feet is, it'll, it'll get overwhelmed, right? It can be flipped end over end, pitch pulled, rolled, you know, all kinds of things can happen.

• 9:56Steven Rinella?

  Has that, did that boat ever get recovered?

• 9:57Speaker 03

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

• 10:02Steven Rinella?

  I, uh, 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 and you're like, this can't happen on earth.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:21Steven Rinella?

  Did you ever talk to people who had been in seas like that and what, as far as like what they're, how, how accurately that captured the?

• 10:29Speaker 03

  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 on that topic, but, yeah, I mean, the boat disappeared and 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, um,

• 10:51Speaker 03

  I even talked to a guy named Ernie Hazard, whose boat was pitch pulled off Georgia'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, and he managed to, on a lungful 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, you know, the

• 11:36Speaker 03

  waves, they're, they're huge. And the, the problem isn't that their individual waves are that big that they will, but they'll converge. Like waves will, they're coming at 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.

• 11:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. God, man. Yeah.

• 11:58Steven 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, 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, 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?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  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, a sort of, a personal decision about what fascinated me actually coincided with something that turned out to be a great commercial decision. And I, you know, 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 Stutz Turkle wrote a great book called Working. It was an oral history of work, an amazing book,

• 13:13Speaker 03

  but it wasn't focused on dangerous work, right? And, you know, I just, I just thought this is, you know, there was a, 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, and so I just, all of that was really compelling to me. And, 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, you know, it works.

• 13:56Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you intentionally steer clear of some of the broader geopolitical concerns? When you're getting, like, if you get into, if you're talking about oil workers, you, you don't want to set it up like it's a debate about dependence on oil.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:14Steven Rinella?

  Right? If you're talking about timber, you're not setting it up that it's a debate about how much old growth logging is too much. Like, you try to really focus on these people that are, focus on the lives of people who

• 14:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:30Steven Rinella?

  Are, it's kind of hard to put like Randall and 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, their desire to participate, or their moving in to participate is, is like politically agnostic. It's like they're doing it because that's what, that's what's available to them.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  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, you know, whatever. There's people doing really good work about the urgent issues of our day, the economy, the climate, you know, whatever, you name it, right? I'm not that guy, right? Like, what really, and it interests me because I'm a part of the planet and part of this country, and I'm invested in the out, 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, in my career,

• 15:41Speaker 03

  but, you know, many years later, when I was embedded with US forces in Afghanistan, you know, I had plenty of personal opinions about the war, you know, and some, some positives, 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, in those guys. And they were, they themselves were not thinking about the war in large-scale terms. They just weren't thinking about it, right?

• 16:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  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 sentence. 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, why, why would they? You know, like, why would they think about the larger issues? They're, they're, they're already have their hands full just doing the job that's right in front of them.

• 16:44Steven Rinella?

  When, if, if you go back to look at your work with, your work with Swordfish Longliners, where there's a disaster and lives are lost, and then you come in after and, and explain that. To go, to become a war correspondent, you're like a...

• 17:05Steven Rinella?

  You're you're not in the after. It's like you're in the mix.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:09Steven Rinella?

  Do you mean that that like it it it puts you on the long line boat?

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:15Steven Rinella?

  In the storm.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:16Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what was that like? What? How would that with your family, friends? Did they? 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.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  Do I call the Pentagon? You know, how do I? How do I get this rolling?

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I 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 and myself, I would have loved to have been on a hotshot crew. I just didn't know the the 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 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.

• 18:08Steven Rinella?

  Well, hold on 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? They did? Okay.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:15Steven 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 harms way for.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  No, they just put they just put me on a helicopter and dropped me in and.

• 18:24Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. And I mean, with absolutely no, I had absolutely no credentials or anything. I mean, I just showed up.

• 18:32Steven Rinella?

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

• 18:37Speaker 03

  It was the early 90s, right? I don't, you know, maybe different now, but I showed up. I was like, hey, I'm, 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, on a huge fire. Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  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?

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Well, you know, most wars are don't involve the US military and most wars in the world.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  So there isn't a government agency involved in whether you can go to Sierra Leone.

• 19:12Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  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, uh, in Kabul.

• 19:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz you interviewed, you interviewed Ahmad.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Hamid Masood, yes.

• 19:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Hamid Shah Masood.

• 19:31Steven Rinella?

  And he was, he was killed.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:32Steven Rinella?

  He was killed by later interviewers.

• 19:34Speaker 03

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

• 19:45Steven Rinella?

  God, that's incredible, man.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  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 Masood. And spend a couple of months with him, fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. They have nothing to do with that. 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 US forces.

• 20:08Steven Rinella?

  It's just been you try to get closer, closer, closer.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:11Steven Rinella?

  Until you're in it.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  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 and Ukraine. Except on a much smaller scale, right? It's not Russia and Ukraine. It's the Bosnian Serbs and in Bosnia. Um, but the same sort of awful shelling of civilians. They besieged Sarajevo. It was an ethnic, um, ethnically driven con- uh, conflict, you know, sort of a nationalistic conflict and, and grotesque, grotesquely violent. And I, you know, I managed to convince a magazine editor I knew at a magazine called Men's Journal, which was back in the day, a pretty good magazine.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  And they, he, he, he gave, he gave me a sort of letter of passage, like Sebastian is working on a piece for us, which wasn't even true. For, for the war, civil war in Bosnia and please, you know, help him in any way you can. I just like 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, and no credentials from anybody, right? But there were a lot of freelancers in Sarajevo who made their, made their bones. I mean, it's sort of like learned the craft because they just put themselves in that situation. Started freelancing, radio, newspaper. You know, I went there, basically the girlfriend I was living with in Gloucester dumped me. And I was, you know.

• 21:34Steven Rinella?

  Look, I'll show her you.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  I show totally. So I was sort of heartbroken and like, oh, I could, you mean, I could 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 people in your life. And so I went to Sorry, when 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.

• 22:04Steven Rinella?

  You know, eight, so, oh, sorry. I was gonna say, there's a, there's a book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I met him. I met him in Bosnia in 93.

• 22:15Steven Rinella?

  I mean, I remember reading, 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.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. He was probably dumped by his girlfriend also.

• 22:29Steven 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.

• 22:40Steven Rinella?

  And I realized when I was, I topped my last, I topped my last big tree.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:46Steven Rinella?

  And, um,

• 22:48Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:56Steven Rinella?

  Was indifferent to it, didn't think about it. And I was like, man, I don't want to. I climbed down to that tree, never like, I changed my behaviors and I was getting married that summer. But you have to, um, to go do what you did, like tree, tree climb is one thing, but to go do you did and like go into Afghanistan during the civil war. When 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.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  No, I wasn't indifferent to death, but I felt like I was taking calculated risks that were manageable.

• 23:43Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would never have gone into Syria. I mean, Syria, there was an open market for Western, you know, right?

• 23:49Steven Rinella?

  So when I- Afghanistan didn't feel that way when you were there?

• 23:52Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I was, I was with Masood and the Northern Alliance, and there were absolutely zero issues with them about, they were my hosts and my protectors, right? I mean-

• 24:03Steven Rinella?

  Wow, but he was also blown up.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, I mean, right, but I don't-

• 24:06Steven Rinella?

  Including people around him.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  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 the, 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 Masood were fully on board with the fact that someone had, from the Western press, had come in to shine a spotlight on them. So I was very, I mean-

• 24:30Steven Rinella?

  You felt protected.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  They would have died protecting me, right? I mean, seriously, not true in West Africa. West Africa was a lot scarier.

• 24:39Speaker 03

  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, and I had some incredibly scary situations with them.

• 24:54Steven Rinella?

  What, what, what would you categorize, like, when you say that, like, what would be the kind of scenario or, or situation you'd be in that, 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.

• 25:10Speaker 03

  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, the two scariest moments, I think, were, um, moments where I, I, I had, where I thought I was going to be executed, right? And both of them were in West Africa. One was in Sierra Leone, we were, uh, I was coming back from a frontline fight back towards Free Town, and, uh, 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, um- Journalists on the same road, like right near where we were, these same guys stopped us.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  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 sort of 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 upwards so it wouldn't.

• 26:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh my god, man.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  So, you know, I had, you know, for about 10 or 15 minutes, I was thinking this really could go down, right? And 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.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  I was seized by rebels, the Eja 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 Eja warriors, they, 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 fact, very matter of factly, he said, when we, when we kill you later today, I'll, I'm going to be the one to do it.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  He didn't say it meanly. He was just, I just want you to, you know, just by way of introduction.

• 27:45Steven Rinella?

  That's like Princess Bride, remember?

• 27:48Speaker 03

  The pirate.

• 27:49Steven Rinella?

  Probably kill you in the morning.

• 27:51Speaker 03

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

• 28:00Steven Rinella?

  Do you think he was just tormenting you?

• 28:02Speaker 03

  I don't know what he was doing. There was a lot of.

• 28:08Speaker 03

  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 cellphone, 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 and in South Africa, but indigenous Eja.

• 28:28Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  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 gonna say. I was gonna 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, flipped the phone. He flipped it closed and he said, it's gonna be fine. We're gonna 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 at America.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  That's what I was gonna ask. Is there, is there like any, is it like a myth that like, being a member of like the American press affords you some degree of safety in those situations?

• 29:16Speaker 03

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

• 29:45Steven Rinella?

  In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military. I'll tell you one thing that binds together all of the. Vehicles in the Rinella fleet at my house, they all have WeatherTech floor liners. When we get a new car, the first thing we do, out with the junky factory carpet mats,

• 30:27Steven Rinella?

  in with WeatherTech. They really are the best. They're indestructible. You can pull them out, hose them off. It doesn't matter what happens on the floor of your rig. If you've got WeatherTech, you're going to be covered. I love these things. If you're looking to get a great gift for someone, especially if they're a big time outdoors kind of person, like if you really want to do them a favor, get them some WeatherTech floor liners for their truck or car. They'll have a way easier time keeping their rig nice and clean, and they'll get years and years of use out of a set. Visit weatherTech.com for your holiday shopping today. I'm holding in my hot little hand here, the first ever folding knife from Montana Knife

• 31:11Steven Rinella?

  Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flat head screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times

• 31:52Steven Rinella?

  and it bends and get all loose. The blade goes back into the mill after heat treatment for its most critical surfaces. That's the kind of step nobody else takes. That same standard applies to every part of the Montana. That's the name of the folder, the Montana, from start to finish. The wait is over and I've been waiting a long time to get one of these suckers. MKC launching their first folding knife. It's dropping extremely soon, so make sure you sign up for email and SMS to be the first to know. These are going to sell out quick. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com.

• 32:29Steven Rinella?

  How different did it feel for you when it was, uh, 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?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Oh, it was, it was so nice, right? Cause I didn't have to worry that the people I was with were gonna 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, 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 or a week or two, right? And, but I spent a year off and on with one platoon, which was like 30, 40 guys at this remote outpost called Bristrepo. It was named after the platoon medic who was killed, you know, basically at the bottom of the hill. And, um, and so I really became part of that platoon and enjoyed the profound comfort of being part of a group.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, a really ancient, a really ancient, um, and 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 life for me and I know I would for them and here we are. Let's get it done, you know? And it, it was, it was absolutely extraordinary and so that, that experience really changed me, right? I mean, I feel like in our society, we don't get to enjoy that group affiliation at such a profound, 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.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  And in, when we're in groups like that, the individuals in them will risk their lives or give their lives to protect the group. Uh, you know, 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, I just kept thinking, this is, this is all I want. Like I, I don't wanna go home. Why would I wanna do that? Like it was quite extraordinary.

• 34:38Steven Rinella?

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

• 34:41Speaker 03

  You know, thirty guys or so. I mean, you know, so thirty to fifty people is the anthropologist 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, it, you know, 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 thirty, forty 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

• 35:24Speaker 03

  be all male. It would be a mix, right? It would be a mix of old and young, male and female, et cetera. And, 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 thirty or forty 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.

• 35:49Steven Rinella?

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

• 36:06Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 36:07Steven Rinella?

  And we were talking about, well, how big, like, how big was the encampment? Then he, he's like, thirty, forty people.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 36:17Steven Rinella?

  Ice Age, you know what I mean?

• 36:19Speaker 03

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

• 36:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. There's a thing I've been like, you should feel free as we're talking. I would, I appreciate that you're not doing this, but I

• 36:34Steven Rinella?

  I appreciate the impulse. Please tie into the books.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:37Steven Rinella?

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

• 36:40Speaker 03

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

• 36:44Steven Rinella?

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

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  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. Uh, why was it that along the American frontier, at its various points in Pennsylvania and Ohio and further west, all the way to Texas and Arizona? Like, why were, why were pioneers constantly sort of absconding into native society and disappearing in native society? And the natives didn't do the opposite. And, 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?

• 37:34Speaker 03

  And, and Benjamin Franklin wrote letters about this, like, what is the appeal? Like, and the appeal is that, that those kinds of organic hunter gatherer societies um, are extremely egalitarian. Uh, 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, um, and there's community. There's community, really close community. And, um, and of course, if you're a young man, instead of having to plow fields all day, you can go hunting. Like, you know what I mean? Like, what, like, what's not to like, sort of?

• 38:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Um, and, and so that, so that was my, the genesis of my thought that, um, maybe what people are really drawn to is close connection to each other. And that's why the soldiers that I was with, um, against all apparent logic, they missed being at Restrepo. They got back to their girlfriends and their families and bars and everything, you know, all the things young men like. It's like, wow. 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.

• 38:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  And that's how, so my book Tribe was about that phenomenon.

• 38:49Steven Rinella?

  We recently had a guy on, a guy named, is Pastor Shane Yates, who's sitting right in that chair. And he was talking about coming home from.

• 39:00Steven Rinella?

  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, you're literally watching children.

• 39:13Steven Rinella?

  Looking in the garbage for food.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:15Steven Rinella?

  Competing with dogs.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:17Steven Rinella?

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

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:27Steven Rinella?

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

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:31Steven 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, you're talking about and, and the ideas that. You explore in Tribe. It was like. I'm kind of struggling with this. Thing I'm seeing. Happen lately. I'm just becoming aware of it. And it's very troubling to me about American culture where.

• 39:54Steven Rinella?

  What? When you're on the internet.

• 39:59Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:19Steven Rinella?

  Meaning. Um. 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.

• 40:33Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:33Steven Rinella?

  I would go into any one of my neighbors' houses to get their kids.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:38Steven Rinella?

  And, and when I say this, I'm not like. I have no idea of the political affiliation.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:43Steven 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, um. That these are just symptoms of a, that these are symptoms. Of an ailment.

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:07Steven 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, that, 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.

• 41:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:23Steven Rinella?

  Too much time online is the thing.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:27Steven Rinella?

  And then the symptoms are you could be radicalized in one direction, you're radicalized in another direction, you're like, you want it 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.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:40Steven Rinella?

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

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Right. Well, you know, in evolutionary terms, outrage is, 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, that, that anger and outrage response is, is a very effective defense against a threat. Right? And the, the algorithms that are used in social media are very good at generating outrage. It's harder for algorithms to generate the more subtle and, but also very important feelings of love or sadness or regret.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  You know, 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. You know, 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.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  And you'd be like, okay, I'm totally against that, but that's Joe. I know his, you know, I have, 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. You're 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, um, the internet's a great tool for all kinds of things.

• 43:55Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  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 there. It's a, 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, you know, I think it's destroying the society. I just refuse to participate in it.

• 44:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man, it's tough because like I use the internet to find out how the internet's destroying society. Because I'm into this thing right now. This, it's like American Veterans Institute. It's like interviews with World War Two veterans. They just, they've been very good. Like when these guys, they, they kind of were catching all these dudes in their eighties, nineties.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  I've seen some of those, amazing.

• 44:40Steven Rinella?

  And it's like, I was telling my wife the other day, I'm sitting there on a Saturday morning.

• 44:45Steven Rinella?

  I'm sitting there doing some work and I got one of those playing. And I was like, uh, I said, this is gonna sound so nostalgic.

• 44:54Steven Rinella?

  But, um, holy shit, we've fallen.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:57Steven Rinella?

  Far.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:58Steven Rinella?

  Like listening to interview after interview after interview with these guys about, um, they all kind of start like, where were you when Pearl Harbor was attacked?

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  And the portraits they paint. There's this dude, there's this Italian dude and, um, 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 Harbor just got attacked. He goes home. His dad listens to the address from Franklin Roosevelt.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:30Steven Rinella?

  Calls his four sons down into the room. Informs them, you will all.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:36Steven Rinella?

  Fight. He goes, we moved to this country. We have a house and a car.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:39Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 46:03Steven Rinella?

  That was, that was it dude. Out the door and I'm like, I don't matter. It's getting nostalgic about it, you know?

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:10Steven 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, like, the internet hatred.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I mean, I still, you know, we're, we're all hu- 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.

• 46:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  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, you know, that it's the, 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'm, you know, I was born in this country, whatever. It's all great. So the idea that we're all unified in this American project is incredibly powerful one, right? And, and it transcends, it should transcend all these other divisions, including left and right.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  And I think one of the problems right now is that the internet. And look, I have a laptop. I'm online. I researched 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 um, I, uh, I, I think that.

• 47:43Speaker 03

  I think, I think we've sort of lost sight of the idea that there is one, that there's the ultimate, that the ultimate category we're all in is American.

• 47:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's, that's what, 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, or do, or whatever, but like journalists don't tell you what to think.

• 48:12Speaker 03

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

• 48:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Which is interesting, right? But I was, 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, turn it off.

• 48:31Steven Rinella?

  They're a commentator.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 48:32Steven Rinella?

  They're an analyst or commentator.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, worse than an analyst, like, and we need analysts, they're

• 48:38Steven Rinella?

  Commentator.

• 48:38Speaker 03

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

• 49:19Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm. Let's talk about your health scare, man.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:23Steven Rinella?

  I've never heard of that.

• 49:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, me neither. That's still, that's still happened to me.

• 49:28Steven 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.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 49:37Steven Rinella?

  Like a, like a cartilage issue, you know?

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 49:40Speaker 04

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

• 49:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I have this like if someone's telling me like whatever any problem someone tells you, especially internal.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:54Steven Rinella?

  Like they're like, yeah, you know, I got a whatever in my kidney. I'm like, well, something like, son of a bitch.

• 50:01Steven Rinella?

  No, I've got a weird feeling in my kidney.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, that that sort of paranoia is very human and it and it and and it it helps keeps 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.

• 50:32Steven Rinella?

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

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And it cross it crosses right near the bottom of your rib cage, crosses your abdomen, and mine is too tight. So it is 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 of

• 50:58Steven 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.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 51:03Steven Rinella?

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

• 51:05Speaker 04

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

• 51:09Steven Rinella?

  Like, I don't understand.

• 51:10Speaker 03

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

• 51:28Steven Rinella?

  So also, this ligament is like on the outside.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Pushing it down.

• 51:32Steven Rinella?

  Binding in.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Right. And it's just.

• 51:33Steven Rinella?

  Like crimping it off or whatever.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's just an irregularity. It isn't because I led a bad life and I'm filled with cholesterol. There's nothing like that, right? It's just a sort of 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 prob- they're meant to dilate, but if there's a weak spot in one of the arteries, instead of dilating,

• 52:17Speaker 03

  it will bubble out or balloon outwards. That's called an aneurysm. Okay?

• 52:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  The artery wall will balloon outwards and it will get bigger over the course of decades. So it's, there's no symptoms. Uh, 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 bleed, you're, you're bleeding out from an artery. You know what 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.

• 52:58Steven Rinella?

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

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. They went, 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, um, this happened five years ago and it was during-

• 53:14Steven Rinella?

  But you know when the blood's coming out.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  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.

• 53:21Steven Rinella?

  And it's like high pressure blood.

• 53:23Speaker 03

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

• 53:27Steven Rinella?

  So that's what's causing the pain?

• 53:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm like, there's blood around my kidneys and around my liver and it just like feels all, it's very, very painful.

• 53:34Steven Rinella?

  All of a sudden?

• 53:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, in mid-sentence.

• 53:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  It ruptured. So I mean, I mean, we're-

• 53:39Steven Rinella?

  What were you talking, what was the sentence?

• 53:40Speaker 03

  We, yeah, right. I'm gonna live forever. I think this is the sentence.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  So, so it was, um, it was during COVID and my, so I have two little girls that are now eight and five. At the time they were three, three years old and six months and my wife and we were, it was during COVID and we were, 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. The landlines are old and when it rains, they short out. So there's no landlines. We're surrounded by government land. It's, it's basically paradise, right? It's an old house from 1800 and we were there during COVID and I'd built a post and beam cabin deeper in the woods. And one day, we managed that some teenage girls who 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 a thousand dollars an hour.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  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 cabin. It's totally off the grid, like oil lamp, wood stove, you know? I felt it myself, you know? So we're in this place of peace and beauty and, uh, and this is sort of enjoying our, you know, a couple of hours of, of, of alone time. And all of a sudden, this is pain in my abdomen, like, oh, what was that? And, um, I, 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 into my abdomen. My blood pressure was tanking and, um, I was graying out, right? And, um, I sat back down.

• 55:15Speaker 03

  I said to my wife, I'd never thought I'd have to ever say these words to anyone. I said, I think I'm gonna 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? And 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, um, we finally got, there was no cell phone.

• 55:42Steven Rinella?

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

• 55:45Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:50Steven Rinella?

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

• 55:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right. The car off the baby. No, not quite. So, so, so the ambulance came, you know, it took them 20 minutes to get there. I'm losing a pint of blood, maybe every 10 or 15 minutes into my abdomen.

• 56:03Steven Rinella?

  But all in you.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  All in me. And, um, 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, like it was, I was a human hourglass. And, um, they, you know, they, their 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 far, five alarm, alarm fire, even though, even if you don't, right? I didn't know I was dying. I had no idea, right? And so it, it cuts off circulation to the parts of your body that you don't need to survive. Your, your, your, uh, surface areas, your skin, your legs, your arms. And it pools it in your brain and in your abdomen, in your heart, around your heart.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  So when it does that, your blood pressure goes back up. And you and I became sort of clear minded again. So the ambulance guys got there and they were like, you know, it's a hot day. You probably dehydrated, sir. They're looking at me. I'm 58. They're like, you're an old man.

• 56:57Steven Rinella?

  Have a gatorade.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  20s, right?

• 56:58Steven Rinella?

  The old dehydration thing, man.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  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. And my wife.

• 57:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh, my God.

• 57:07Speaker 03

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

• 57:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, I've seen thirsty people.

• 57:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Exactly.

• 57:15Steven Rinella?

  And he was not acting thirsty.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  In 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. So.

• 57:27Steven Rinella?

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

• 57:32Speaker 03

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

• 57:40Steven Rinella?

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

• 57:42Speaker 03

  None.

• 57:42Speaker 04

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

• 57:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  So things look kind of okay.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  Right. Except I'm, I'm very fit. So they looked at my heart rate and it was probably in the eighties. They're like, all right, he's almost 60 years old. His heart rate's in the eighties. That's pretty normal.

• 58:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 58:11Speaker 03

  Right? My heart rate's 55. So they didn't know I was 30 beats up. Had they known that, they would, they were like, oh, this is a classic symptom for internal hemorrhage. But I, my fitness level was masking it, right? So they were totally cavalier about it, right? We almost stopped for coffee practically, you know, like. 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 went, I went into end stage hemorrhagic shock. I'm convulsing and with hypothermia. And they rushed me into the trauma bay. The doctors know immediately what's going on and, uh, immediately they diagnosed me immediately and sent me through a CAT scan. They saw the, where the blood was pooling and they. And um, so I'm in the trauma bay and

• 58:55Steven Rinella?

  I got, uh, yeah. I just wanted to mention something. What you were just describing, would you say hype? Like, what'd you say?

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Uh, hemorrhagic shock. So is that?

• 59:05Speaker 05

  No, you said something about hypothermia.

• 59:08Speaker 03

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

• 59:14Steven Rinella?

  Well, I don't understand that. Why is that?

• 59:16Speaker 03

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

• 59:21Steven Rinella?

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

• 59:28Speaker 03

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

• 59:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, 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

• 59:39Steven Rinella?

  But you, you knew it was a cold feeling.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Well, yes, I was shaking. I've only shake, I've only shaken like that when I was very, very cold. And I've never even convulsively shake.

• 59:50Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:50Steven Rinella?

  God, man.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  But I'm fine. Like, you know, like there

• 1:00:06Steven Rinella?

  Just need a gatorade.

• 1:00:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:12Steven Rinella?

  So they were, they like, they were able to look at what's going on. Cause 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

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:24Steven Rinella?

  And they recognize that stuff.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:00:38Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:46Steven Rinella?

  So they don't try to get it out of there?

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:49Speaker 05

  Like a Capri Sun pouch deal.

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  No, no, no, that, they don't, that doesn't matter. Like they, they, they

• 1:00:54Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they don't need to worry about that.

• 1:00:57Steven Rinella?

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  Every blade they make is a high-performance, durable tool that you can rely on, whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to mkc.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications so you get the alert the exact second the knife drops.

• 1:03:09Steven Rinella?

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• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  I was probably 10 minutes from dead, right? And they, they, they put me on in the trauma bay and a doctor, um, 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, um, he asked my permission to do this and I still didn't get it. I was like, you mean in case there's an emergency? He was 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 gotta 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. I think they kind of go hand in hand a little bit.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  Well, 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, of my understanding of reality, of my understanding of life and 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, the vast darkness, right? Like when you take your dog to the vet and the dog doesn't want to go to the, you know,

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  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. Like I, it was a sense that I'd, that's, it was a sense that's not familiar to me, but it was absolutely like, oh, there's my dad. Like, 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.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  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, in that way that he was at that moment. Like, he 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. Like, 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

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  stay alive with my family. I was really offended. I was like, what do you, what do you think? And I said to the doctor, you gotta hurry. I'm going.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

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

• 1:06:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was talking to the doctor. And then there was my dad. And I said, said to the doc, he was right over here. I said, you gotta hurry. I'm going right now. I'm, I'm being taken.

• 1:06:36Steven Rinella?

  Oh, did, did the hole in your dad seem like diametric?

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  They were, they, 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.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so it wasn't, oh, different directions?

• 1:06:49Speaker 03

  None. Well, he was there. The pit was above me. He was up, up there. But basically, he was saying, you don't have to, I was fighting going into the hole.

• 1:06:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

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

• 1:07:02Steven Rinella?

  I'll accompany you into the.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And they eventually.

• 1:07:07Steven Rinella?

  And you're, and you're still talking to this doctor?

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yep. And, you know, they couldn't sedate me because 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. So, instead of, you know, 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

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  to embolize it, to block it, so I would stop bleeding. And the alternative to doing that. This 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 in the, on the fluoroscope for hours. And now it's 2:00 in the morning, and I remember the doctors giving up, right?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  And I remember them sort of, when I'm struggling, it 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.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  And during this, they're pumping blood to you and you're just bleeding it out? It's kind of like...

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's right. And, um, 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 in, being a patient in a hospital is extremely lonely, right?

• 1:09:32Speaker 03

  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 I, you know, I was, she was my, like, lifeline. And, um, 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, uh, along with amazing medical care.

• 1:09:55Speaker 06

  Was she, did she have a glove on, or it was skin?

• 1:09:58Speaker 03

  I don't remember. I, she, it was skin.

• 1:10:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  And it was skin, yeah. It was just absolutely crucial. And, um, so the...

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  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, what's going on? Right? I had no idea. And then the doctor said, well, why don't we try going through his left wrist? And the other doctor was like, wow, I like the way you think that. And so because of the weird, 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 you know, he'd been called from dinner an hour away and had driven to the hospital to save my life. Like, I mean, what these doctors do is just amazing. Like, he was on call and he, and um,

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  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. You said that, not us. Yeah. It's pretty harsh, pretty hush, pretty hush accent, right? And just this woman speaking a really intense Boston accent and I'm still in my, in darkness,

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  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. Guy's getting mean. So he, 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, wow, 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.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  I was absolutely shocked. And she left because she was doing her rounds. And I'm a mess. I'm throwing up 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 are you doing? I said, well, um, 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, um, 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 out.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  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. You know, it might be a minister. Sacred work happens in church as well, right? You know, so anything that preserves human dignity. And as a journalist, on our best days, we bring back information that our, our country, the world can use responsibly to help alleviate human suffering. That's a sacred job. You know, on our best days, that's like sacred work, right?

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  So I thought, I've been going to front lines 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? And, but I circled back to ask her, this wonderful woman, like, 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, 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 visi-, 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?

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  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, um, imagining everything. It was my, I would die in hallucination. And I actually didn't survive. And did, um,

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

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

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  Oh, I, 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 in the pit, you know, and I, 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're, they're, they fall into three or four basic buckets, one of them being that, you know, the dead show up to either tell you to go back or help escort you across. And it's very, very common. It's 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

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  they're on the threshold. You know, I'm a rationalist. I'm like, all right, that, 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 centered view, which like fighter pilots undergo. You know, there's way, the one thing that didn't quite make sense to me is the consistency of the vision, right? So the many, many people see the dead when they're dying in hospice, in ERs, you know, like, I mean, it's a really, really common thing. And, you know, if you give a room full of people LSD, they, we, they will all hallucinate. There's no mystery there. The, 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, they involve the dead, even people that don't know they're dying, even people who don't like the dead

• 1:16:10Speaker 03

  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, you know, I started, 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. Um, 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. Um, but there might be at some sort of quantum level, uh, a reality that, that we don't

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Or for a person of faith. Also, you know, if you're a person of faith and have questions, that's also a huge step in the right direction.

• 1:17:12Steven Rinella?

  There's this guy I knew um that

• 1:17:18Steven Rinella?

  wrote me an email one time uh and he had had, he was tipping over a tree. Here we are, chainsaws and trees again. He was tipping over a tree. And the wind picked up. And uh, he lives.

• 1:17:31Steven Rinella?

  And all of a sudden, the tree was going away. He didn't anticipate.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Steven Rinella?

  And he tripped and fell.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  Geez.

• 1:17:35Steven Rinella?

  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 he describes going back and looking into that hole.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Steven 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.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:01Steven Rinella?

  Where he's like, maybe I did die.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Steven Rinella?

  And now I'm in a weird spot.

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:18:05Steven Rinella?

  And he went to look.

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Steven Rinella?

  Like he was in, it got that weird for him over those next few days.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  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 a truck at a red light and medically, she was, you know, was hurt a little bit. She wasn't, didn't have an N D E. 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, I had the same problem and part of my, part of my problem was that, and this is, and I'm not woo woo, I'm really not a mystic. I mean, I'm I really am a rationalist, right? But our rationality doesn't understand everything and this is, that's where I have questions. But so the dawn of the day before, right, right before dawn, that we could, my family and I co-sleep.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  Right? So my wife and I, our little girls sleep in the same, you know, area, on the pad, on the big pad on the floor. It's like we're camping, basically.

• 1:18:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  Except at home, right? Very, very nice. And um. I had a dream that I didn't know was a dream, but I, at the time, but I had a dream that my family was below me. My wife and my little, two little girls, and they were crying. They were crying about me. And I was wavy, I was like, I'm right here, it's okay, I'm like, and they didn't, couldn't see me, they couldn't hear me. I was, I was floating above them. And I was made, 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 then 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.

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  I mean, that's how real the dream was, right? And, um, thank God, that was just a dream, you know, I was really shaken. And thirty-six hours later, it started, I started dying. Right? So when I started researching NDEs, another common NDE is that you're floating above the doctors, above your body, above your family.

• 1:20:02Steven Rinella?

  I was gonna ask about that, the bright light and the floating.

• 1:20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I started researching NDEs, and again, you know, like, the rationalist explanations for most of it, I kind of buy, right? And

• 1:20:12Steven Rinella?

  What, what are they?

• 1:20:13Speaker 03

  Oh, that, you know, the, the, the brain is being traumatized by low, low blood oxygen, and it releases endorphins, and you can hallucin, you know, brains hallucinate during times of stress. I mean, you know, there's all these just sort of, sort of neurochemical explanations that do a pretty good job at, 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. And, um, 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.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  The trip to the hospital, the return home, the tearful reunion with my children. My reading a, you know, story to my, 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 your, like your friend. And so I got pretty crazy, right? I really start, I mean, you know, one of the effects of trauma is anxiety and panic. And another is depression.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  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. Uh, the word apocalypse means the revealing of all things, right? As I've gone, I've, I've experienced the apocalypse, I've experienced the revealing, the ultimate revealing of what reality actually is. It's actually, I'm, we're not here, you know, like, I, I really got crazy. And at one point I went up to my poor wife, but 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 in, right in front of you? That I survived, like, just tell me that, 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.

• 1:22:24Steven Rinella?

  Can you please take the garbage out?

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, can you please say, yeah, exactly. 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, I didn't believe it. And she eventually said to me, and, and another very profound, like this nurse, like incredibly profound thing. She said, okay, Sebastian, um, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you? Right? 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 was sort of cursed with this terror that I'm actually dead, or the reality doesn't exist, or all these existential epistemological sort of terrors, right?

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  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 when 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,

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  to see what sort of earlier generations, earlier eras, what significance they attach to these words.

• 1:23:58Steven Rinella?

  Give me an example of what you mean.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  Well, I will right now. 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 knows, there's no known origin for the word curse. But bless, 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, blezian, 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.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  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 in that place sacred. And so it suddenly, I got it. I was like, oh. It's not that you're, 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. Um, he's crippled by, he wrestles with God and is crippled by God.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  But also blessed, like God unjoins his hip and cripples him for life and blesses him at the same time. And, uh, so it's a very ancient human, human thought. And that just relieved me, for some reason, helped relieve me of this sort of like unanswerable terror.

• 1:25:45Steven Rinella?

  If you might go, so in the next 20 years, this is gonna happen again sometime, maybe more.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Of, of the aneurysm?

• 1:25:52Steven Rinella?

  No, no, that you're gonna die.

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  Oh, they're gonna die. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:55Steven Rinella?

  Are you, uh,

• 1:25:59Steven Rinella?

  how, how did this shape your?

• 1:26:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:26:13Speaker 03

  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. I'm like, please take me away from my pain racked body. I'm done. Right? Thank you. And, um, 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. I'll, I'll, you know, I'm gonna miss them, but I, you know, but I'm, I'll, I'll, I'll be at peace with it.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  You're not, you know, you leave children behind, you're not at peace. I mean, you know what I mean? Like you're, you're a dad. I mean, imagine, right? Like, so.

• 1:27:05Steven Rinella?

  It's the worst thought.

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  It's the worst thought is, and, and that, uh, I'm, I'm going and, 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.

• 1:27:41Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Well, again, you know, we don't know the answers to these things, but

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  on a sort of neurochemical level, the brain gets very active when you're dying. And, um, and they've, they've had, um, 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 different, um, gamma waves and the different waves in the brain that like are part of consciousness. They got to watch them change around the moment of death. And one of the things that ha- that happens as you die is that the parts of the brain that are engaged in memory

• 1:28:34Speaker 03

  activate when you die, right? So you're, you know, 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, 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, um, overarching knowledge that you can have with dreams like in dreams you think you sort of understand things that you can't understand you know there's this sort of all encompassing knowledge sometime so that might be what's going on with that and let

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  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 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 other otherwise does consciousness in the universe create the

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  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 as 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 you know it's not it's not an insane question right it's a legitimate question.

• 1:30:27Steven Rinella?

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• 1:31:12Steven Rinella?

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• 1:31:54Steven Rinella?

  Company. Dude, this thing is sweet. They like reimagined folding knives. You touch this thing and you know you are holding a quality product. Montana Knife Company founded by Josh Smith, one of the most experienced master bladesmiths in the world. The Montana is the first folder Josh has built at production scale with a team of engineers and machinists who could match what he does on the bench. G10 scales with a 3D milled micro texture, titanium hardware, a custom deep carry clip with flat head screws set flush. This is a rock solid clip. It's not the kind of clip that you're going to use a couple of times

• 1:32:35Steven Rinella?

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• 1:33:11Steven Rinella?

  You you get it like this stuff. You know, I was saying earlier about if I don't understand something, I try to ask. But I no, I can't because I I know that I can't understand quantum mechanics, quantum physics. But there's a thing that is a trippy thing.

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  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 happens according to physics. And you go like, well, life is electrochemical.

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:33:53Steven Rinella?

  Right? There's no room then like then someone then a really good person who's really good at predictive modeling.

• 1:34:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:01Steven Rinella?

  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. Yeah, 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 shit on the other side of the brick wall.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Well, the the sort of 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, you know, the definition is something around the ability to think about itself. Right, or 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 and the you know, the fact that consciousness can can determine outcomes in the physical world simply because it is exists and is observing.

• 1:34:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  That, you know, that 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 it. Consciousness resides in the brain, which is a 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.

• 1:35:33Speaker 03

  Right, I mean, that's the 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? Um, but it doesn't mean they 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, you know, the universe, basically, religion and and physics are in they're closer than you might think. So when religion, you have to believe that God is self-creating. Yeah. Otherwise, you're stuck with, oh, well, someone created God. Why aren't we worshiping that entity? Right? Like, it God has to be self-creating. From that point onwards, it all works fine.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  If you just take that leap, like, work with me here. God self-creating, and then from now on, we're just believing 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 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.

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

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

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  Well, of course, I don't know. Right? I mean, I'm like, uh, yeah.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  Like, did you feel better, more like I'm?

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:38:01Speaker 03

  It doesn't because of this invisible force called gravity. And it exists throughout the universe and we don't know why. Right? That would sound like the rantings of a schizophrenic. Right? I'm sorry. Likewise with consciousness, like. And so, so there's a, 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 great, 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.

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  I also don't want to have to be conscious in the way we're conscious now for eternity. Like, thank you, no, right?

• 1:38:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I had a moment of panic earlier in this conversation. Starting to contemplate that possibility.

• 1:38:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like careful what you ask for, right? I mean, you know, 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 eternal, an eternity of conscious. 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.

• 1:39:20Steven 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, um, and I had that feeling of, um,

• 1:39:32Steven Rinella?

  Things, I had that feeling of, of my focus becoming singular. And in reading about why that was, like a feeling of like slowing down, things slow down. And then I was intensely focused on a thing.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Steven Rinella?

  And I was reading about that people in, um, people in traumatic experiences, people near, uh, uh, experiences. It's not so much near death experiences, but people in proximity to that.

• 1:40:04Steven Rinella?

  That there, there's like two paths. And, and the example that I read about one day was that there's a, there's an explosion. Okay. And, and there's chaos.

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  Some people can be in that moment and they, there's an arm on the ground. The only thing they see.

• 1:40:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:28Steven Rinella?

  Is the arm on the ground.

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:31Steven Rinella?

  And it's, they just get lost in like a sort of timeless consideration of the arm on the ground.

• 1:40:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:37Steven Rinella?

  There's people that all they see is everything.

• 1:40:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:41Steven Rinella?

  It's utter chaos. Nothing makes sense. And then there's people that are like, that guy needs help.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:40:51Steven Rinella?

  That's happening, that's gonna fall. Right? And in certain disciplines, they're looking for the people that.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:41:00Steven Rinella?

  Don't have those. And your, and your experiences in, in war and your experience with the, with, with death, like have you, have you ever grappled with that? Or did you find any of that, any of, in your research about these different, these different sort of responses people have?

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I've had all, I, I, 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, 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, what have you, is they just get them to rehearse and practice. The, um, 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, uh, there's a lot of tactics in combat that are somewhat formulaic, like football is, right? I mean, there's this sort of team, team coordination.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  That it 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, I have, I've had all of them. I mean, one time we got hit very, when I was with American soldiers, we got hit very unexpectedly, very hard. And I, 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, around, like, and then I snapped out of it, and then I was hyper-functional. Other times, I've, I, I-

• 1:42:42Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  It was, it was a blur, right? And I couldn't keep up with the blur, so I couldn't make good decisions, because it was like this jumbled blur. And my buddy, Tim, was behind a, 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, you know, your fear just moves in and sets up camp, right?

• 1:43:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  And so, Tim threw across, you know, we, we, we were this far away, like, between me and you, like, five feet. We couldn't, there, there was too much gunfire to, and he threw me my bulletproof vest and my camera. And as soon as I was, like, geared up, boom, I was good.

• 1:43:45Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:43:45Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:43:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Speaker 03

  And, uh, and so that gives you insight into how soldiers perform under pressure. They've got jobs, they got weapons, they got, you know, 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 their, for, for each other. And, and, 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. I would, you know what I mean? Like totally changes that fear equation.

• 1:44:32Steven Rinella?

  Uh, I was with my fire, one of my buddies who's a firefighter yesterday and it's 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 going to have my kids do it, but my daughter, that I've come to respect my daughter's hatred of spiders.

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:57Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Steven Rinella?

  And he's, he says, for me, it's eyeballs. And I said, well, that's, it seems avoidable. He goes, not my line of work.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I can see, yeah. And one, one traumatic incident. Yeah. And then it's locked in eyeballs. Like, no, thank you. No. I mean, I'm, I, 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, 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 you're scared of. Right? I know tarantulas.

• 1:45:54Steven Rinella?

  No, I've tested this out. I, I was skeptical. I've tested it out. It's legit.

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  It's legit.

• 1:45:58Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:46:02Speaker 03

  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, a deep seated panic reaction. You can't, you can't just turn it off.

• 1:46:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What, 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 on it.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:46:28Steven Rinella?

  That's a great skill.

• 1:46:29Speaker 03

  Oh, totally.

• 1:46:30Steven Rinella?

  But just applied to something I'm not interested in.

• 1:46:32Speaker 05

  Well, if she was in the tribe, that would be her job.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, spider.

• 1:46:35Speaker 05

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

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Steven Rinella?

  What are you gonna work on next?

• 1:46:41Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:46:42Steven Rinella?

  Are you searching?

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  A little bit. 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 after, you know, like, what are you gonna?

• 1:47:02Speaker 05

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

• 1:47:04Speaker 03

  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, 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, we're gonna work on something, but I don't, I don't know quite what yet.

• 1:47:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But you might wrap it up.

• 1:47:24Speaker 03

  No, I love writing. I mean, it's like, you know, I'm, I love running, you know, I'm, I'm, 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, um, it's one of my, one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.

• 1:47:41Steven Rinella?

  You like the act of it.

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love it.

• 1:47:43Steven Rinella?

  Doing it.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Doing it.

• 1:47:45Steven Rinella?

  God, I hate doing it. I only like having done it.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:47:49Steven Rinella?

  Hate doing it.

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  Well, there are people that cheat running like that, right? I don't like doing it, but I love it afterwards, right? And, uh, no, I, I, I love it. It's, it's a, it's a higher state of mind for me.

• 1:48:01Steven Rinella?

  Doing it.

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Steven Rinella?

  Good for you.

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Not always, not always, but when it's, when it's, you know, musicians say the same thing, right? You know, when they're really on.

• 1:48:10Steven Rinella?

  It's all fun, man. It's like.

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

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

• 1:48:22Steven Rinella?

  Are you familiar with the writer Ian Frazier?

• 1:48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He once told me that, you know, he, 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.

• 1:48:36Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:48:49Steven Rinella?

  And I want him not be in that way.

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 1:48:53Steven 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.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure, yeah.

• 1:49:00Steven Rinella?

  So, 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.

• 1:49:11Speaker 03

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:49:13Steven Rinella?

  And that, we'll see.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, he doesn't want to turn into a washed up director.

• 1:49:18Steven Rinella?

  I'm like, I'm like skeptical.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 1:49:26Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it's hard to picture the end, man. But it all ties into that mortality shit, you know?

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  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 what, that's what it has to feel like.

• 1:49:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. David Grand, you know, the writer David Grand?

• 1:49:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:49:48Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:50:00Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:50:01Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean?

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:50:02Steven Rinella?

  He was hunting for a topic.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:50:05Steven Rinella?

  Which is cool.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a different way to do it. And I mean, it's, you know, it's, I feel like it kinda 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.

• 1:50:30Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:31Speaker 03

  You know, and I feel like it's, and 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, um, content to it, right?

• 1:50:51Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:50:55Speaker 03

  God, my understanding about faith is that it's an overwhelming feeling of love and connection.

• 1:51:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  So it's like, if you're just deciding to marry Suzie, you might not be in love with Suzie. Right. It's a, it's a higher level decision.

• 1:51:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Speaker 03

  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, I was mortally terrified. I almost died. Now I'm going to believe in God, just to, just to be on the safe side because, you know, maybe, 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 with, for another person, I think it has to find you. If you're out seeking it.

• 1:51:43Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  You don't, 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,

• 1:51:57Speaker 03

  I'd be like, okay, you convinced me.

• 1:51:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  I got it, right. I wasn't looking for you. You found me. I'm all ears. Like, what, what do you got to say? I'm, I'm, I'll, I'll listen.

• 1:52:07Steven Rinella?

  We just released this, this, I, 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?

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  Bear Grease.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Podcast?

• 1:52:26Steven Rinella?

  I know, yeah. But no, maybe you could have a podcast with Jude Humming.

• 1:52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's just like a distribution platform, right? Whatever.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

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

• 1:52:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Anyway, I was doing this bit on this guy, and the guy has what you're talking about. The guy has an epiphany.

• 1:52:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:42Steven Rinella?

  In a moment.

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:43Steven Rinella?

  And, um, was an addict, you know?

• 1:52:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:52:46Steven 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.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:52:56Steven Rinella?

  And dropped his addictions.

• 1:52:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59Steven Rinella?

  Committed himself to his wife. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:53:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:53:02Steven Rinella?

  And it was like, he had like, an epiphany.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  Well, that's.

• 1:53:05Steven Rinella?

  Like, he got overwhelmed.

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  Right. And that's, that's very powerful. I mean, for me, I would need evidence to believe in God. I'd 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.

• 1:53:24Speaker 03

  I'm gonna 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.

• 1:53:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:53:38Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  Well, no, except I didn't see God, right? Like, I mean, I, I mean, I saw my dad, right? And I saw the nurse and the, you know, I did, actually did not see God.

• 1:53:51Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:53:52Speaker 03

  And if I had, we'd be, we might be having a different podcast right now, right? Or, but I didn't. Uh, what the things that I saw were very, uh, 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 that ultimate reality is not accessible to us.

• 1:54:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:54:19Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 1:54:22Steven Rinella?

  I'm glad. Thanks for coming on the show. Could, do you mind, uh, what, what's the best way for people to go? Do we have a good list of all, all your books here on our document?

• 1:54:32Speaker 03

  Well, I'll rattle them off right now.

• 1:54:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, do it. Rattle them off, man. Like, you had, you had a book about, you had a book about a murder, like, do the whole thing.

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  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, um, hundred foot waves, et cetera. My next book was called Fire. It was a collection of my long-form journalism, including quite a lot about, uh, wildland firefighting, hotshot crews. Um, and, uh, 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 the Salvo. And he, uh, a couple of years after they finished building the addition to the house, Al confessed to being the, the Boston Strangler. And he actually-

• 1:55:22Speaker 03

  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 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. Um, it's a, it's a cold case who done it, basically. After that, I wrote a book called War about this platoon

• 1:56:07Speaker 03

  in the 173rd Airborne that I was with off and on for a year in the Korengal Valley. Uh, I also shot a lot of video with my buddy, Tim, and we made a documentary called Restrepo. I was nominated for an Academy Award. A few, a couple of months after we were at the Oscars, we didn't win, but a couple of 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 Misrada. And after that, I decided to give up war reporting. And um, I wrote a book called Tribe about community and uh, and how it works and how soldiers experience it.

• 1:56:50Speaker 03

  Native Americans and what the, how the loss of community has affected uh, 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.

• 1:57:15Speaker 03

  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 a larger, more powerful adversary.

• 1:57:43Steven Rinella?

  Like, why did the Americans win the revolution? Why did the Vietcong win Vietnam?

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And then 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, you know, the US military or any military. And the smaller you are, the faster you are. And that, and that more than can more than compensate for your lack of size and strength. So without, without that unique trait, it's unique to humans. In 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, for self-definition. You know, and then finally, my recent book is called In My Time of Dying.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  And it's about my near-death experience and what that might mean for all of us facing our, facing our mortality and what it might mean for how we understand the universe to function.

• 1:58:45Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:58:57Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. But you could also go on sebastianjunger.com is my website. And it's J U N G E R, sebastianjunger.com. And all my stuff is there as well.

• 1:59:13Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for doing the show. I appreciate it.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:17Steven Rinella?

  No, thanks.

• 1:59:45Steven Rinella?

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• 2:00:27Steven Rinella?

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• 2:01:09Steven Rinella?

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• 2:01:46Speaker 00

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